Chapter 3 The Alpha's Smile

Duncan sent word through Fiona that I was expected at the Alpha's table that evening. It was not a request. I spent the afternoon in the archive with the accounts he had given me and a second set I found in a filing cabinet that had not been locked, which told me how safe Duncan felt in his own house. The two sets did not agree. I wrote the differences in my own ledger, in pencil, in the small precise hand I had developed over ten years of writing things down where other people could not see them.

At seven I put on a clean shirt and the silver pin and went down.

The Alpha's table was at the head of the dining hall, on a raised platform under a window that looked out on the loch. The rain had stopped and the water was the colour of a knife. Duncan sat at the centre with his Beta on his right and an empty chair on his left. He gestured at it when I came in.

"Mr. Calum. Sit."

I sat. There were eleven of us at that table. The Beta, whose name was Robert and who said almost nothing all evening. Two warriors with the flat watchful faces of men chosen for their size. An older woman with iron-grey hair who turned out to be the pack's Gamma. A young woman with red hair introduced as a visiting cousin from a pack in the south, who watched me the way a cat watches a bird. And Isla, at the far end, in a dark green dress with her hair down, looking at her plate.

Duncan poured the wine himself, which Alphas do when they want you to notice that they are pouring it.

"You have been in my archive all afternoon," he said. "Did you find anything interesting?"

"I found that your pack keeps very good records."

"We are a careful people." He cut into his meat. "The Council sends an auditor every few years. The last one was a woman from the Borders. She stayed a fortnight and left with a clean report and a bottle of our whisky."

"That sounds like a good outcome for everyone."

"It was." He chewed and swallowed. "She understood that a pack is a family, and a family has private business. Things that look like one thing on paper look like another thing in a house. You will find that here, I expect."

"I expect I will."

"Good." He smiled. It was a fine smile, open and warm, the smile of a man who had been told all his life that he was good company. "Because I would hate for you to spend a month in my house and leave with the wrong idea about us."

The threat was in the pause after the word month, not in the words themselves. I drank my wine and said nothing.

The dinner went on. The warriors talked about a fence on the east boundary that needed mending. The Gamma defended a calf born with a twisted leg. Duncan told a story about a Council meeting twenty years ago in which a rival Alpha had made a fool of himself, and everyone laughed, and I laughed too, because that is what you do. Robert ate his dinner and watched me over his fork.

I studied the faces. A pack's faces tell you where the power actually sits, as opposed to where the seating plan puts it. The Gamma deferred to Duncan on everything except the calf, and he let her have it. The red-haired cousin watched Duncan more than she watched anyone else. The two warriors watched the doors. And Isla watched me.

She did not look away when I caught her. Her green eyes were steady and cold, and her mouth was set in a line I had seen before on the faces of people who had decided to hate me and were enjoying it. She was very good at it. I had kissed her less than twenty-four hours ago and she looked at me as if I were a stain on the tablecloth.

That was the performance. What I did not understand was why she was bothering. If she had already told her father what I was, there would be no need to pretend. Which meant Duncan did not know what she knew, which meant she was keeping a secret from her own Alpha.

I filed that away and reached for the salt.

"Mr. Calum," Duncan said. "Tell me something."

"Anything you like."

"You have been an auditor for a long time. You must have seen many packs. What makes a pack strong, in your professional opinion?"

It was a test, dressed as a question. The table went quiet. Isla's fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Strong leadership," I said. "A clear border. Enough food to get through the winter. And a reason for the young ones to stay."

Duncan nodded slowly. "A reason to stay. Yes. That is the thing, isn't it. A wolf who has no reason to stay is a wolf who leaves, and a wolf who leaves is a rogue, and a rogue is a problem for everyone." He set his knife down. "I have kept this pack together for thirty-one years. Every wolf at this table was born here or came here as a child. There has not been a rogue in my territory in a decade. Do you know how I managed that?"

"Tell me."

"I give them a reason to stay." He picked up his wine. "And when a wolf threatens that reason, I remove the threat."

The red-haired woman laughed, a small bright sound, and the Gamma said something about the calf again, and the moment passed. But Robert had not looked away from me, and Isla had put her fork down, and I understood that I was being told, politely and in front of witnesses, that I could leave with a clean report or I could leave in a way that would not be clean at all.

After the plates were cleared Duncan stood and the table stood with him. He came round to my chair and put a hand on my shoulder, and his grip was friendly and hard.

"Walk with me," he said.

We went out through the hall and onto the terrace above the loch. The night was cold and clear and the moon was three days off full, a fat white shape above the far hills. Duncan put his hands in his pockets and looked out at the water.

"I like you," he said. "I want you to know that. You are careful and you do not drink too much and you have not tried to bed any of my wolves. That is better than the last one."

"Thank you."

"The Council is a machine, Mr. Calum. It eats packs and calls it order. I have kept Blackmuir out of its teeth for thirty-one years, and I will not lose it now because a forestry company paid a fair price for some trees." He turned to look at me. His eyes were pale in the moonlight. "You have found a hole in my ledger. I know you have. I put it there myself, three years ago, when I moved the hydro money to cover the farm. That is the whole of it. That is my crime. A man who moves money from one column to another to keep his people fed."

"That is not what the ledger says."

"The ledger says what I wrote in it." He smiled his warm smile. "You should ask yourself who wrote the other one. The one you found in the cabinet."

I did not answer. We stood on the terrace in the cold and looked at the loch, and then Duncan went back inside.

When I went in, the hall was empty. I walked through to the corridor and Isla was standing at the foot of the stairs with her arms folded and her green eyes on mine.

"You were warned," she said.

"By you, or by your father?"

"Both of us, though he was politer about it." She stepped closer, and her voice dropped. "The ledger in the cabinet. The one you found this afternoon. Who told you it was there?"

"No one. The cabinet was unlocked."

"It is never unlocked." She looked at me, and her cold face slipped, and underneath it I saw something that looked like fear. "Someone wanted you to find that ledger, Mr. Calum. Someone in this house is using you, and I do not know yet whether it is to hurt my father or to help him."

She turned and went up the stairs, and I stood in the corridor with the cold of the terrace still in my bones, thinking about an unlocked cabinet and a hole in a ledger and a smile that had been warm right up until the moment it was not.