my thumbs. Hear the gagging. Smell the blood. Benches, asshole. I make fucking fine benches.
“Hunh,” I say, though even that noncommittal grunt takes effort.
“I’m sick and tired of being told what to do,” he says.
“What? Like August didn’t tell us what to do?”
“That’s not the same thing at all. He paid us. Good money, plus people knew I was somebody when I worked for him.”
Somebody making the world safe for cabbages.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Something August said about cabbages.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? We are trapped here in the middle of a jungle, no way out, nobody knows where we are, and you’re talking about cabbages?”
“More to the point, nobody cares.” I reach my elbow around to stretch the cramping in my back. “Besides, what would you do if you did?”
“Did what?”
“Get out, Cassius. Our skills are not readily transferrable, and August isn’t going to be writing any letters of recommendation.”
He looks at me with the sly expression of an idiot discovering a thing that everyone else has already learned and discounted.
Don’t say it, idiot. Don’t say it.
“August wasn’t the only Leveraux out there.”
I told you not to, but you said it anyway.
“Cassius, we never spent much time together, but I’m going to do you a favor anyway. You don’t know her.”
“I met her once. With my parents. She was pretty and made me cookies. Oatmeal and raisin.”
“Just because she bakes cookies doesn’t make her a good person. She killed her brother. Cut him into tiny pieces, and he was a better fighter than you will ever be.” I rub the ball of my thumb. “You are August’s man. Never underestimate the power of her hatred.”
“That’s exactly what I’m counting on because I can give her the one thing that she hates more than August.”
The cold creeps up my back, and when he says it—when he says, “I can give her this Pack”—it takes my heart like frostbite.
* * *
Otho was the only person I talked to about my mother. “She was a powerful wolf,” he said, like every Lukani who’d known Maxima. “A little like Drusilla in some ways.” I waited for him to say something else, but he just went back to cleaning guns. He was fanatical about making sure every gun was cleaned, zeroed, and loaded, so we did that a lot.
He wasn’t a big talker and wouldn’t say more than he felt like at the moment he felt like it.
Finally, when it was all done and he’d slid his .44 in his shoulder holster, he said, “Never try to make a powerful woman small.” He cupped his hands together into a ball and made as though he was pressing the air inside. “There’s only so small you can make them before they”—he shot his fingers apart into the air—“explode.”
I looked at the prominent scar at the base of his thumb.
“Kind of like stars that way.”
And that was all he said.
When I found him in the steam room of his health club in Toronto, that was the only part that was intact, the fleshy muscle of his thumb, with the scarred-over bite. The distinctive marker left by Mala, the wolf who had made Drusilla feel small.
Chapter 23
Evie
“How long have you been here?”
The dock creaks, the swallow song melds together into a dull murmur, while the water rustles through the grasses at water’s edge.
“Since Evening Song,” he says from the Adirondack chair at the end of the dock. “I wasn’t sure whether you meant on the dot of Moon in the Endeberg Notch or Moon in the Endeberg Notch-ish.”
“You have no idea where the Endeberg Notch is, do you?”
He shakes his head.
Resting my elbow on the arm of the chair, I lean down, pointing to the last mountain of the northern range and the notch between it and the pile of rock that was too small for our ancestors to bother giving even one of the unimaginative names they specialized in. Westdæl, the West Place. Norþdæl, the North Place. Endeberg, the End Mountain.
“The moon’s coming up now. Right there.” I pluck at something sticking to my lashes. “You won’t see it if you don’t look.”
“You have…” He touches his own eyelashes, then reaches his hand toward my cheek. “Should I try?”
I close my eyes, feeling the edge of his hand anchored cool on my cheek, his thumb and forefinger gentle as though I were something precious that needed care. He is close enough for me to feel his warm breath eddy against my skin. When I open