One Minute Younger Always Second Best Until I Walked Out the Door novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Gravel Fork

In Jonas's truck Roxana reads the ambush file and learns her ridge map killed his brother and that Colt knew.

I did not take the paper.

"You're a Black Creek wolf in our lot on Naming night," I said. "My brother's guards will be out here in a minute."

"They won't come out for an hour," Jonas said. "Your father is giving them the toast again."

He was right.

I could hear it through the walls, the cheering, and Colt's name over and over.

"Get in the truck," he said. "Read it, then walk back in if you want to."

"Why would I get in a truck with you?"

"Because your dress has no pockets and you left your phone on the table."

I looked down.

He was right about that too.

I climbed into the passenger seat, because the cold was getting into my bones.

The cab smelled of cedar and woodsmoke.

It also smelled of something else that made my wolf lift her head.

I ignored it.

Jonas set a folder on my knees.

"My brother was twenty-two," he said. "Three years ago he led a six-wolf patrol up the Gravel Fork road."

"I remember the border incident," I said. "My father said it was a rogue band."

"It was Ironwood wolves in Ironwood colours."

I opened the folder.

The first page was a photocopy of a map.

It was my map.

I knew it by the smudged corner where I always rest my thumb, and by the little arrow I put on every north line.

I had drawn it for a training exercise the spring before.

Colt had asked me for a ridge map of the Gravel Fork country, so he could teach the young wolves how to hold a high road.

"This is from a drill," I said.

"Turn the page."

The second page was a typed order on Ironwood paper.

Beneath it, in my brother's square handwriting, was a note in the margin.

Pin them at the ford. Three on the high bank. Nobody leaves.

My mouth went dry.

My grid sat under his note. My ford was circled in red, exactly where he wanted the wolves.

"He told me it was a drill," I said.

"Maybe he did."

"I didn't know."

"I believe that."

I looked up at him.

He was not looking at me. He was watching the lit windows of the hall.

"I've believed it for three years," he said. "That's what makes it hard."

"You knew whose hand it was."

"The pencil is distinctive. The lettering is distinctive. Everyone in this valley who reads a map has seen your hand and thought it was your brother's."

I turned back to the page.

Under the order was a list of names, and the last name on it was Jonas's brother.

My throat closed.

I had spent three years drawing, and none of it had ever been mine.

"What do you want from me?" I said.

"The truth," he said. "I want you to look at this and know it's yours."

"I know it."

"Then go back inside and kneel to him like he asked."

I stared at him.

He had heard the speech through the wall, then.

"I just walked out of there," I said.

"I know. I heard it through the doors."

"You think I'll go back."

"I think everyone in your family has taught you to," he said.

He said it flatly, without cruelty.

It was the nearest thing to kindness anyone had said to me that night.

I closed the folder. My hands were shaking, so I set them on top of it.

The scent in the cab was stronger now.

Cedar, smoke, and something warm underneath that I had no name for.

My wolf shifted. She wanted to lean toward him.

I pressed my back against the door.

Jonas's hand tightened on the wheel.

"Don't," he said quietly. "I smelled it the moment you came out the doors. I didn't come here for that."

"For what?"

"You know what."

I knew.

Every wolf knows the scent of a fated mate, and no one believes it will come on a night like this.

"I came about my brother," he said. "I'd have done it the same if you were anyone else. I would honestly rather it was anyone else."

"That makes two of us," I said.

He nearly smiled, and then did not.

I looked at the dark window.

The Radley name was gone. My ranking was gone. My brother had my maps and my father had my silence, and I was sitting in the truck of the man whose family I had unknowingly buried.

I should have been crying.

Instead I felt very clear.

"Where are you going from here?" I asked.

"Home. North, forty minutes."

"Do you have a spare bed?"

His head turned.

"And a pencil," I said. "A hard one, and a pad of grid paper. I want to see every map I ever gave my brother, and I want to see what he did with them."

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