Page 55

“You don’t think it has anything to do with guilt?”

“She’s not guilty. She’s scared.”

“Those can look the same from where I’m sitting.”

Chris felt something rise in his chest, hot and immediate, and he pushed it down before it reached his voice. Losing his temper with Kahn had never gained him anything.

“You trust me,” he said instead.

“I do.”

“Then trust what I’m telling you about her.”

Kahn leaned back in his chair. The wood creaked under him. Outside the window, a patrol crossed the courtyard in the grey afternoon light, boots crunching over gravel, and neither of them looked at it.

“I trust you,” Kahn said. “I don’t know her. Not anymore. I remember the ruthless Sloane who worked against Caitlynn, and now she’s the daughter of the man trying to breach my walls, and I’m supposed to hand her intelligence on his movements and hope the bond has fixed everything that’s wrong.”

“Nothing about her is wrong.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

Chris exhaled through his nose. He did know it. He also knew that every time someone in this compound looked at Sloane and saw a threat instead of a woman who’d survived one, it cost her something she couldn’t get back.

“What would convince you?” Chris asked.

Kahn considered the question longer than Chris expected. He picked up one of the red markers from the map and turned it over in his fingers, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its edge.

“History,” he said. “I want to know what he did to her, before all of this. I want to know what kind of man banishes himself into becoming this. Gideon was here when it happened. He might remember something useful.”

“Sloane already told me some of it.”

“Not to me, she hasn’t. I want it from someone with no reason to protect her.”

Chris didn’t like the phrasing, but he understood the shape of it. He nodded once and followed Kahn out of the study.

Gideon’s office sat at the far end of the administrative wing, a narrow room lined with shelves of bound patrol logs going back decades. The elder was at his desk when they came in, reading glasses low on his nose, a stack of reports in front of him that he didn’t bother straightening when the door opened.

He looked at Chris, then back at Kahn. “This looks like business.”

“Garrett Mercer,” Kahn said.

Gideon’s hand stilled over the page he’d been reading. He set his pen down with a care that seemed deliberate, like he needed the extra second before he answered.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come ask me about him properly,” he said. “Sit down. Both of you.”

Chris took the chair against the wall. Kahn remained standing, arms crossed, and Gideon studied him for a moment before he began.

“I was thirty-one when we banished him,” Gideon said. “Your father was still Alpha then. I stood at his right hand the same way Viktor stands at yours.”

“I know the record,” Kahn said. “Territorial violations. Running unsanctioned operations on bordering land. He challenged your father and lost.”

“That’s the record.” Gideon took his glasses off and folded them, set them beside the reports. “The record is accurate. It’s also incomplete.”

Chris leaned forward. “Incomplete how?”

“We banished him for what he did to the pack. Nobody looked hard enough at what he was doing at home.” Gideon’s jaw worked once, and he seemed to be choosing his next words with more effort than the sentence should have required. “I remember the day we came for him. Your father brought four of us to the house, myself included. Garrett fought the arrest, but not the way a strong man fights. He fought like someone who knew he’d already lost and wanted the show of it anyway.”

“And Sloane?” Chris asked.