Chapter 22: The Letter

Gideon walked into the ring with the rope still on his wrists.

He stopped in front of me and looked at the frozen grass.

"Cut it," I said.

The Warden cut it. Gideon rubbed his hands together once and then faced the three packs.

His voice shook, but it carried.

"I'm Gideon Thorne, Gamma of Silver Claw. I'm going to tell you what I did."

Priscilla laughed lightly. "Brother, don't."

"I'm telling it, Pris."

He didn't look at her.

"I knew when I was nine that Nora wasn't my blood."

"I heard it through a door, and I kept quiet for twenty years."

"The night after the elders read her charges, my sister came to my quarters. She asked for my pliers."

He lifted his hands and looked at them.

"I handed them over. I held the lamp."

"She cut the brake line on Nora's car in the Hall lot, and she hummed while she did it."

A sound went through the Silver Claw ranks, low and ugly.

"Four cubs were in that car," Gideon said. "I'd have said so if I'd known. I'm saying it now."

"He's lying," Priscilla said. Her voice was thin. "He'll say anything the Calloway tells him..."

"I'm her brother," Gideon said. "That's why it has to be me."

A woman stepped out of the Silver Claw ranks, grey-haired, in a healer's coat.

"I wrote the report," she said, and her face was wet.

"The Luna put it in front of me and told me what to write. No cardiac activity."

"Four hearts came out of my own Doppler in front of her, and I said nothing."

Another figure came out behind her, thin and tired in a nurse's smock under a parka.

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