Page 13 of A Wolf's Revenge

“Okay,” she said. “When you’re ready.” She leaned her head back against my shoulder and looked up at the sky. “But Z — whatever it is. I want you to know there’s no version of it that sends me away. I’ve thought about it. I’ve watched you decide a hundred times that I’d run if I knew the real you, and I’ve decided I won’t, in advance, so you can stop spending so much energy being afraid of it.” A pause. “Whatever you are. I already chose it. Months ago.”

Whatever you are. She didn’t know how literally she’d said it. Or maybe she half-did — maybe her wolf had been telling her something about mine that her mind hadn’t caught up to. The way two wolves who are made for each other carry a knowledge their human halves take years to admit. I felt the bond pull taut between us on that roof, unnamed, both of us nineteen and twenty-two and stupid with it, her wolf answering mine in a language neither of us would say out loud for thirty-four more years.

I had one chance, that night, to be the man she’d already decided to forgive.

I let it go. I kissed her instead of telling her. She exhaled against my mouth the way she always did, and the truth went back down behind my teeth where I’d kept it all summer. I told myself soon, when we’re safe, when we’re somewhere he can’t reach, I’ll tell her everything then.

There was no then. I’d had the only then there was going to be, on a roof, with the sky over us and her telling me she’d already chosen. I’d used it to buy myself a kiss instead of giving her the truth that might have let her save her own family.

That’s the one I carry hardest. Not the lie I told. The truth I had teed up and ready and swallowed, because I was a coward, on the one night she’d opened the door herself and stood in it and told me I was already through.

I bought the ring two days later.

Onyx and diamonds, from a jeweler off Odim Street, because she wore dark colors, laughed at things that sparkled, and I wanted something that was both. I carried it in my coat for a week before I could look at it without my hands going unsteady, checking it was there and then checking again, the way you do with a thing you’re afraid to lose.

I bought the tickets the same week. Two, first-class, Stockholm, an open return I had no intention of using. I had enough put aside by then to set us up properly — enough to disappear and stay disappeared, which was the only kind of disappearing that would keep us breathing.

I had a plan, a ring, a passport, an account, and a girl who’d told me on a roof that she’d already chosen me sight unseen.

What I didn’t have, yet, was the thing that would take the decision out of my hands entirely, and make the leaving not a choice, but the only door left.

She told me about that on a Tuesday.

8

She told me on a Tuesday evening, sitting on the edge of my bed with her hands folded in her lap, watching my face with that particular stillness she had when she was bracing for something she didn’t want to brace for.

I knew before she said it. I think I’d known for a few days — her scent had changed, deepened, taken on the low warm note that a wolf’s body broadcasts whether she’s ready to or not. Some animal part of me had registered it and filed it under nothing, the way I filed everything I wasn’t ready to look at. When she folded her hands in her lap and looked at me, my wolf already knew, stood up, and went very still.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

I did the thing she’d braced for. I panicked — not loudly, I didn’t know how to be loud, but I stood up and then didn’t know where to go. I crossed to the window and back, and the careful machine of my mind threw up every operational objection at once: the timeline, the exposure, what a pregnancy did to a plan built on speed and invisibility, what my father would do, what her family would do, the thousand ways a child made everything more dangerous.

She gave me thirty seconds of it. She watched me move around the room with the calm of a woman who had already had this argument with herself and won it, and when the thirty seconds were up she said, quietly:

“I’m keeping it, Zimife. That’s not a discussion.”

It stopped me where I stood. Because there was no version of arguing that would move her — Kerra had a line between the things she’d compromise on and the things she wouldn’t, and once you found it, you understood it was absolute. Because, underneath the panic, in the place where the wolf had stood up and gone still, I didn’t want to argue. The panic was the surface. The thing under it was older and quieter and it had been waiting in me since a corridor in January, and it recognized, before my mind did, that this was not a complication.

This was the thing my whole careful life had been missing and never named.

“Okay,” I said. I came back and sat down across from her, close enough that our knees touched. “Okay.”

She searched my face. “Okay?”

“Okay.” I took her hands. They were cold; her hands were always cold. “We keep it. We leave sooner. We — “ The machine was already turning over, but for the first time it was turning over toward something instead of away. “I have a plan. I’ve had it for a while. I was waiting to have everything in place before I told you, but we don’t have time to wait, so I’m telling you now.” I told her about the account, the passports, Stockholm, the open return. I didn’t tell her what I was running from. I told her the shape of the escape without the shape of the thing I was escaping, and she listened the way she listened to everything, directly, taking it in.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment. Then she said the thing I’d been dreading, because it was so completely her.

“I don’t want to run, Z.” She said it gently, because she knew it would land hard. “Not like that. Not in the dark, like we did something wrong.” She turned her hands over in mine. “I want you to come to my grandfather. With me. I want you to stand in front of Emeka Conti and tell him what we are to each other. That I’m carrying his great-grandchild, and I want to let the families do what families do when their children have done something irrevocable.” She held my eyes. “He’s not a soft man. But he’s not a stupid one either, and he loves me. I think — I genuinely think — he could look at his grandchild and choose differently than he’s chosen everything else in his life. People can surprise you, Z. I’ve watched my grandfather surprise people.”

I knew better. I had grown up inside Aleksander Zorander’s idea of family, and I knew there was no version of that conversation that didn’t end in blood — not because Emeka was cruel, but because the thing between our families wasn’t a feud that a marriage could heal. It was a war one side had already privately decided to win by erasing the other, and a granddaughter showing up pregnant by the enemy’s son would not be a bridge. It would be a reason. A grievance to point at. A justification handed to my father gift-wrapped.

I couldn’t tell her any of that without telling her all of it.

So I lied to her one more time, the gentlest one, the one I almost believe I told for her sake. “We’ll go to him,” I said. “I promise. But not yet — not until we’re somewhere safe first, somewhere with leverage, so the conversation happens on our terms, instead of his. Let me get us out, get us settled, get the baby here safe. Then we come back and we stand in front of your family as people they can’t simply make disappear.” I squeezed her hands. “I’m not asking you to hide forever. I’m asking you to let me make us strong enough to be seen.”

It was a beautiful lie. It even had a kind of truth in it. She looked at me for a long moment, weighing it against her own instincts, and then — because she loved me, and because the alternative was a fight she didn’t have the heart for while carrying our child — she let me have it.