Chapter 20: The Safe

I lay very still on the iron bed.

"Both," I said through the door.

"Kacey for the water. You for me." I heard him lean on the frame. "That's how it should've been from the start, Shi. Mother's finally seeing sense."

"Does Kacey know?"

"Kacey'll do what she's told. She's a Jessup now."

My wolf rose up off the floor of my chest with her lip curled.

I made her sit.

"Go to bed, Coy," I said. "The moon's six days off."

He laughed, soft.

"Six days," he said. "I can count."

His boots went off down the hall.

I didn't sleep.

On Monday I ran the Jessup remuda.

The foreman met me at the horse barn at six without a word. He just handed me a halter.

Ninety head came up to the fence when I whistled.

Tonka got there first and knocked two geldings out of the way to put his head in my arms.

Every Jessup rider who'd been on the gather was in that barn.

The red-bearded one. The kid. The woman who'd ridden flank.

None of them would look at me.

At noon, I found the kid standing by Tonka's stall.

"Did he make you?" he said. "Coy. Did he make you come back?"

"Nobody makes me do anything."

He looked at me like I'd let him down personally.

Then he went back to work.

I let him think it. It was safer for him.

Kacey had told me in the pantry.

Monday nights Noreen drove to Casper to sign the old Alpha's papers at the care home.

She left at seven and was never back before eleven.

Coy played cards in the bunkhouse on Mondays and drank Noreen's whiskey.

At seven I heard Noreen's truck go down the lane.

At seven-thirty Kacey texted me.

No cherry pie tonight.

That meant Coy was out of the house and in the bunkhouse.

I went down the back stairs in my socks.

Noreen's office was at the end of the ground floor hall, past the old Alpha's empty room.

The door was locked. It had always been locked.

I'd known where she hid the key for six years. In the toe of a beaded moccasin on the hall table.

The office smelled like her. Lavender and gun oil and old paper.

The elk mount stared down at me from over the desk with its glass eyes.

The safe sat under it, gray steel, waist high.

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