Chapter 10: The Photo

By six in the morning it was on every phone in the pack.

I saw it first on Lucille's, at her kitchen table, while she was putting ointment on my burned palm.

Her phone buzzed.

Then it buzzed again, and again, and kept buzzing.

She picked it up, looked at it, and set it face down on the table.

"Show me," I said.

"Eat your eggs."

"Lucille."

She turned it over.

It was a good picture.

That was the worst part.

Whoever took it had a steady hand.

Me against the brick wall behind the dumpsters, my hair down, my hands in his shirt.

Him bent over me, one hand in my hair, his mouth on mine.

The fire light made it orange and gold, like a painting.

Under it, somebody had typed a heading:

THE ALPHA'S LITTLE DENIAL.

It had gone to the pack's group text, the one for hunts and funerals and lost dogs.

Four hundred wolves.

By the time I scrolled down, there were sixty replies.

I stopped reading at the third one.

Lucille took the phone back out of my hand.

"Who's in that group who'd send it?" I said.

"Anybody with a number." She looked at me over her glasses. "Anybody who drove a dark car to a fire."

The eldest called at eight.

She didn't call me.

She called Stellan, and at nine he came up Lucille's porch steps with soot still in the creases of his knuckles.

He sat at the kitchen table across from me, in the chair the ranch hand had bled on.

Lucille poured him coffee and stood at the stove with her back to us, pretending she wasn't listening.

"Trial's set," he said. "Full moon. The twenty-sixth. In front of the whole pack."

"Twelve days."

"What does she want?"

"She wants to know if I lied to her face." He turned the mug around on the table. "I did. She knows I did. Now four hundred wolves know it too."

"We could say it was the smoke," I said. "The fire. Adrenaline. A one-time thing."

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