Chapter 62 ZANE

Chapter 62 ZANE
Three days before the council review, I made a phone call I hadn't told anyone about.

I called Garrett Obed.

Garrett was a council liaison who handled supernatural security operations up and down the eastern seaboard. We'd worked something out two years ago—a situation I'd handled quietly because going through official channels would have taken three times as long and left twice as many loose ends. He owed me for that. And I'd never asked for anything back.

I called it in now.

It was a short conversation. I asked him to quietly confirm that Maria was clean. That she hadn't been contacted, hadn't been offered anything, hadn't been compromised in any way that would make the room Nadia was about to walk into the wrong room. 

I needed to know before we went in. If it was already deeper than we thought—if Maria was also in Ferguson's pocket—then everything we were doing was just handing the whole thing to the wrong people on a platter.

Garrett confirmed within twelve hours.

Maria was clean. Sixteen years of running that council and there was nothing on her. She was, in fact, exactly the person she appeared to be, which in my experience was a genuinely rare thing.

In the same call, I asked Garrett to flag the council's enforcement arm about Marcus specifically. Not to move, not yet. Just to be watching. They had to already be positioned so that the moment the restrictions went live, there would be someone ready to monitor compliance and log anything that looked like Marcus was testing the edges.

Garrett said he'd handle it.

I didn't tell Nadia any of it. She had enough on her plate. The testimony preparation, the sessions with Petra, even the council questions we'd been running every evening. She was carrying a lot, and she was carrying it well, but there was no reason to add the weight of knowing I'd been making calls behind the scenes to all of that baggage. I’d handled it and it had worked. Case closed.

I also told myself I wasn't keeping things from her. I was just using the network I'd spent six years building. Protecting the people in my pack was the job, and she was one of those people now, whether or not we'd formally said those words out loud yet.

Dex, of course, figured it out.

He found me the evening after the review, after the building had cleared out and it was just the two of us in the back hallway. He stopped walking and without any lead-up at all, said, "You called Garrett Obed."

I said, "Yes."

He looked at me. "Before the review."

"Yes."

“To confirm if Maria was compromised or not?”

"Dex."

“You should tell her,” he said.

I started to say, "It's not—"

He cut me off, talking right over me. "You called in a six-year favor to make sure the room she was going to walk into was safe before she walked into it. You should tell her that." He held my eyes. "She needs to know what it looks like when someone actually has her back for real. Not just standing next to her. She's never had that before, Zane. Not once. She doesn't know what it feels like."

I was quiet.

Dex let the silence settle for a moment, then said, "I'm not trying to give you a hard time about it. I'm just saying she should know."

I nodded. "Noted."

He nodded once and walked off.

I thought about it for the rest of the day. On the drive back, during dinner, and even afterwards.

That evening, I told her.

We were in the kitchen. She was making coffee because neither of us ever fully stopped moving these days. I said it simply, that I'd called Garrett three days before the review, and I'd asked him to confirm exactly where Maria stood, that I'd also asked him to have the enforcement arm in position and watching before the restrictions went live.

Then I added, "I should have told you before the review. I didn't want to add to what you were already carrying."

She didn't say anything right away. She stood at the counter and went still for a moment, like something had actually gotten to her for real. 

Then she responded. "Okay."

Just that. Okay.

Like she was taking it in carefully, putting it somewhere safe, and figuring out what to do with it.

“Dex told me to tell you,” I said after a short while.

That got a small sound out of her. It wasn’t quite a laugh but close to one. "Of course he did."

"He was right," I said.

When she looked at me just then, the expression on her face was one I couldn't fully read, but I thought it had something to do with the fact that she was still figuring out what it meant to have people in her corner. Not people who needed something from her or the ones who'd put her somewhere on purpose. Just people who were there for her anytime she needed them.

She turned back to the coffee. I stayed where I was.

After a moment she quietly said, "I want to know everything moving forward. Even when you think it will add to what I'm carrying."

“Okay,” I replied. 

“I mean it,” she added.

“I know you do." I paused. "Okay."

She nodded as she poured the coffee. Then she handed me a cup, and I took it, and we stood in the kitchen in the silence that had become our kind of silence—the comfortable kind, with nothing left unsaid in it.

Outside, somewhere in the city, I knew Marcus was still there, still watching and calculating. The restrictions would slow him down but they wouldn't stop him.

I knew that, and she knew that, but neither of us needed to say it right now.

But for the first time since all of this started, I didn't feel like we were running out of time.

I felt like we were ready for whatever came next.