Chapter 2 Her Scent at the Crime Scene

For a moment the street went quiet in my ears, the traffic and the officers and the wet hiss of tires all dropping away, and there was only her voice and the mark on my arm burning like a coal.

Rolf stepped between us. "Ma'am, this is a closed scene. Who let you through the tape?"

She looked past him at me, and her mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "Nobody let me through. I walked. You should have a word with your two officers at the corner, they are more interested in their phones than in the crowd."

"I will ask you once more. Who are you?"

"Anya Weber. I write for the Mitte Report." She produced a press card from her coat pocket and held it up, and Rolf took it and turned it over twice. "I got a tip about a dead registration officer. My editor likes it when I confirm things before we print them."

Rolf handed the card back. "You can confirm things from behind the tape."

"I could," she said. "But then I would have to print that the Bureau let a Council official lie in the rain for an hour before anyone thought to cover him. That is not the story I came for. That is the story your press office will hate."

I had not moved. I could not have told you what my face was doing, but Rolf glanced at me and then back at her, and something in his grey eyes sharpened.

"You two know each other."

"He arrested my brother once," Anya said, before I could get my mouth working. "Four years ago. It did not go well for either of us."

It was a good lie. It came out smooth and bored, and it had just enough truth in it to hold up if anyone pulled the thread. I had arrested her brother once, for running a bond registration scam out of a back room in Wedding, and the memory of that night was one of the few things about my old life I could still look at without flinching.

"Elias." Rolf's voice had gone flat. "A word."

He took my elbow and walked me six steps away, which was not far enough for a wolf's hearing and he knew it. "I do not care what she is to you. This is a Council case. The last thing I need is a reporter with a grudge poking at it."

"She is not poking at anything. She is standing in the rain like the rest of them."

"She is standing in the rain and you have gone the color of a fish belly. Do you want to tell me why?"

The mark on my forearm had stopped burning and started to ache, a dull deep ache that spread up to my shoulder and down into my fingers. I put my hand in my coat pocket so he would not see me rub it. "I knew her brother. That is all."

"Fine. Keep her behind the tape and keep your face straight." He turned back toward the body. "We have an hour before the press office gets here and turns this into a circus. I want the registration office files before then. Go and get them."

He walked off toward the van. I stood in the rain with my hand in my pocket and my heart going too fast, and when I turned around Anya had already stepped past the tape and was crouched beside Hartmann's body with her head tilted, the way she used to tilt it over a chessboard.

"Get away from him," I said.

"I am looking at his hands." She did not get up. "His nails are clean. A man who fought for his life would have something under them. This one let whoever it was get close."

I crouched across from her. The rain had soaked her bob flat against her temples, and there was a small silver pendant at her throat, a crescent moon on a fine chain, and it caught the light from the Bureau van and threw it back at me. "You have thirty seconds to tell me why you are really here before I walk you to the tape myself."

"Thirty seconds." She looked up then, and her hazel eyes were steady and cold and nothing like the eyes I remembered. "Let me be clear. I am here because a man died with a Severance mark on his neck, and the Bureau will file it as a robbery and forget it by Friday. I am here because I have spent four years building something that can prove what the Council does to bonded wolves, and this is the first time one of their own has turned up dead with the evidence still on him."

The word sat between us in the rain. Severance. It was not a word you said out loud on a public street unless you wanted a Council car to follow you home.

"Where did you hear that word?"

"Where did you hear it?" she said. "You are the bond crimes detective. You tell me what that mark on his neck is, and I will tell you what I know, and then we can both go back to pretending we have never met."

"He was Severed," I said. "Recently. The skin has not had time to settle. The procedure leaves a mark like that, a pair of punctures where the chemical goes in, and the bond mark on his arm would be fading if he had one. But Hartmann was registered as unbonded for eleven years."

"Registered." She said the word like it tasted of something spoiled. "You still believe the registry."

I did not answer. The rain ran down the back of my neck and I watched a drop slide off her jaw and into her collar, and the ache in my arm was spreading into my chest now, and I could feel the wolf pushing at the inside of my skin, wanting to be closer to her, wanting to put its nose in her hair and breathe.

"Anya." I said her name quietly, and she flinched as if I had touched her. "I put you in the ground. I stood at the grave. What did I bury?"

She stood up and pulled her coat straight. "You buried a box of stones with my name on it. I had a friend in the records office who owed me a favor, and a doctor who owed me a bigger one, and an Alpha who thought the best way to protect a mate was to stop being near her." She looked down at me and her voice dropped. "I needed the Council to believe I was dead, Elias. It was the only way to keep working. If they knew I was alive, they would have come for me the way they came for every other bonded wolf who asked questions."

I got to my feet. Behind me a car door opened and shut, and Rolf called my name, and I heard the click of a camera from somewhere near the tape. "You let me believe it. For four years."

"I let you believe it because you rejected me." Her voice did not shake. "You put your hand on my chest and you told me to leave your pack, and then you walked away, and the last thing I saw was your back. Did you think I would send you a card at Christmas?"

A horn sounded on Kirchstrasse. Rolf called my name again, louder this time, and I heard the sharp edge in it that meant someone was about to ask a question I could not answer.

Anya stepped close, close enough that the pendant at her throat brushed my coat, and her scent went through me like a knife. "I will be at the Cafe Adler on Friedrichstrasse at noon. Come alone or bring your Beta, I do not care. But you should know this before you decide." She put her hand flat on my chest, exactly where she had put it four years ago, and the bond mark on my arm burned white hot. "The man on the ground is the third one this month. Whoever is doing this is working through the registration office, name by name, and your name is on the same list, Elias. It has been on it since the night you rejected me."