Chapter 14
Tate’s POV
Two days and no word from Marlon. I understood the process – screening trial participants required time, required careful assessment, required a principal investigator who apparently considered direct communication with outside parties a disruption to her work. I understood all of it.
I was still checking my phone with an irritating regularity that Storm found quietly amusing.
My mother’s last evaluation was not good. The physician had used words like progressive and irreversible, and Tracy had sat through the whole appointment with her hands folded and her face blank.
She had once been sharp, precise and difficult to catch off guard but that woman was becoming harder to find.
This research was not a long shot. It was the only shot I needed, and I needed Marlon to come back to me with a
Yes.
I came to the institute library to look up older case studies on bond severance research, the ones that predated the current project.
I found three useful texts and one dead end. I was standing in the medical history section with a book open in my hands when something bumped hard into my leg.
I looked down.
A little girl. Small, fair-haired, wearing a white dress with careful pigtails and holding a book nearly as large as her torso. She looked up at me with wide hazel eyes and the expression of someone who had just walked into something large and was deciding whether to cry about it.
She didn’t run, she just stood still looking at me.
I was aware, dimly, that I had been told my entire life that I had an unapproachable face. I attempted a smile. It was not my most natural expression and I was conscious of that, but I bent down to her level and kept my voice as unthreatening as I could manage. “Are you alright? Do you need help finding something?”
Her eyes filled up as I froze.
In all my years of navigating wolves considerably larger and more dangerous than this, I had not felt as completely at a loss as I did in this particular moment. “Hey,” I said, slightly desperately. “It’s alright. You’re not in trouble, I just – where are your parents?”
I reached out, meaning only to touch her shoulder gently, and then smack.
A hand connected with mine, sharp and decisive, and when I looked up there was a boy standing between me and the girl, feet planted, chin up, dark hair in every direction. He was exactly the same height as his sister and roughly the size of a well-fed housecat, and he was looking at me with fury.
“Don’t touch my sister,” he said. “Bad guy.”
I stared at him. Storm, at the back of my mind, found this extremely funny.
I wasn’t angry either. Something about the boy’s stance, feet planted, chin up, completely certain pulled at an old
memory.
I had stood like that once, in front of Lily, when we were small. She had been cornered by older boys near the pack training grounds and I had put myself between her and them without thinking about it, the same way this boy had
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moved, fast and without hesitation.
The boy turned to the girl immediately, his whole manner shifting, the fury dissolving into something gentle, checking her over with focused attention. “Rosy, are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“He didn’t hurt me,” the girl Rosy said quietly, with the composed intensity of a child who chose her words carefully. “He was trying to help.”
“We don’t know that,” the boy said.
“I was,” I said, still crouched, keeping my voice low. “I was asking where your parents are. That’s all.”
The boy
dark eyes, absolutely unconvinced looked me over with the evaluating suspicion of a much older person. “Mom says bad guys trick kids exactly like that.”
I almost smiled.”Fair point, does your mom also say that bad guys carry institute passes?” I held mine up, slowly, where he could see it. “I work here, I’m a guest of the institute.”
He studied the pass for a long moment, then he studied me. The calculation behind his eyes was uncomfortably familiar.
“The service desk,” he said finally. “You can take us to the service desk.”
“That’s exactly where I was going to suggest,” I said.
He took his sister’s hand and they walked slightly ahead of me, which I found I respected.
At the service desk I explained the situation to the staff quietly, made sure both children were comfortable, and stepped back. The girl – Rosy – watched me from behind her book with those hazel eyes that were still doing something I couldn’t name.
The boy sat with his arms folded, maintaining a dignified wariness that suggested he wasn’t fully ruling out the bad-guy hypothesis.
I didn’t leave immediately, I’m not sure why. I told myself it was to confirm the staff had the situation handled. They were remarkable children. The girl was quietly self-contained in a way that felt much older.
The boy’s protectiveness was total and completely natural, the kind that doesn’t come from thinking about it but from simply being that way. Whatever parents had raised them had done something right.
A few minutes later the desk staff made a quiet announcement over the library system. Two missing children had been found safe and were waiting at the service desk.
Shortly after that a middle aged woman came hurrying through the doors, out of breath, eyes scanning the room. She spotted the desk and rushed over. Rosy looked up and pointed in my direction. The woman turned to me with relief and started to speak.
But my beta appeared at my elbow. “Marlon is ready,” Jonathan said quietly. “He says it’s about the project.”
I looked at the children one last time the boy still watching me with those dark, evaluating eyes and turned toward the exit.
I was almost at the door when a woman passed me going the other direction, moving fast, her hair catching on my arm as she went by.
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