Moonbound Vows

The Valenti warehouse smelled like diesel, river rot, and money.

I lay flat on the steel catwalk forty feet above the loading floor and let my wolf sort the scents for me. Gun oil. Cigarette smoke. Cheap cologne on the guard by the east door, expensive cologne on the accountant sweating through his shirt beside the forklift. Seven men below. Two more outside with the trucks. Nobody up here but me and the pigeons.

Getting in had taken forty minutes. A drainage culvert off the Chicago River, a rusted maintenance ladder, a skylight latch I'd loosened with a flathead and a prayer. My climbing gloves were soaked through, and the black tactical jacket I wore clung to my back with sweat and river water. None of it mattered. Discomfort was just information. My father taught me that too.

He had given me the numbers three nights ago, seated at the head of the long oak table in the Silverfang lodge while the rest of the pack pretended not to listen.

"Nine guards on a Thursday. Lorenzo Valenti inspects the shipment himself. He doesn't trust his father's people."

"Smart man," I'd said.

The Alpha of the Silverfang Pack did not smile. He rarely smiled at me. "Get the ledger. Kill the heir. Come home."

Three sentences. That was how my father gave orders, as though anything longer might suggest I was allowed to ask questions.

Nobody at that table had argued. Nobody ever did. My mother used to, according to the older wolves, back before she vanished when I was three years old and my father ordered her name struck from pack records. My brother Kael had argued once. He'd left Silverfang territory the same winter and never come home. After that, I learned to say yes, sir, and mean it.

Before I'd left the lodge, my father had pressed something small into my palm, the way he did before every mission. The black vial. I'd carried it since I was fifteen, sewn into a pocket over my heart.

"If they take you," he'd said, "you don't let them keep you."

I touched the pocket now through my jacket. Still there.

The moon hung fat beyond the grimy skylights, two nights from full, and my skin itched with it. I pushed the itch down. Twenty-two years of training had taught me to put my wolf in a box and sit on the lid.

The ledger was in the office at the end of the catwalk. I'd watched the accountant carry up, an hour ago, a black leather book, because the Valentis didn't trust anything important to computers. My father said Don Marco Valenti had built an empire on paper and blood, and the paper was the part that could hang him.

The office door wasn't locked. That bothered me more than a lock would have.

The ledger sat in the middle of the desk. I flipped it open with a gloved finger. Shipping dates. Payments. Names from the enemies list my father made us memorize as children.

Near the back, on a page yellowed with age, a payment from nineteen years ago had no name beside it at all.

Only a small crescent moon, drawn in faded blue ink.

Something cold slid down my spine. I tore the page free, tucked it inside my jacket, and slid the ledger into the flat pack strapped against my back.

Then I went to the window, where my rifle waited behind half-drawn blinds.

Downstairs, a door banged open.

"He's here."

Lorenzo Valenti walked into the warehouse like he owned the air in it.

I had studied a hundred photographs of him. Long-lens shots outside the family restaurant on Taylor Street. Blurry gala pictures. A mugshot from when he was nineteen that had mysteriously disappeared from the police database a week later. None of them had prepared me for the way he moved. Dark suit, no tie, sleeves shoved to his elbows. Black hair pushed back from a hard, handsome face. The men straightened when he passed. Not out of fear.

Out of something worse. Respect.

"Talk to me, Benny," he said, and his voice carried up to me low and rough.

The accountant talked. Enzo listened with his head tilted, eyes on the crates instead of the man, and I understood why my father wanted him dead before Marco retired. Marco Valenti was a butcher. His son was a strategist.

I settled the crosshairs over his heart.

Breathe in. Hold. Squeeze between heartbeats. The way my father taught me when I was nine and the target was a paper silhouette nailed to a pine tree.

My finger touched the trigger.

The ventilation system shuddered on, and warm air rolled up through the catwalk slats, carrying every scent in the building to me at once.

Diesel. Smoke. Sweat.

Him.

Cedar and rain and something darker underneath, like the air right before lightning strikes. It went through my lungs and straight into the box where I kept my wolf, and the lid didn't just open.

It shattered.

My wolf slammed against my ribs so hard I gasped. Heat poured through my veins. Gold bled into the edges of my vision. My hands shook on the rifle. My hands, which had not shaken since I was fourteen.

He's the target, I told her. He's Valenti. He's nothing.

She did not care what he was. She wanted to go to him.

The crosshairs drifted. I dragged them back. They drifted again. Sweat slid beneath the ledger pack. This was a trick. A drug in the vents. Valenti magic. It had to be.

Below me, Enzo Valenti went completely still.

He raised one hand. Benny stopped mid-word. Enzo lifted his head slowly, nostrils flaring, and I watched the man I'd been sent to kill breathe in the same air that had just broken me open.

His eyes changed from dark brown to burning amber.

I'd known the Valentis were wolves my entire life. Knowing it and watching it happen were two different things.

"Everybody out," he said quietly.

"Boss."

"Out."

They went. Doors slammed. Engines turned over in the lot. The warehouse emptied until there was only the hum of the vents, the thunder of my heartbeat, and Lorenzo Valenti standing alone in the center of the floor with his back to my rifle.

As if I weren't a threat.

Or as if he wanted me to try.

All I had to do was squeeze. One pull, and I could go home. One pull, and my father might finally look at me the way he looked at the pack's best trackers. Like I was worth something.

My wolf howled so loudly inside my skull that I nearly dropped the gun.

Enzo turned, not fast, not like a man who feared a bullet, and looked straight at the dark office window. Straight at me.

His mouth curved.

"Come out, little wolf."