Thomas followed, willing his feet in his Beta's tracks while his senses honed in on Harrison.

The scout had a thin face, thin nose, and a moustache he gelled into mismatched curls. The scent came from his jacket; it was tweed, which held onto scent particularly well. It meant he'd been in the holding cell with the smell for a while.

The scent of pine and smoke burrowed under his skin, but with none of the crashing waterfalls and spruce Ridged Fang was known for. It felt like those childhood games, when his nanny would trace a letter on his back for him to guess; the movements familiar, almost cohesive, but the memory fading too fast to name.

"Keep up, Thomas," came Beta's sharp reprimand.

Thomas jogged back to her heels. He vaguely heard Anastasia say something to Harrison and lead him in the other direction. But it sounded far away, underwater.

He trailed Beta a step closer than protocol allowed. "They've come for me?" the question sounded choked.

Beta glanced over her shoulder in reprimand and Thomas retreated the proper two steps of distance.

Not that she looked angry; in fact, Beta rarely looked like she felt anything at all. Smooth-cut eyes with short lashes; black-glass hair clipped an inch below her chin. The only emotional tell was a slight pinch in her round lips. Impatience, probably. She hated when he jumped ahead of her reports with fury and questions.

Without a missed beat in her boots, she turned back to the elevator and began, as she always did, from the crisis' chronological beginning. "Four days ago, a letter was delivered to the breeding office. Inside was a note and a key."

Thomas nodded, but his attention was still unravelling the scent Harrison had trailed down the hall.

It was person, not a Pack perhaps. Someone he hadn't thought of in a long, long time.

"Stay with me, Thomas," Beta ordered, her tone flat enough to be a wrap on his knuckles.

Thomas shook his head and breathed in Beta's scent to set the other aside. "I'm attending."

"Good." Beta pressed the elevator button and stretched out her neck. "By the time breeding office set aside their pride for my assistance, she'd been locked in a flat on the Luna's side of the river for three days. Sick, near starved, practically delirious."

Her voice was crisp in its corners. Charles said Beta had a personal vendetta against the breeding office; she never worked a case alongside them unless she was the last recourse.

"I recognised the mountain smell of her and escalated the situation to one of Pack security." She titled her head in the barest shows of anger. "Before I could so much as ask her name, she demanded a breeding consult."

"Oh." The anger wasn't at the breeding office then.

There were laws in place for a potential's privacy; no wolf would see her now without the breeding office's direct supervision. Sidelining Beta and her wolves for good.

"Hm," Beta said.

They watched the red arrow over the elevators door slowly count down the floors.

Thomas' logic replayed her words. "She's a potential." He rocked on his heels. "In a holding cell?" That went against every wolf instinct there was.

"As clever as she was in thwarting me, she's been doubly so with the breeding office." Beta cocked her head back to Thomas' interrogation room. "Answers all questions with claims of a blood oath we can't prove."

"Yes, but a holding cell?"

"The breeding office likes to be the only ones with information to manipulate." Beta turned to study him, the line of her hair brushing her throat to take in his full height. "But this potential refuses a medical exam until they sign her a breeding contract." Why did she watch his face like she expected an answer beneath his indignation?

Thomas scratched the back of his ear. "She's infertile?" he guessed. The mountains would kick her out for that.

"Hm," Beta said, which might have been a laugh. "No. She is pregnant, Thomas."

Sometimes Thomas' brain scratched like a record; all senses narrowing to those three words and expanding into brawler fury like blown glass.

"Pregnant?" Thomas said, and word bounced back to him off the elevator wall. He followed Beta inside, the metal contraption jostling with his weight. "Half-starved, pregnant, with breeding potential—and in a holding cell?"

Beta pressed the button for -7; the holding cells. "They can't have her run or the pup will die, they say."

Thomas had been in a holding cell once, when he first came from the mountains. They were soulless, grey spaces with threadbare cots where they administered bane for interrogations.

Beta checked her watch. "And while they play nursemaid warden, the mountain threat remains unnamed."

The grey holding cell and Beta's words opened a sink hole of old memories.

The recruitment interrogator's left the door open, so Thomas hears every word. "He's a beast, Alpha. And unknown threat. The mountain brawlers are another breed entirely."

Alpha Lewis of White Pine taps the glass window rimming the holding cell.

Thomas looks up, only to find his own reflection in the one way window.

Hair sheared, beard pulled out, swelling in his jaw, and the bulge in his shoulder where a bone misset. The bane blurs his vision until his reflection is a smear of black and blue.

"Even beasts have their uses," Alpha says. "Give him to Ivan."

"Why do you smell of Francine?" Beta's sharp tone cut the memory free.

The textured steel of the closing doors reflected the black smudge of Beta's dress; the silver-white tower of Thomas' shirt and waistcoat, twice her size.

The lift creaked its descent and Thomas averted his gaze. "She wanted to gauge my interest in a new case." Probably this one, now that he thought about it.

Beta looked up. "Did you sign anything?"

"What sort of wolf do you think I am?"

Beta ran her eyes over his crooked necktie and too small boots. "A lonely one, Thomas." She withdrew her watch and traced its groove with her nail. "Should I even ask about the lemons?"

Thomas wasn't about to out Gunther. She'd smell it as soon as the chemical perfumes settled, so he tried to take a discreet step to the other side of the lift and returned to the case at hand. "Surely a potential doesn't present as much of a threat as this. Mountains or not."

"So the breeding office tells me. But when I first found her, she smelled of desperation and two Packs. One of which I recognised."

Hell.

"And while I'm legislatively sidelined, our enforcer has jurisdiction to react to any threat he perceives regardless of mating status."

The lift jostled to a halt and the doors hissed open. The hall was empty, but awash in the scent of recent crowds; medics with their septic smell, breeding officers with their perfume, and fear behind bars—there, that tether of scent that slipped down his throat like a loose mooring.

Ridged Fang. No spruce, no falls–but definitely Ridged Fang.

Beta set her hand to his arm; she only touched him when she thought he was lost to that memory-place. "Thomas?"

Thomas blinked at her, aware his arm was shaking. "I'm fine," he said. It had been so many years.

"I know this last job was hard."

Thomas turned his back on the holding cells, a hand through his hair. "I'm fine."

"Anastasia cleared you for duty." The lift's impatient doors tried to close, but Beta stepped in their way. "Look at me, soldier."

Thomas obeyed.

"That letter with the key? It was addressed to you." She watched him too closely to hide his shudder. "Thomas, I'll ask only once. Is there anything you need to tell me?"

And there it was, the bite of mistrust in her tone of anxiety.

The muscles in his back tightened the seams of his shirt. "Beta, I—" The scent tangled in his mouth when he tried to speak.

He swallowed, and it settled in his lungs, unwinding in his mouth, melting like candy on his tongue. Pine and musk with a touch of honey-sweetness she'd been teased for when they were little.

Impossible.

There were foreign scents too, ones that flicked by too fast for him to name. Mountain smoke, lake water, darkness that lived beneath the skin. And below the pine-honey was... sweat, pain—fear.

That smell he knew better than anyone.

Before Beta could tell him the way, Thomas found himself at the one-way window of holding cell number 4. And there, standing before the cement table in that grey skeleton of a room, she was.

Skin a warm brown like summer sap. Plain green dress hanging from a too-thin form. Black hair cropped to her scalp—a mountain sign of mourning. Mourning what? And a tightness in her shoulders; a hunch like she feared a blow.

Sensing a threat, Thomas' focus expanded to the rest of the room, only to find it full of the crowd he'd scented earlier.

There was a medic with an intern discussing something on a clipboard. Three breeding officers, two of whom were wolves with grins. The weasel-scout Harrison's superior was there too, crowded with the rest of the mountain-greedy surveillance team. One rapped the table to emphasise his stream of questions.

She tried to answer them, but these walls were thicker than the interrogation rooms. Or perhaps she was saying nothing at all, because the scout threw up his hands and she flinched.

Shoulders tucked to ears like she feared a blow, she looked nothing like the girl he'd known. Spine too stooped, breath too fast, nerves too tight.

The scout said something caustic and turned to the breeding office; they motioned to the medics and the medics honed in. She stumbled back into the table. Stumbled.

Rage boiled so fast, Thomas lost sight of the room.

Before he knew what he was about, the doorknob crumpled in Thomas' grip and he shoved open the door. It slammed against the wall and startled the wolves to snarling, the human officers to squealing. Thomas only had eyes for one. "Suzette?" he asked, the name as foreign on his tongue as her flinch.

Then like a sudden plunge into ice water, the rest of his dream washed over him, so clear he was certain it was not a dream at all.

I shiver. The village is too far. I feel sick, but can't be sick. I feel hungry, but drowned the rest of my provisions in the ice. I want to cry, but they'll scent that too.

Oh, God.

I stand there alone and shivering, eye to the moon as it wanes. I'm not even willing to touch a tree for support as I sway with the nausea, the hunger, the fear.

I need help. Good God, I need help.

Suzette took one look at him, hid her face in her hands, and burst into tears.