Chapter 648

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Two of Solander’s wolves had her by the arms and she was making the experience of holding her extremely unpleasant for both of them – not because she was winning, she was significantly smaller than both of them and the physical math was not in her favor, but because she was using everything she had with the specific focused efficiency of someone who’d been in situations where everything she had was what she had, and had learned to use it completely.

Clara.

The girl Ivory had described. The one with the moon dagger at her ribs within forty-five seconds of introduction. The one who’d thrown a chair through a reinforced window.

She was – small. The first thing that registered was the specific smallness of her in the context of the grip of the two wolves, and then everything else. Dark hair, dark eyes, the specific quality of a face that had been watching things for long enough that the watching had become visible in the expression. Old eyes in a young face, the specific combination of someone who’d had to be older than they were for longer than they should have been.

She was bleeding from somewhere – the window, probably, or the capture, one of the two.

She was still fighting.

“Get your-” she started, and the rest of the sentence was the specific vocabulary of someone who’d been in Old Haven since they were old enough to be there and had no concept of adjusting their language for audience.

“Enough,” Kael said.

She looked at him.

The fighting paused.

Not because the word had stopped her – because the specific quality of the word had registered. The Alpha register. The one that operated below the verbal, that reached the wolf instinct even in someone whose wolf instinct had been operating in the worst possible conditions for their entire life.

She looked at Kael.

He looked at her.

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Then he crossed the room.

The fury that had been in him since Ivory had rolled out of the car – contained, controlled, channeled into the operational requirements of getting to the safe house and getting through the door and getting to this room – was still there. Under the control. Present and real and looking for something to direct itself at.

Clara was fifteen.

Clara was also the daughter of the man who’d taken Ivory.

Kael slammed her into the wall.

Not the managed version – the full force of an Alpha who had been holding something for hours and had made a decision about where it was going, the wall cracking behind her on the impact, the specific violence of someone who’d stopped calculating the appropriate response.

She made a sound.

Then she was bleeding more, from the wall, and Kael had her by the front of her jacket and his face was the specific face that had made the name Kael the Deranged something that neighboring packs used to keep children from doing dangerous things.

“Kael,” I said.

He didn’t look at me.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said, to Clara, “what your priorities are. What you do or don’t want to say. What agreements you think you have or don’t have. Your father and Hale took my healer.” His voice was at the level below shouting that was more dangerous than shouting. “They took Ivory. And I am running out of patience for diplomacy and I have been running at a deficit of sleep and I am currently held together by a wolf integration and a compound that Ivory made for me because Ivory makes everything for me and Ivory is not here right now because your father and Hale took her.”

He leaned in.

“The next words out of your mouth,” he said, “are the locations, the coordinates, the plans, and where the document to your specific miserable life is being held. Or I will set aside the fact that you are fifteen and do something about my current mood that will be irreversible. You think Ivory is terrifying – and Ivory is terrifying, she is objectively the most terrifying human being I have ever encountered — try a deranged Alpha who has significantly less patience for

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appealing to someone’s moral side.”

Clara’s eyes were on him.

Not scared – or not only scared. The specific assessment of someone who was cataloguing

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information in real time, who’d received a threat and was processing it against the full picture of who was making it.

“You can’t-” she started.

“Really,” Kael said.

He reached for the claws.

The partial shift coming through in the specific way it came through when the integration was active and being directed rather than running loose – controlled, aimed, the specific thing that made an Alpha with full wolf integration categorically different from a suppressed wolf.

The claws extended.

Clara screamed.

Not the defensive scream of someone who’d decided on a tactic. The genuine one, the one that arrived when the body received information about immediate threat that the mind hadn’t yet processed.

“I’ll talk,” she said. “I’ll talk. Stop – I’ll talk.”

Nina, from somewhere to my right, said: “Damn it. I wanted to be the one to do it.”

Jordan looked at her.

“Nina,” he said.

“I’ve been waiting since we got in the car,” she said. “I had a whole approach.”

“Your approach was going to work,” Jordan said.

“It was going to work very well,” Nina said. “And now we’ve gone the Kael route.”

“It’s effective,” Jordan said.

“It’s effective,” Nina said. “It’s also less elegant.”

“Nina,” Jordan said.

“It worked,” Nina said. “I know it worked. I’m allowed to have opinions about the methodology.”

I looked at Clara.

At the blood and the wall damage and the specific state of a fifteen-year-old who’d just been slammed into a wall by an Alpha King and had claws extended at her and was now talking.

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“Kael,” I said.

“Aria,” he said.

“She’s a child,” I said.

“We’ve all been through worse as kids,” he said, still looking at Clara. “That’s not the bar you think it is.”

“Kael-”

“She’s going to talk,” he said. “And then she’s going to give us what we need. And then-” he looked at me briefly, something in his expression that was the full complicated thing, the Alpha and the furious and the person underneath both, “–and then you can have your arc.”

I looked at Clara.

She was looking at me.

Not with the assessment she’d been giving Kael – a different evaluation, the specific one that Ivory had warned me about. The one that decided whether you were useful or dangerous and made its calculation quickly.

“Jordan,” I said.

Jordan looked at me.

“Tell her,” I said.

He looked at Clara.

“You are Cassium’s daughter,” Jordan said, with the specific calm of someone delivering a comprehensive and unflattering picture. “And in a previous capacity you were Cassium’s – other thing. Which is a fact that is documented and which I have in a file that has already been sent to enough people that it cannot be recalled.” He held her gaze. “You know who Kael is. You’ve probably heard his name. You’ve definitely heard what the name represents. You know

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Ivory — you’ve met her, which means you have some understanding of what Ivory is and what Ivory represents to this specific group of people.”

A beat.

“Kael’s relationship with Ivory,” Jordan continued, “is something that your father and Hale chose to target deliberately because they understood that Ivory is the most effective leverage point for reaching Kael. They chose correctly. The specific state of Kael right now is the result of them choosing correctly.” He paused. “What they miscalculated is that Kael can be targeted and reached and be in the specific state he is currently in, and still be the Alpha King of the

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Southern Isles. Still have fifty packs behind him. Still have the Eastern Territories Alpha King in this room with forty-five more.” He looked at Clara. “Your father is terrified of Kael. You know this. You know it the way you know everything you know, which is because you’ve been paying attention to everything since you were old enough to understand that information was what kept you alive.”

Clara’s eyes moved from Jordan to Kael.

To the claws.

Back to Jordan.

“Talk before I release him,” Jordan said. “Because I can hold him for approximately another thirty seconds and then the patience is gone and the wall is next and the wall is going to be harder than the one you already contributed to.”

Clara looked at me.

The specific evaluation.

I held it.

“Your father is going to remove you,” I said, quietly. “Not because you talked to us. Before we were even involved. Cassium was already planning to remove you because someone found out about his secret and he couldn’t risk the exposure.” I held her gaze. “You’ve been trying to get to the document for two years. You know what it means. You know it’s the only leverage you have over him.” I paused. “We can use it and you can be on the side of the people using it, which means you’re protected by the outcome. Or you can be on the other side of it, which means—”

I stopped.

I didn’t finish the sentence the way Ivory would have finished it.

I didn’t finish it the way Kael was prepared to finish it.

I held her gaze and I waited.

Silver said: *Let her come to it.*

*Yes,* I said.

Clara looked at me for a long time.

The old eyes in the young face.

The specific assessment of someone who’d been deciding who to trust based on very limited information since they were old enough to decide anything.

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“The compartment,” she said.

The room went very still.

you

“The compartment is in the east wall of his private office,” she said. “Behind the second panel from the left. The mechanism is a pressure point on the lower-right corner of the panel push and hold for three seconds and the panel releases.” She held my gaze. “The document is in a sealed case inside. Blue. His seal on the front.”

Kael’s claws retracted.

He stepped back.

She looked at him.

Then at me.

“What happens to me,” she said.

The room held.

I looked at Kael.

He looked at me.

“That,” he said, “is apparently between you and Aria.”

I looked at Clara.

At the blood and the old eyes and the window she’d thrown a chair through and the moon dagger that was probably somewhere on her person and the specific reality of fifteen years of surviving in conditions that had not been designed for surviving in.

“What do you want,” I said.

She blinked.

The specific blink of someone who’d been asked a question they hadn’t been asked before and was locating the experience of having been asked it.

“What,” she said.

“What do you want,” I said. “Not what’s available. Not what you think I’m offering. What do you actually want.”

She looked at me for a long time.

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“To not be there anymore,” she said.

Simple.

The simplest thing.

*That,* Silver said.

*Yes,* I said.

“Okay,” I said. “We can work with that.”

Kael looked at me with the expression that I was getting better at reading – the one that existed when the management layer was down and something more direct was looking out.

He didn’t say anything.

But the expression said something.

I held it.

And in the war room of Solander’s safe fortress, with the maps on the walls and the documents on the tables and fifty packs behind us and forty-five more, and Ivory somewhere in the direction we were going, and the document’s location finally in our hands –

We got to work.