Chapter 10: Proof

"No," Duncan said. "She'd have told me."

"She told you not to tell me."

"That's different."

"Is it?" I said. "She asked you to hide a thing for eighteen months, and you did. What else would she ask you to hide?"

He opened his mouth.

He shut it.

A muscle jumped in his jaw, and I watched him look back over every collapse and every call, every night he had left the table.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

"I'm going to ask you not to hate me," he said at last.

"I can't ask you to forgive me. I know I don't get that."

"You don't."

"I lied to you for a year and a half."

"Yes."

"I told myself it was kindness."

"It was convenience," I said. "Yours and hers."

He took it.

It was an ugly word and he took it with his chin up.

"I'm going to prove it," he said. "If I'm wrong, I'll have killed her, and I'll answer for that. But I'm not wrong."

"How?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then you'll ask someone who does."

Orson's healer lived above the clinic, in a cluttered apartment that smelled of chamomile and old books.

She sat at her kitchen table in a flannel robe with her silver glasses pushed up into her hair.

"Close the door," she said. "The Alpha of Silver Ridge is welcome to come in, since I imagine he's the reason I'm awake."

Duncan ducked his head in.

"Orson let me over the bridge."

"Orson let you over the bridge for one hour a day, and it's past midnight."

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