Chapter 60: Father of Lies

The abandoned ski lodge sat at the top of a road the county had stopped maintaining in 2009. It had been a neutral site for regional pack meetings twice before — Grace knew this from Elena's files — which made it a reasonable choice and also a manipulative one. Neutral in structure, loaded in implication.

They drove up in Caleb's truck, just the two of them, which had been a thirty-minute argument with Samuel that Grace had won because a larger group would read as aggression, and she wasn't going in there to start something.

The lodge was lit inside with portable lanterns. Through the dusty glass, Grace could see a single figure standing at the far end of the main room.

She recognized the posture before she recognized the face.

Inside, he was older than her memory, which was rational — it had been eight years — but the oldness was a specific kind, written in scar tissue and in the way he held his shoulders, braced and careful, like a man who had learned that relaxing was expensive. His hair had gone more gray than dark. His eyes, when he turned to look at her, were exactly as she remembered.

Pale gray. Her own eyes, looking back at her.

"Grace," Pete Walker said.

She didn't say anything.

Caleb positioned himself slightly behind and to her left, which she understood as protective and chose not to argue with.

Pete spoke carefully, with the deliberateness of someone who had rehearsed and then decided the rehearsal was wrong and was improvising off the wreckage of it. He'd faked his death with Samuel's initial knowledge — there had been an agreement, eight years ago, that he would infiltrate the ESC's European network and feed intelligence back to the pack. It was supposed to take two years. The ESC moved slower than expected, or his access went deeper than expected, or both.

The agreement with Samuel had frayed. The communication had thinned. By year four, he was effectively autonomous, embedded at a level where surfacing would mean dismantling six years of placement.

Grace listened to all of this.

Then she stopped listening and started talking.

"I was seventeen," she said. "I buried an empty casket. I — do you understand what that—" Her voice broke in the middle and she let it break. "I thought you were dead. I moved to a town I'd never been to because I thought you wanted me to. I started a whole life. I learned to make pie, and I patched drywall, and I ran a diner, and I — I did all of that thinking you were gone."

"I know," Pete said.

"Don't say you know. Don't stand there and say you know like it's an answer."

"Grace—"

She moved before Caleb could process it, forward and fast, and then Caleb's arms were around her from behind, not restraining her, just — present, the bond flaring between them like a live wire. She was shaking. She was furious and she was something underneath the furious that was worse, that was the seventeen-year-old girl who had stood at a grave and believed it.

"You abandoned me," she said, quieter now. The truth of it simple and total. "Whatever reason you had, whatever mission, you abandoned me."

Pete Walker stood in the lantern light and didn't look away.

"Yes," he said. "I did. I was wrong."

The silence was very long.

Caleb stepped forward.

He did it the way he did things in pack situations — deliberate, from a place of authority that didn't announce itself. He looked at Pete Walker directly, the kind of look that in wolf terms meant I see you and I am measuring you.

"You don't get to call her your daughter," Caleb said. "Not tonight. Not because she says so, and not because eight years of distance earns it back automatically." He kept his voice even, not threatening — something more considered than threat. "You want a relationship with her, you prove you won't disappear again. You stay. You answer questions. You do not make any more unilateral decisions about what she needs to know or when she needs to know it."

Pete looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded, once, slowly.

"Agreed," he said.

He reached into his jacket and produced a flash drive — compact, black, unremarkable. He held it out to Grace.

"The full ESC plan," he said. "The bridge-blood harvesting protocol, the facility locations, the projected timeline for the soldier program. Everything I've collected in six years." He waited until she took it. "They're further along than the pack knows. They're not planning to extract from you voluntarily. They're planning a retrieval. In the next thirty days."

Grace looked at the flash drive in her hand.

"Thirty days," she said.

"Perhaps less."

Caleb was already moving toward the door — angle of exit, line of sight to the vehicles, the way he moved when he was threat-assessing. Grace recognized it without looking directly at it.

"We need to go," he said.

Pete walked with them toward the door. Outside, the mountain air was thin and cold, the sky enormously starred, the gravel lot empty except for Caleb's truck.

Grace was three steps from the door when she heard the crack — a single sharp report from the treeline above the lodge — and felt the air move past her left ear.

Pete made a sound.

She turned.

He was down on one knee in the gravel, one hand pressed to his right shoulder, silver-bright blood welling between his fingers under the lantern glow spilling from the lodge windows.

He'd turned into it. The bullet had been on a line for her and he'd turned into it.

Grace was moving before she decided to move.