Chapter 16 Chapter 16

Chapter 16 Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Hannibal

Bruno found me splitting wood behind the east wing.

I hadn't been asked to. I had simply needed something physical to do before I lost my mind entirely, and someone had left an axe leaning against the wall and a stack of unsplit logs beside it, and it had seemed like the most honest available option.

He watched me for a moment without speaking, which I had come to understand was simply how Bruno operated, he arrived and assessed before he committed to anything.

"She was in there," he said. "The meeting."

I brought the axe down. "I know. I heard."

"Xavier let her stay."

"I know that too."

Bruno sat on the low wall beside the woodpile and watched me work. He wasn't in a hurry, which was irritating given that I was.

"She told them everything she remembered about the network," he said. "Guard rotations, weak points, a woman named Mari who helped her." He paused. "It was good intelligence. Better than what Fabrizio had."

I set the next log up and split it cleanly. "Why are you telling me this."

"Because you're back here splitting wood alone and you have the look of a man who's about to make a bad decision."

"I'm not going to do anything."

"You're thinking about it."

I set the axe down and turned to look at him. "What do you want me to say, Bruno. She was taken because she left her territory alone and she left her territory alone because I rejected her and made her feel like she had nothing worth staying for. That's the line. It goes directly from one thing to the other."

Bruno was quiet.

"So yes," I said. "I'm back here splitting wood because it's the only thing I can do right now that doesn't make everything worse."

"Fair enough." He reached over and picked up a piece of split wood and turned it over in his hands. "She's going to be fine. She already is, mostly."

"I can see that."

"Does that make it better or worse."

I picked the axe back up. "Both."

Bruno accepted that with a nod. He stayed on the wall while I worked through the rest of the stack and the afternoon light moved across the yard and somewhere inside the house someone was playing violin.

We both heard it at the same moment. Bruno looked toward the sound and I stopped mid-swing and stood there.

It was not what I expected. Not the careful practicing of someone working through scales or repeating difficult passages. It was something fully formed and entirely her, I knew that instinctively even though I had only heard her play twice in my life. It moved the way she moved, with that quality of someone saying something exact and important without words.

"She plays every evening," Bruno said. "Since the second night."

I lowered the axe.

"The pack has started gathering in the corridor outside the main room when she does. They don't go in. They just listen."

I looked at him.

He shrugged, not quite concealing something. "She has that effect."

I stacked the split wood against the wall without answering and Bruno stood and helped without being asked and we worked in silence until the pile was done and the music was still going somewhere inside.

"Xavier's running the operation in eight days," Bruno said. "Full team, east approach, based on what she told us."

"And Hannibal stays here, presumably."

"That's not been decided."

I looked at him.

"You know the Blood Moon territory better than anyone on this team," he said simply. "Two of the eleven locations Fabrizio identified are on or near your border. Xavier knows that."

"Xavier doesn't trust me."

"Xavier doesn't trust easily. That's different." Bruno dusted his hands off. "He's not sentimental about resources. If you're useful he'll use you."

I thought about my father somewhere back in Blood Moon territory, convinced he was playing a long game, convinced the pack had a destiny, sitting in a house full of Pablo's ghost and his own pride. I thought about the meeting I had walked out of three weeks ago when he'd started talking about the prophecy again, about the Blood Moon's rise, and I had looked at him across the table and understood clearly that he was going to drive what was left of us into the ground.

"What would I need to do," I said.

"Talk to Xavier. Tonight." Bruno picked up his jacket from the wall. "Come to dinner. Stay at the table afterward. Don't make it complicated."

"He barely tolerates my presence."

"He tolerated it through an entire dinner last night. He's making a calculation." Bruno started toward the door. "You should make one too."

I stood in the yard after he'd gone and listened to the violin through the walls and thought about Carmen sitting in her cabin the winter I had stolen her firewood, and how she'd come out the next morning and started rebuilding her garden without a word to anyone, without complaint, just quietly beginning again.

She had always been beginning again. Every time we destroyed something she had built she simply turned around and started over, not because she was weak, I understood that now with a clarity that was almost painful, but because she was the only person in that entire pack who had ever understood that survival was a daily choice you made with whatever you had left.

I had called that weakness for twenty years.

I went inside to find Xavier.