Chapter 2 Terms of Surrender

KATE POV

He doesn't call the guards.

That's the first thing that unravels me — not the scar, not the memory, but the eight full seconds Jesse Calloway spends deciding whether to hand me over to men who'd gut a hunter on principle, and choosing, instead, to shut the archive door and stand between me and it.

"You have thirty seconds," he says, "to tell me why I shouldn't."

"Because I just told you something that should be impossible, and you didn't call me a liar."

His jaw works. "I didn't say I believed you."

"You didn't say you didn't."

For a long moment neither of us moves, and the room gets smaller the way rooms do when two people stop pretending they aren't paying attention to each other. He's close enough that I can smell woodsmoke and something clean underneath it, and I hate how much my body remembers being seven and small and certain that the hands pulling me through that window belonged to someone safe.

"What's your real name," he says finally.

"Kate."

"Kate what?"

"Ellison."

Something crosses his face — not recognition, not yet, but the shape of a man doing math he doesn't want to finish. "Ellison. Not a Millhaven name I know."

"My mother remarried before the fire. Different last name, same house, same night." I make myself hold his eyes, because looking away now would be its own confession. "I was seven. I don't remember much. I remember hands. I remember a voice telling me to run and not stop, and I remember being pulled out of a Guild transport six months later by a man who told me wolves did this, wolves killed your family, and if I wanted to survive what came next, I'd learn to hate them properly."

"And did you?"

"I learned to be very good at my job."

He studies me like he's deciding whether that's an answer or a threat. "Which is."

"Breaking into archive rooms that aren't mine," I say, "looking for proof that the Guild ordered an attack on this pack and blamed it on you instead."

I watch it land. Watch the exact moment the last ten years of his life gets pulled out from under him the same way mine just did, because if I'm right — if the box marked MILLHAVEN holds what Director Holt sent me to find — then neither of us has been mourning the enemy. We've both been mourning the same night, on opposite sides of a lie built specifically to keep us that way.

"Get out," he says, but there's no heat in it, just a man buying himself a second to breathe. "Not the compound. This room. I need to think, and I can't do that with a Guild hunter standing where my sister used to keep her school books."

I go. I don't run — running would mean I still believe the old story, the one where wolves are something you flee — I just walk, slow, deliberate, past a man who is watching me leave like he isn't sure whether he wants to stop me or follow.

He finds me an hour later on the porch overlooking the training yard, two glasses of the same dark unlabeled drink from earlier, and hands me one without asking if I want it.

"I looked at the box," he says.

I don't breathe.

"It's sealed with my father's mark. Nobody's opened it since the night he died, which means nobody in this pack has looked at what's inside in ten years, including me." He sits, close enough that our shoulders almost touch, not close enough that they do. "I want to open it. I want you there when I do."

"Why."

"Because you're the only person alive who might actually know what we're looking at." He turns the glass in his hand, doesn't drink. "And because some part of me has spent ten years hating a seven-year-old girl I thought died screaming in a fire I couldn't stop in time. I'd like to stop hating her before the sun comes up."

It shouldn't feel like anything, a man saying that to a woman he met an hour ago under a lie. It shouldn't make my chest go tight and stupid and young. But it does, and for the first time since Director Holt put a knife-shaped assignment in my hand and called it a mission, I want something that isn't survival.

I want to know what happens if I let myself want this.

My phone buzzes against my hip before I can answer him. Guild-issue, encrypted, a number I was told to answer no matter what hour it came in.

I step off the porch to take it. Jesse watches me go, and I feel his eyes on my back the whole ten feet, warm in a way that has nothing to do with the fire pit behind us.

"Report," Director Holt says, and his voice is the same flat certainty it always is, except tonight there's something underneath it I've never heard from him before. Satisfaction.

"I'm in. I found the archive."

"Good girl." A pause, the kind he uses when he's about to make sure I understand exactly what I am to him. "Change of plans. Forget the box. We don't need proof anymore, we need position. You've got seven days before the treaty summit, and I want you close enough to that Alpha to put a tracker on him personally. Something small. Something he won't feel until it's too late for it to matter."

My stomach drops through the porch boards. "That's not the mission you gave me."

"The mission is whatever I say it is." Another pause, and I can hear him smiling, and I hate how well I know that sound. "Your grandmother's been very cooperative about her medication schedule this week. I'd hate for that to change because you decided to develop a conscience on me, Kate. Seven days. Get close to him. Don't get attached."

The line goes dead before I can answer, before I can tell him it might already be too late for that last part, and behind me, Jesse Calloway is still watching, still waiting, still looking at me like I'm something worth saving twice.

I have seven days to choose between the only family I have left and the boy who once pulled me out of a fire the Guild set to make me theirs.

I don't know yet which one I'm going to burn for.