Chapter 32 Chapter 33

Chapter 32 Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Carmen

Sorel said yes before I finished asking.

I found her at breakfast, earlier than everyone else, sitting with both hands around her tea and looking out the kitchen window at the training ground. She had the quality of someone who had also not slept particularly well, not anxious exactly, more like a mind that hadn't stopped processing.

I sat across from her and told her what Fabrizio wanted and what I thought about it and she listened without interrupting and when I finished she said yes and then was quiet for a moment and then said, "I've been wanting to say Dara's name in a room that had to write it down for twelve years."

I understood that completely.

We sat with our tea and Rosaria arrived and pretended she hadn't been listening from the kitchen doorway and put bread on the table and left again, and Sorel looked at me with something that had been building in her expression since she arrived.

"Hannibal," she said.

"He doesn't know you're here."

"I know. I asked Fabrizio not to tell him." She turned her cup in her hands. "I wasn't ready. I didn't know if I was going to be ready." She looked at the window. "Is he actually different."

"Yes," I said. "Not finished. But different in the direction that matters."

She was quiet for a moment. "My father told me Hannibal took the Alpha position badly. That he was difficult, uncooperative, embarrassing the pack with his attitude." She paused. "My father's version of embarrassing the pack is usually someone doing something right."

"In this case yes."

She almost smiled. "I want to talk to him. After the counsel. Not now, there's too much else happening and I need to keep my head clear for the documentation." She looked at me directly. "Will you tell him I'm here? Not today. When it's done."

"Yes," I said.

Bruno drove us to Fabrizio's city office two days later for the final review before submission. The four of us sat around a table that was considerably more elegant than anything in the pack house and Fabrizio went through the document section by section with the thoroughness of a man who treated preparation as moral responsibility.

My section was near the end.

He had written it from our conversations over the preceding weeks, precise and structured, and he slid it across the table to me without comment and let me read it. I read it twice. The language was formal in the way legal documents are formal, which meant it had a particular flatness to it, and reading my own history in that flatness was a strange experience, like seeing a familiar landscape from a great height. Recognizable but altered.

I picked up the pen and changed three things. One was a date he had slightly wrong. One was a description of the cabin that was more generous than accurate. The third was a sentence near the end that had softened something that should not have been softened, something about the conditions of my removal from the pack that implied a degree of choice I had not had.

I crossed it out and wrote the accurate version in the margin.

Fabrizio read my corrections without expression and then looked at me with the particular look he had given me the first time I had spoken in a strategy meeting, the look of someone updating a file.

"Thank you," he said. "These are correct."

Xavier was reading his section across the table and I watched him reach something that made his jaw tighten slightly and then continue without comment. Bruno was going through the border route evidence with the focused expression of someone looking for gaps that an opposing counsel might find first.

"Timeline," Xavier said.

"Submission next Thursday. The counsel convenes the following Monday." Fabrizio straightened the papers into alignment. "We'll have a response within two weeks of convening. Possibly sooner if they find it as straightforward as I do."

"And if they don't find it straightforward," Sorel said.

"Then it becomes a longer process." Fabrizio looked at her. "But I want to be clear. Your account is the spine of this document. Without it the border route evidence is a pattern that requires interpretation. With it the interpretation is already done." He paused. "They will find it straightforward."

We drove back in the late afternoon, the city giving way to the outer territories and then to familiar roads, and I sat in the back with Sorel and watched the landscape go by and thought about Thursday.

Thought about the formal room and the counsel's table and saying clearly what had happened and what it had meant, not in the careful diminished way I had been trained by years of survival to present things, but accurately, the full size of it, taking up the space it actually occupied.

Sorel fell asleep against the window somewhere in the last hour, which I was glad of because she had barely slept in four days, and I sat beside her in the quiet car with Xavier's hand reaching back from the front seat to rest near mine on the seat between us, not quite touching, available.

I put my hand over his.

Bruno caught my eye in the rearview mirror and looked back at the road.

The pack house appeared through the gate as the last light was leaving and Rosaria had the lights on inside and smoke coming from the chimney and it looked the way it had been looking to me for several weeks now, like the answer to a question I had been asking for a very long time without the right language for it.

We went inside and Rosaria had food on the table and the fire was going and Sorel woke up and sat down and Bruno poured water and Xavier stood at the head of the table and looked at everyone in it and I sat in my chair and felt the bond warm and steady and the mark alive at my neck and thought, Thursday.

I was ready.