Trapped by the Bond

The rain hit the windshield like gravel, and the wipers pushed it aside only for the next wave to arrive. I had been driving six hours through the kind of Scottish landscape postcards love and I had learned to distrust. Pine trees, black lochs, hills that looked soft from a distance and were not soft at all. Eleven miles to the Blackmuir gate. I counted them down out of habit.

The road narrowed to a single track and the GPS gave up around the third cattle grid. I knew where I was going. The Council's file on Blackmuir ran to two hundred pages and I had read all of it twice. A thousand square miles of forest and loch. Duncan Blackmuir, Alpha for thirty-one years. Ninety-four wolves. A sheep farm, a hydro scheme on the burn, and a land deal that did not add up.

That last part was my job. The Council of Alphas pays a small, unloved group of wolves to walk into a pack house, smile at its Alpha, and find the rot underneath. We are called auditors. The packs call us other things.

The gate appeared at half past seven: two stone pillars, an iron arch with a wolf's head worked into the metal, and a lodge beyond it with warm windows. I stopped the car and listened to the rain and the tick of the cooling engine. Then I took the small silver pin with the Council's mark from my jacket and put it on my lapel. It weighs nothing. It has ended more than one conversation before it began.

Duncan was waiting on the steps under the porch light, a tall, broad man in his early sixties with silver hair and eyes the colour of a winter sky. He wore a good wool coat and the expression of a landlord inspecting a tenant.

"Mr. Calum," he said. "The Council said you would come before the week was out. They did not say you would come in weather fit for drowning."

"The weather does not take my calls, Alpha."

He laughed, warm and practiced. "Come in. Fiona has kept a plate for you. You will want a bath and a bed before we talk business."

The warmth hit me in the hall: woodsmoke, wet wool, cooking, the smell of a pack house where ninety wolves have lived in the same rooms for years. Underneath it I caught something faint and clean, like green things crushed in the hand. I put it out of my mind. The job did not include sniffing the furniture.

Fiona was a short, round woman in her sixties with grey curls and the sharpest eyes in the building. She set a plate of lamb and potatoes in front of me and sat down opposite without being invited.

"Eat," she said. "You are thin. The Council does not feed its people."

"The Council feeds us documents. They are less filling."

She smiled, a real one, and I noted it. Omegas remember kindness. "You will want to know about the land sales. I am not the one to ask. I only cook."

"You cook for everyone who signs the papers."

Her spoon stopped for half a second. Then she picked it up again. "Eat your dinner, auditor."

I was halfway through the lamb when the kitchen door opened and the smell from the hall came back, stronger, and a woman walked in with her hair damp from the rain and a basket of herbs under her arm. She was tall. Black hair pulled back and coming loose at the temples, a long face with a narrow jaw and green eyes that landed on me and stayed there. Mud on her boots. She looked at the silver pin on my lapel, then at my face, and the floor moved under me.

I have had a lot happen in pack houses. I have been threatened, flattered and once locked in a cellar for a night. I had never had the ground shift and my own wolf, usually silent and sardonic, sit up in my chest and howl. The bond is not a metaphor. It starts in the chest and goes outward, through the ribs and into the hands, and it does not ask permission. I gripped the edge of the table.

"You are the auditor," she said. Her voice was low and flat. "Isla Blackmuir. I am the healer here."

"I know who you are."

"Of course you do. You read the file." She put the basket down with a thump. "Fiona, I need the dried yarrow from the top shelf. The one on the left."

Fiona found it, and the two of them spoke about a sick child in the east cottages while I sat with my heart going like a bird in a box. Isla did not look at me again. I could feel her not looking at me.

I finished my dinner, thanked Fiona, and asked Duncan where I could wash and sleep.

"Second floor, end of the corridor," he said. "The green door. There is a lock on it, though you will not need one here."

The corridor was long and lit by one bulb, and the wind pressed at the windows. The green door opened onto a room with a narrow bed, a writing desk and a view of nothing but rain. I set my bag down and counted my exits: the door, the window, the roof below the window. Two ways out, one way in. I always count them.

Someone knocked.

Isla stood there with her arms folded, her hair down and wet at the ends, and the bond came up through me again, hot and insistent. She stepped in past me without waiting and I closed the door because it seemed worse to leave it open.

"You are going to ruin my father," she said.

"I am going to find out what he has been doing with the pack's land. Whether that ruins him is his decision."

"He is an Alpha. He has been Alpha since before I was born. Do you know what happens to a pack when its Alpha is dragged in front of the Council?"

"I know what happens when an Alpha sells his own territory and lies about it in the ledger. I have seen three packs fold that way."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she put her hand flat on my chest, over the bond, and the heat went through my jumper and my shirt and into the bone.

"You feel that," she said. It was not a question.

"Yes."

"So do I. And I want you to understand something, auditor. I have spent my whole life being careful with my father. If your audit brings him down, half this pack will blame me before they blame you, because everyone knows a daughter can always be got at." Her hand did not move. "I am not going to let a stranger with a silver pin tear this place apart. Not for a bond I did not ask for."

"I did not ask for it either."

"That makes two of us."

Neither of us stepped back. The rain ran down the window. Her heart was going fast under my hand, and I had not noticed my own hand moving until it was on her waist, over the wool of her jumper. She smelled of rain and herbs and something underneath that was just her, and my wolf had stopped howling and gone very quiet and very watchful.

She kissed me first. I will hold on to that, later, when it matters. She kissed me hard and angry and over too soon, and then she kissed me again and it was not angry at all.

We did not reach the bed. The writing desk was closer, and the wall was closer still. There was a moment when my mouth was on her throat and her fingers were in my hair and she said my name, and it sounded like a curse and a blessing at once, and I stopped thinking about the audit and the ledger and the exits. She pulled my jumper over my head and I lifted her onto the desk and the lamp rocked and neither of us cared. I wanted to know what she sounded like. I found out.

Afterward she sat on the edge of the desk with her jumper pulled down over her knees and her hair in her face, and I stood by the window with the rain at my back, and neither of us said anything for a while.

I should have been suspicious. I have been doing this job for a decade, and the one rule I have never broken is that I do not let a pack get close to me. A woman could be used to get at an auditor, and a fated mate could be used more easily than most. But she had kissed me first, and I was still stupid with it, and so I only said, "That was not how I expected the evening to go."

She laughed, once, without much humour. Then she slid off the desk, pulled her jumper straight and came toward me, and she reached up and touched the silver pin on my lapel with one finger.

"You should be more careful," she said. "You left this on."

"I usually do."

"I am not talking about the pin." She looked up at me, and her green eyes had gone flat and hard again, and the warmth of the last hour drained out of the room. "You are here to find out what my father has been hiding. That is your job. I understand that. But you should know what you have walked into, Calum of the Council."

I opened my mouth to say something clever, and she leaned in close and said the next words into my ear, quietly, the way you would tell someone the time.

"I know you are a spy. I knew before you came through the gate." She stepped back. "Good night, auditor."

The door closed behind her. I stood there in the dark of my first night at Blackmuir with my hand still raised and the bond still pulling at my chest, and I counted my exits again, because it was that or admit that I had already missed the only one that mattered.