Chapter 5: The Wife

"Six," I said. "They're yours."

The man from Portland stayed where I had left him, in the back of my head.

A wolf who can smell my children from the doorway can smell that lie, and I would rather he hear the truth from me than read it off their faces.

Torin did not stand up.

He stayed crouched in front of Hazel, and she looked back at him with her head tilted.

"He smells like us," Hazel said.

"Like Orin and me and a pine tree."

Orin took a step forward.

He came up to Torin's belt, and he put himself between his sister and a man who weighed four times what he did.

Then he growled.

It was low and rough, and far too deep for a six-year-old.

His eyes went pale gold and came back grey.

I felt the floor shift under my shoes.

Wolves do not growl like that until they shift, and they do not shift until they are sixteen.

I had no wolf, and nobody in my family had left one for him.

I did not know where that sound had come from.

Torin heard it, and something went through his whole body and stayed.

"Easy," he said to Orin.

"I'm not going to touch your sister."

Orin kept growling until Torin stood and took one step back.

Then he stopped, and put his book up against his chest again, and glared.

"Seven years," Torin said to me.

His voice had gone very quiet.

"You took eight thousand dollars and vanished, and you had my children."

"You gave me eight thousand dollars," I said.

"I never gave you a cent," he said.

"It was in an envelope on the boathouse floor, with a text from your number telling me to keep my mouth shut."

"What text?" Torin said.

I looked at his face.

At nineteen I had spent two years learning every lie Torin Wolcott had, and I knew every one.

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