And such a simple hit—a bullet in the brain in parking lot. Easy to film.
Somehow, the girl and Kiro made my guys and slipped out the back.
Lazy. Sloppy.
I get the second in command, a man named Dirk, on the phone. I tell him I want him and his men to come up with three strategies for locating the pair of them again. I have more guys on their way up. He needs to handle the manhunt. I don’t threaten to kill him if he doesn’t succeed. But he gets that I will kill him if he doesn’t give 110 percent.
Kiro needs to die. Hell, he needed to die before he knocked me out and dislocated my shoulder. Things aren’t looking great.
Until seven hours later.
That’s when I get the call from some editor from out east telling me he has a way to get the location of Kiro and the girl, who turns out to be a reporter—in exchange for a generous finder’s fee and a favor. He wants to embed his own reporter. He actually uses the word “embed.” Like this is a troop situation.
“How’d you get my number?”
“I have sources everywhere,” he says. “A journalist never reveals his sources. It goes for you, too. You want my info or not?”
“You know where they are right now?” I ask him.
“I know where they were two hours ago. And as soon as my freelancer puts her battery back into her phone, I’ll have her location.”
“They’re heading into a wilderness area the size of a small state. You think you can run GPS off her phone?”
“No, I’ve got a tracker on her. Runs behind the scenes off the lithium battery,” he says. “The phone doesn’t need to connect to a tower to give me her location. She just needs to assemble the thing to take a picture. It’s only a matter of time.”
“And I want a reporter telling the world what my people do…why?”
“My guy, Garrick, is interested in getting a few pictures of Savage Adonis in his home and, if possible, to have a word or two with him. After that, Garrick walks away. A quick interview, a few images of Kiro in his natural habitat. Keeping you strictly out of it.”
“I don’t understand—this freelancer that’s with him now is yours, didn’t you say?”
“She’s…off-roading. Not really doing the story anymore.”
“Huh.” I’m thinking maybe this guy could use a few sessions with Valerie on leadership.
“I’m assuming you have people up there. Probably a helicopter at your disposal, but it’s a lot of tundra. We could deliver the coordinates.”
It’s strange but creative. I don’t have to think about it long. One of the top things that distinguishes a successful leader is quick decision making, according to Valerie. That’s one of the few things I don’t have trouble with. I need that location.
“Put your guy on a plane to Duluth. If he’s cool, we’re cool.”
I put down the phone. When one door closes, another opens.
We’ll gun down Savage Adonis. See whether we can deal with this embedded reporter. My guys have a sense of people. They’ll suss out whether we can play ball with this Garrick. If we can’t, we’ll kill him, too.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kiro
I suck in the night air, palms flat against the cool dirt, feeling the wilderness come alive around me.
I should be happy, but everything hurts.
My shoulder wound throbs. My muscles ache. Ann said that might happen—that it’s the drugs working through my system.
But none of that compares to the pain of Ann betraying me over and over. Just a reporter, out for my story.
I heard the phone sounds—more pictures? I squeeze my eyes shut, remembering how it felt to be trapped outside that hospital with those reporters taking their photos, hounding me while I could barely stand. Shouting their questions, reminding me that I’m different. Wrong.
I’m a story and a savage to Ann, too.
The knife of it twists in my heart because for a moment there, back when we worked to move the branches, I felt like we were really together.
Well, I’m nearly home now. My pack is out there somewhere. That’s my family.
I breathe in the scent of the soil. Wet leaves under dry. A nearby stream. This area was on the edge of where I used to roam. I recognize the types of trees. The air. The look of the rocks.
This wilderness area has lots of official entrances across northern Minnesota and Canada. This is not one of those official entrances. We probably won’t see any people from here on in.
I brush the dirt from my hands and wipe my eyes on my sleeve. I don’t want her to see my tears.
More phone sounds. Pain rages through me.
She wants to learn about the savage. Well, she’ll have her savage.
People love to hold their phones, love to look at them when they’re upset. I hate the phones, and I hate Ann’s most of all. I would love to take her phone and smash it, but I won’t.
Yet.
I’ll wait until we’re deep in. I need her to go with me voluntarily.
It’s one hundred fifty miles back to where my pack is. I can make thirty miles a day by canoe and foot. Carrying her, while she struggles? More like fifteen miles a day.
I try not to think about her struggling. I don’t want her distressed and I don’t want her to struggle, but even if she struggles, I’ll take her with me.
I have to take her with me. I get this crushing feeling in my chest when I imagine letting her go.
She climbs down from the truck. She smiles, and my heart swells in spite of everything.
She helped me. She really did seem to care for a while.
She looks up at the dawn sky above the tiptops of the pines. I follow the line of her gaze, wanting her to see the beauty here. Her gaze lowers, then.
“You’re not going to…”
She eyes a downed tree, then turns to me with a kind of wonder. She thinks I’ll move it. I suppress a smile. Even I have limits.
“No,” I say simply. “We’re here. Near.”
She looks happy.
My heart swells to see her happy. “We’ll leave the truck here,” I say.
She watches me a little bit longer, and I think she’s going to sneak a photo like she does, but instead she goes over to the downed tree and begins to crawl up. I hop up and pull her up and steady her. We stand there together, face to face. She looks into my eyes, and I wonder what she’s looking for, what she hopes to see.
I slide my fingers over her curls. She shudders a little. I think it’s me, then I realize it’s the cold. Early fall. There’s a chill in the air. I pull off my jacket and put it around her, over her smaller coat.
She resists. “Kiro, just a shirt can’t keep you warm. You need this, come on.” She begins to pull it off, but I still her arms.
“You’ll wear it.”
“You can’t just make me wear it.”
“Can’t I?”
Her pulse jumps—I see it in her throat. How well does she understand the situation she’s in?
“You’ll freeze.”
“I won’t freeze. You just have no tolerance for temperature variation.”
Yet.
She pulls the jacket around her, as if it’s so strange, as if she’s unused to…this. Has no male ever cared for her? I find it shocking, but at the same time, the idea of any other male warming her or feeding her or fucking her makes me feel crazy.
“So it’s near here?”
I jump down. Not only is it one hundred fifty miles away, but deep into Canada. I know only because the professor would show me maps on his computer, trying to get me to show him where I had lived. The summer and winter ranges. He figured out a good amount about me and the wolves. “The walk will warm you,” I say simply.
We pull the packs out of the back. Pull the canoe off the top. Ann puts plastic over the broken window—so the seats don’t get moldy.
I nod like I think it matters.
She brought a lot of energy bars and dried food. She’ll soon see she has no nee
d of them. I’ll provide everything she needs. She’s also brought the wolf keychain. I won’t need that, either. I’ll have the real thing.
“There’s a river this way,” I say. “Maybe an hour’s walk from here.”
“You really know this place.”
We begin to trudge. I carry the canoe on my head. The canoe slows us, but not as much as she does. She asks me questions now and then, points out birds. “Stop!” she says after a while.
I halt, thinking there’s something wrong. She points out a doe on the ridge above us.
Has she never seen a deer? I put down the canoe, and we watch it together.
“It’s magical,” she says.
She won’t like it when I kill one. I decide I’ll kill things away from her and bring her the parts, not let her see the whole animal. “Have you never been in the wild?”
“Not like this. The trailer park where we lived, it was more suburban, I guess. And when I worked in war zones, well, the animals were usually mostly gone by then. This is real wilderness. Deep, wild wilderness.”
I nod, amused she thinks this is deep or wild.
It takes us two hours to reach the river. It’s midday by the time we set the canoe in the water. I take the paddle. She wants to help, but I tell her it’s faster for me to do it alone.
She gets in, sits sideways, and we set off. I paddle upstream—north. The water is low, but not so low that we can’t take the best way. She watches the trees go by. Now and then, Canadian geese fly overhead, honking, heading south for the winter. The opposite direction from us.
She shivers. Is it the geese flying south? Do they make her think of winter?
“You sure you don’t want my help? There’s another paddle. I mean, I’m here to help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
She furrows her brow. The forest around us grows darker, deeper. “So you have this kind of handled? You don’t really need me?”
“Not at the moment.”
“But you might later? To help carry the things?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Oh. I kind of thought you needed help.”
Maybe she imagined it was all about the supplies. She was helping me bring back supplies. And I would walk her back to the vehicle. Like a date, like on the television at the Fancher Institute.
“Can a wolf pack ever move?”
“The pack moves all the time. Different places for different seasons.”
“Oh. So there’s not just one place…one cave?”
“Wolves are hunters. Hunters always move around.”
“Would the pack ever relocate entirely, like to a whole different wilderness area? Like if there was a better place to live?”
“There is no better place to live.”
“That may have been true before, but you understand, you’re living on federal land, which is illegal.”
“It’s never been a problem.”
“You’ve never had the mob and U.S. law enforcement after you before. A manhunt. They didn’t know you were living up here before,” she continues, looking all around, “but now they do. The police will track you here because they know this is where you’re from.”
“They won’t be able to track me.”
“It’s not like you’re on the moon, Kiro. They’ll get the forest rangers involved. And then there’s the Albanian mob…”
“This is a big place,” I say. “My place.”
“But you don’t own it,” she says. “It’s a park. What if there was a place you owned? What if you had land of your own where nobody could touch you? Even campers couldn’t go there without your okay. All yours—your home. Miles of land.”
“That’s what I have now. I own this in every way that matters. It’s not a park; it’s a world.”
She watches the clouds. “Seriously, don’t you want to know why they’re hunting you?”
This again. “I know why they’re hunting me.”
“Uh. Wrong. You so don’t know.”
I love when she’s so confident and capable. She’s wrong, of course, but I love it, and it makes me want to kiss her.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say. We round a bend. The waterway opens up into a large lake walled in by trees and massive rock formations.
“Omigod,” she whispers.
“What?”
“What? Um, hello! The whole thing! It’s beautiful.”
My heart swells with pride.
“Look how the lake is a perfect mirror for the trees. All the yellows and oranges. The mist rising up at the end. It’s like a magical glen or something.”
She spots an eagle. A moose up on the ridge.
“How long?” she asks an hour later, when we’re going up one of the smaller rivers.
“We won’t get there today,” I say simply. “We’ll stop for the night.”
She goes still, eyes the color of moss in the waning light. The unfocused look tells me she’s thinking complicated thoughts.
She bites the side of her lower lip. She knows why she wants to come along with me—to get my story. Is she’s finally wondering why I want her along?
“You see the black rocks around the water’s edge? Those are slippery as ice.”
She brightens. “Is that personal experience talking?”
“Yes. I learned very much the hard way.” I tell her about slipping into the icy water as a kid. How long it took me to put even the simplest things together. The details of my story seem to calm her.
The details for the article she imagines she’ll be able to write about me. The dirty savage.
“Weren’t you hungry?”
“The loneliness was worse than the hunger.”
“It must have been so hard.”
She has no idea. How the loneliness wore at me.
I’ve only ever wanted companionship. Affection. The affection of the wolves meant everything—even the slightest scrap of it.
Ann’s affection in the institute was even more powerful to me than the affection of the wolves. The realization shakes me. Her affection meant more.
And now I’m bringing her home.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Aleksio
We set up at the Sky Slope Hotel, just outside of Duluth. My luxury suite becomes a command center, and my guys and I are generals, plotting our incursion into the giant wilderness area northwest of here. We’re assembling guides, getting ears on local law enforcement, developing teams, hiring copters.
My brother Viktor’s working on getting ears inside Bloody Lazarus’s organization. Lazarus has some kind of intel that’s keeping him a step ahead of us.
My girlfriend Mira comes in. She has her lawyer outfit on—the suit, the skirt. She looks so fuckable, I want to die.
“Baby,” I say.
She shoves Viktor’s feet off the coffee table. He grins at her.
She slams down the paper. Kiro’s commitment order. Vacated. “Your brother is never going back to that place,” she says. “Ever.”
An unfortunate choice of words. I’d love him to go back there. I’d love him to be anywhere I could find him, rather than out in the vast wilderness, unaware of the danger he’s in.
“They’re already moving against the committing officer,” she says. “I think the director’s dirty, too. Dr. Fancher.”
“Good work,” I say. She’s amazing. She just started her own solo practice down in Chicago and already she’s kicking ass.
“You’re going to find him.” She eyes the camping shit all over the floor and then Viktor. “That’s what you’re going to wear out there? A wise-guy suit and necktie? Shiny shoes? You know it’s wilderness, right?”
“He’s not going,” I say. “He’s still recovering.”
“What’s your excuse?” she asks Yuri.
“This is what I fight best in,” Yuri says.
I snort. The Russians love their suits.
She picks up a Tavor with holographic sights, the latest in semi
automatic weaponry. “You’re bringing this to the wilderness? It weighs a ton. You think you’ll hike with this?”
“When you need one, you need one,” I say.
She puts it down. She hates guns. Once we get Kiro back, things are going to change.
“Everyone in the world is chasing your brother. How will he know you’re the good guys? His brothers?”
“Our bratik will know us by the path of blood we paint on our way to rescue him,” Viktor says.
I smile. I can’t wait to meet him.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kiro
We make good time, moving over land and water. At times we’re so hemmed in by the trees that you can’t see the dusky sky. Other times the vista opens so wide, you feel like you’re on top of the earth.
We cross a lake.
“You’re not breathing,” I say, slipping the paddle into the dark water, stroking us onward.
She sighs.
“You smell it? The leaves? The moss?”
“I smell…no smell.”
I frown.
“No, it’s a good thing,” she says. “A relief.”
“Because of the Fancher smell?”
“Yeah. For a while there I thought I’d never escape it. That antiseptic smell. I sometimes almost felt like it chased me. Like it went everywhere I did.” She gets a haunted expression, like she used to in the institution. “I hope I never smell it again. That smell, it’s just so…” She seems lost, suddenly.
Getting lost in my head was a way of surviving. I would lose myself in memories of running with the pack. Of lying on the forest floor. The trees. When she gets lost, it’s not good.
“Hey.” I grab the extra paddle and pat the space next to me. “Come here.”
She furrows her brow.
“Come here.”
“You want me to help paddle now?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought I would just slow you down.”
“Now I want you to help.”
She accepts my hand and sits next to me, takes up the paddle. We paddle side by side. The breeze shakes the treetops. A loon’s cry pierces the quiet.
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