Chapter 4 Six Days

KATE POV

Six days, and I still haven't called Holt back.

I know what that silence costs. I know exactly what it costs, down to the milligram, and every hour I let it stretch is an hour I'm gambling with the only family I have left. But every time I pick up the burner phone he gave me, I see that photograph — a man in a Guild coat, watching my house burn instead of helping — and my thumb won't move.

Jesse finds me on the porch again on the fourth night, the same spot, the same unlabeled drink, except this time he sits close enough that our shoulders actually touch, and neither of us moves away.

"Sam ran your name," he says. "Kate Ellison doesn't exist before six years ago. Before that, you're a ward of the Guild under a case number. No school records. No medical history except what they wrote themselves."

"They erase you when they take you in. Easier to build something new than fix what's already broken." I look at my hands instead of him. "I used to think that was mercy. Giving a dead girl a new name instead of leaving her buried in Millhaven."

"It's not mercy if the man doing the burying is the one who lit the match."

"No," I agree. "It isn't."

He's quiet for a while, and I let myself notice, the way I haven't let myself do in six years, how it feels to sit next to someone who isn't measuring me for a mission. His hand is close enough to mine on the porch rail that moving either of us an inch would close the distance, and I think about it — actually think about it, weigh it the way I weigh a blade before a fight — and for once the calculation isn't about survival.

"Tell me something true," he says. "Not for the Guild. Not for the pack. Just for me."

"I don't remember my mother's face anymore." It comes out before I decide to say it, raw in a way nothing has been in years. "I remember the fire better than I remember her. I've spent ten years hating wolves for something that took the one memory I actually wanted to keep, and it turns out I had the wrong monster the whole time."

His hand covers mine on the rail, and I let it. "You didn't have the wrong monster. You had the wrong species."

I laugh — actually laugh, short and startled, the first real one in longer than I want to admit — and he watches me do it like it's something worth memorizing.

"If I don't call him back tonight," I say, "he'll assume I'm compromised. He'll send someone else. Someone who won't hesitate the way I have."

"Then call him back." Jesse's voice doesn't waver. "Tell him it's done. Tell him you planted it."

"I'm not going to—"

"I know you're not. That's not what I'm asking." He turns to face me fully now, and the porch light catches the scar at his collar, the twin of mine, the thing that started all of this. "I'm asking you to lie to a man who's made a career out of using the truth as a weapon. Buy us six days instead of none. Let us prepare for a summit he's planning to turn into a slaughter, instead of walking into it blind because you couldn't stomach one more lie for a man who deserves every single one you've got left in you."

He's right, and some cold, trained part of me — the part Holt built, the part I hate and still need — recognizes the strategy is sound before the rest of me catches up to how much it costs to keep playing his daughter a little longer.

I pick up the burner phone. Jesse's hand stays on mine the whole time I dial, like an anchor, like he already knows what it costs me to sound loyal to a man I now understand murdered my mother.

"It's done," I tell Holt when he picks up. My voice doesn't shake. Ten years of training is good for exactly one thing tonight. "Tracker's placed. He doesn't suspect anything."

"Good girl." That satisfaction again, thick and certain, and I have to look at Jesse's hand on mine to keep from throwing the phone into the yard. "Your grandmother sends her love. Six days, Kate. Don't disappoint me."

The line goes dead. I sit there with the phone in my lap and Jesse's hand still covering mine, and for the first time since Millhaven, I let myself cry — not for the mission, not for the fire, but for every year I spent hating the wrong people while the right one kept smiling at me like a father.

"Six days," I say, once I can talk again. "Six days to figure out how to save my grandmother, expose Holt, and keep you alive, and I don't know how to do even one of those things, let alone all three."

Jesse's fingers tighten around mine. "Then we don't do it alone. That's the part you haven't learned yet, Kate. You've spent ten years surviving by yourself. That's over now."

I want to believe him. God, I want to believe him so badly it scares me more than Holt ever has.