Chapter 17
Tate’s POV
Marlon did not like me.He was professional about it. He never said anything discourteous, never gave me a reason I could point to.
But I had spent enough years reading rooms and people to know the difference between a man who was neutral and a man who had decided something about you and was keeping it to himself.
Jonathan agreed when I mentioned it, which meant it wasn’t my imagination.
It didn’t matter, what mattered was that when he called me into the small meeting room at half past ten, his expression was the careful neutral of someone delivering news they had decided to deliver and he said, “Dr. Carter has agreed to include your mother in the trial.”
I sat with that for a moment.
“The conditions,” he said, sliding a document across the table, “are non-negotiable.”
I looked at the contract, it was thorough – more thorough than I had expected. Non-disclosure across all parties. No interference with protocol. No withdrawal without written medical justification reviewed by an independent physician. Participation terms are binding regardless of the participant’s rank or title outside the institute. And one clause, neatly worded in the middle of page two: The Principal Investigator will attend sessions only when clinically required. All participant communications will be managed through the designated research liaison.
“She won’t be in the room,” I said.
“Not unless the protocol requires it,” Marlon said. “Dr. Carter’s direct involvement is reserved for cases where her clinical judgment is specifically needed. Everything else runs through me and the team.”
I looked at the clause again. Somewhere at the back of my mind, Storm stirred with the slow attention he gave to things he found interesting.
“Fine,” I said. “We sign.”
I called my mother from the corridor outside. She picked up on the third ring.
“They’ve accepted you,” I said. “The trial. You’re in.”
“Mother.”
“I heard you,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
“There’s nothing to think about. You’ve been deteriorating for years, the conventional treatments aren’t working. This is the only methodology that addresses bond severance trauma at a neurological level – the only one in existence.”
“Who else is participating,” she said.
I had anticipated this. Tracy had spent years operating within pack hierarchies. Status was her first language. Professor Parkville,” I said. “The project’s founding researcher. And Diana Ashford, former Luna of North Maple Pack.”
A pause. “Luna Ashford.”
“Yes.”
1/3
+25 Bonus
Another silence, shorter this time. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll come.”
I hung up and stood in the corridor for a moment. Jonathan appeared at my shoulder with the expression he wore when he was waiting for instructions.
“She’s agreed,” I said. “They’ll arrive tomorrow for the contract signing. Make sure the arrangements are handled.
“1
“Sophia has asked to accompany Luna Tracy,” Jonathan said carefully.
I had also anticipated this. “Fine but keep her out of the way.”
He nodded and moved off. I went back to my temporary office and sat down at the desk and spent the next three hours working through the pack business that had been accumulating since I left South River.
There was always more of it than I expected. Boundary reports, resource allocation disputes, three separate requests from council members who wanted my attention on things that could wait and knew it but asked anyway. And at the bottom of the stack, a birthday invitation. Lily and Jonathan’s son was turning four next month. A small party, it said, family only.
I set it aside and looked out the window at the institute grounds.
I kept thinking about the children in the library. The girl’s hazel eyes. The boy’s dark hair and the way he had planted his feet and looked at me like he was running a risk assessment he had every intention of completing.
He had reminded me of myself, which was a strange thing to think about. Not the coldness – I had been cold from early childhood, trained into it. But the stance, the refusal to move. The absolute certainty that standing between someone he loved and a potential threat was simply what you did, without calculation, without hesitation. Caesar had tried to train that instinct out of me. He had called it weakness. Sentiment, he said, was what made wolves vulnerable.
I wondered what it would have been like to be raised by someone who let you keep it but I pushed the thought
away.
Also the way that little girl with hazel eyes held back her tears reminded me a lot of Nicole. For some reason, she came to mind.
My memories of Nicole have been getting unclear lately. That bothered me in a way I didn’t examine too closely.
She had lived in my house for years and I could no longer reliably recall her face. When I tried to picture her I got impressions, fragments – small frames, quiet movements, the particular way she used to go still when I spoke to her. But nothing is clear.
After she died – after the funeral, after Tracy and Sophia had tried to clear her room but I had stopped them both. After that outburst, the servants had returned Nicole’s belongings to their original places. Later, no one dared to go near her bedroom. Occasionally, I would walk to her bedroom door but never dared to enter. I should have a clear conscience, but I didn’t know what I was afraid of. To crown it all, every one tacitly agreed never to mention her, as if she had never existed.
There wasn’t a single photograph. Not one. I had looked, afterward, and found nothing. As if she had passed through years of life in that house and left no mark except the small grave at the edge of the pack grounds that no one visited.
I had visited it once. Lately, alone. I hadn’t known what to say so I had said nothing. I had stood there for a long
2/3
+25 Bonus
time in the dark and felt something I still didn’t have an accurate name for.
Storm pressed forward in my mind, heavy and deliberate.
I know, I told him. I know.
He didn’t answer in words. He never did about this.
I closed the last of the files and stood up. Tomorrow the trial will begin. My mother would be here. The contract would be signed and the work would start and I would focus on that and not on library children with hazel eyes, or on green dresses, or on small graves in the dark.
Jonathan knocked and opened the door. “Dinner,” he said.
“Coming,” I said, and followed him out.
BIG SALE: 3500 bonus free fou you
Comments
Support
Share
get it
X
+25 Bonus
