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"I'm told you left the pack meeting early."

"I apologize."

"Problem?"

I looked at the road ahead. The city moving past on both sides. My hands on the wheel at ten and two like he had taught me when I was fifteen. "There is a wrinkle in the city. A business dealing. I need to handle it personally."

Silence followed. I had grown up reading my father's silences. I knew their textures. This one had something in it I had not heard for a long time. Not since I was sixteen on a snow covered clearing, looking down at my girlfriend's dead father.

"Business," my father said. "Not pack."

"No," I said. "Business."

"Then Vidar should handle it. That's his domain. We've talked about delegating, son."

"I'm close. I'll handle it."

Another silence. Longer. He didn't mention that Vidar had been at the same pack meeting that I'd just left.

"Magnus."

"Sir."

"I trust you, son."

Four words. Delivered without inflection, without accusation, without anything that could be pointed to as a confrontation. Just the statement, clean and direct. The weight of it settled into my chest like a stone finding the bottom.

I was lying to my father. I was sitting in a car on the FDR having just called a rival Alpha and left a pack meeting — and I had lied to my father with the smooth fluency of a man who had spent his entire life telling the truth. It was not enough shame to make me turn the car around.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

NELL

The shower was hot enough to qualify as a medical intervention. I stood under the steaming spray until the tension in my shoulders dissolved and the last of the park dirt circled down the drain. I stepped out and tested my ankle. It was a little sore, but totally ready to get back in the game. The buckling episode back at the bottom of the drainage embankment was nothing more than a faint memory of discomfort.

This was not the first time my body had revised an injury downward faster than doctors or nurses had prognosticated it should have. I had never had a cold. I had never had the flu. I had broken two fingers in a car accident back in college when I'd trusted the frat guy I was fucking had been telling the truth about how many drinks he'd had. The X-rays in the ER had said fracture. By the following morning my fingers had been tender but functional.

Now I padded barefoot from the bathroom, pulling the ties on my silk robe tight around me. I eyed my reading chair and the novel I'd only gotten two chapters into. That was a few months ago. The book would wait another night. I was still too keyed up to sit. I didn't want to be still. It was as if the run had never happened. All the energy I'd spent doing loops and taking a tumble had resettled back into my blood.

On the kitchen island sat a small cardboard box I had not opened. It had arrived that morning while I was at the office and been left by the door. I crossed to it now and peeled back the tape.

Business cards. Cream stock, clean sans-serif font, a weight and quality that communicated seriousness.

Nell Odhiambo, Chief Executive Officer, Odhiambo, Blackwood & Associates

I pinched between my thumb and index finger. This was what I had wanted. For ten years I had been in rooms where my name was on the work and someone else's name was on the door. Here was my name on a card that said exactly what I was and exactly whose company it was: mine.

I set the card down and looked at it for a moment. Then I picked up my phone to call Addie. The face of the device was cracked, but it was still functional. I held it for a moment and put it back down.

Addie was home. With Vidar. I had grown so used to reaching out to her for the good, the bad, and the ugly. She'd pick up; I didn't doubt that. But she would likely have to leave her husband's embrace to do so. I couldn't keep tearing her away from him — even though I still doubted he was good enough for her.

Running my fingers over the crack in my phone, I realized I didn't have anyone else to call. I didn't have any arms to open to me.

I sat down on the couch with the business card in my hand. My mother had not put me first. She had loved me — I believed that — but she had been a woman who was waiting. Waiting for me to be old enough. Waiting for the grief to become manageable, waiting for the right morning to simply not wake up. She had gone to sleep one night when I was seventeen and left this world behind. When I found her, she had been wearing an expression I had never seen on her face; a peace so complete it looked like arrival. Like she had finally gotten somewhere she had been trying to go for a long time.

Her hand had been closed around the claw necklace. I touched it now at my throat; the smooth worn ivory of it. The base dark brown where it had pressed against my father's skin and then my mother's and now mine.

My father had died protecting us. That was all my mother had ever said about him. She had said it with a steadiness that didn't invite questions. I had learned not to ask them.