Chapter 3 The Woman Who Should Be Dead

The Cafe Adler sat between a shoe repair shop and a bookstore that had been closing down for as long as I could remember, and at noon it was half full of people who had nowhere better to be. I took the table by the window with my back to the wall, ordered a coffee I did not drink, and watched the door for twenty minutes.

She came in at twelve exactly, shaking the rain off her coat. Ash blonde bob, hazel eyes, a gray scarf wound twice around her neck, and the crescent pendant lying just under the wool. She ordered tea at the counter and sat down across from me without asking permission.

"You came alone," she said.

"You told me to come alone or bring my Beta. I do not have a Beta anymore."

"Mira would disagree."

I set my cup down. "How do you know Mira?"

"I know a great many things about you, Elias. It is what happens when a woman spends four years reading every file she can get her hands on." She wrapped both hands around her teacup and looked at me over the rim. "Ask your questions. I have an hour before I need to be somewhere."

The coffee had gone cold. I pushed it aside. "Start with the grave."

"I told you. A box of stones. The records clerk was an Omega named Lena, and she owed me because I once kept her name out of a report when the Council was looking for someone to blame for a forged registration. The doctor was a human, a coroner with a gambling problem, and he signed the certificate. I never saw the body. I did not need to. I needed the Council to stop watching my flat at two in the morning."

"Why fake it at all? If you had come to me, if you had told me what you were doing, I could have protected you."

She laughed, one short breath of it, and set the cup down hard enough that tea slopped into the saucer. "Protected me. You rejected me in front of your pack, Elias. You put your hand on my chest and you told me to leave. The next morning I woke up with a bond mark that would not stop bleeding and three of your wolves at my door asking whether I had put a curse on their Alpha." She wiped the spilled tea with her napkin, calm and precise. "So no. You could not have protected me. I protected myself."

I had no answer for that. The wolf had gone very still inside me, the way it did when it was ashamed.

"Tell me about the Severance," I said.

"It is a procedure." She said it the way you would explain a bus route. "The Council calls it a legal remedy. When a bonded pair is deemed a danger to the Concordat, the Council can petition to have the bond nullified, and a licensed physician performs the Severance. It takes about four hours. They put a chemical into the bond mark on your arm and another into the base of your skull, and the bond dies. The wolf goes quiet. Most of the time the wolf never comes back."

"Most of the time."

"I said most." Her fingers went to the pendant and turned it over once. "I was one of the ones who came back. Partly. It is not a clean thing, Elias. The bond does not die. It tears. And the wolf does not go quiet. It goes mad."

The radiator under the window clanked. Outside, a woman walked past with a pram and a bag of groceries, and the whole ordinary world kept moving while I sat there with my hands flat on the table.

"Who decides?" I asked. "Who sits on this petition?"

"The Council of Alphas. Or a committee of them, if the full Council is busy. There is a hearing. The bonded pair is brought in and asked whether they consent. If they refuse, the Council can rule that the bond is a danger and order the Severance anyway." She looked at me. "Your name came up in one of those hearings. Two years ago. A committee reviewed your case and decided the rejection had already done the work, and there was no need to Sever a bond that had been broken by choice."

"By choice," I said.

"That is what the record says."

I thought about the night I rejected her. I had been drinking at the pack house, which I almost never did, and by midnight the room had tilted and my wolf had started howling at nothing. I remembered her face, white in the doorway, and my own voice saying words I would never have said sober. I remembered the taste of something bitter under the beer, and I had always put that down to bad hops.

"I did not choose it," I said.

Anya went still. "What?"

"I did not choose it. I do not know what happened that night, but I did not choose it."

She looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind her eyes that she put away quickly. "That is a very convenient thing to say now."

"It is not convenient. It is what I remember."

"Then bring me proof." She leaned forward. "Bring me the bottle you drank from, bring me the bartender, bring me one witness who saw you that night and thought you were yourself. I have been chasing this for four years and I have heard a hundred wolves swear they did not choose their Severance. The Council has an answer for every one of them. What do you have?"

I had nothing. I had a memory of bitter beer and a mark that had ached every day since.

"You said the dead man was the third this month," I said.

"Yes." She pulled a folded page from her coat pocket and slid it across the table. It was a photocopy of a registration office ledger, three names in a neat clerk's hand, and next to each name a date and a small symbol like a pair of crossed pins. "Hartmann is the third. The first two died in their flats and the Bureau called them suicides. Both had the mark on the neck and both were listed as unbonded, and both had been bonded within the last two years according to records the Council says do not exist."

"Where did you get this?"

"From a woman who works in the registration office and is very afraid." She folded the page back into her pocket. "That is my network, Elias. Fourteen people. Two clerks, a coroner, a night guard at the Council archive, and nine Omegas who have survived what was done to them. We do not have guns or money or an army. We have paper and patience, and paper is what the Council fears most."

I finished my cold coffee to give my hands something to do. "Why come to me? You have spent four years avoiding me. Why walk up to a crime scene and say my name in front of Rolf?"

"Because the third name on that list is not on the copy I gave you." She took the page out again and turned it over, and on the back, in the same neat clerk's hand, was a fourth line, and I read it twice before the letters arranged themselves into a word.

Elias Voss. Bond status: severed. Procedure scheduled.

The date was three weeks from today.

"The Bureau will not protect you," Anya said quietly. "The Council will not protect you. The only person in this city who can keep you alive is sitting across from you and drinking tea, and I am not doing it for free." She stood and pulled on her coat. "I need a detective who can walk into the registration office with a Bureau badge and come out with the rest of that ledger. You need someone who knows which of your fellow wolves are already dead and lying about it. So decide quickly, because the Council does not reschedule."

She was at the door before I got my voice back. "Anya."

She stopped with her hand on the frame.

"If I help you, I want the truth about that night. All of it. Not the version you have rehearsed."

She looked back at me, and the rain beyond the glass was coming down hard enough to blur the street into one gray sheet. "Then come to the Bureau at four," she said, "and bring your badge. Rolf has already called me in for questioning. He thinks I am a reporter with a grudge." She pulled the door open and the cold came in. "Let us see how long we can both keep lying."