Her tears were fodder to his blind fury.

"Out," he said with the full weight and menace of his enforcer title.

The wolves moved immediately, throats bared as they scrambled to the door. The humans stood dumbstruck, horrified by a brawler in his full height looming and gnashing his teeth.

Thomas didn't care.

"I said, out!" he roared.

A hiccup of a sob came from Suzette as she tried to wipe her tears from her face. That was the girl he knew: weakness, smothered; tears, hidden. But the reek of terror was disproportionate to the departing wolves, something darker lurking beneath that set him on edge.

Thomas moved to her side, pushing the cement table out of the way. "Are you well?" he asked, reaching for her sleeve.

His fingers found the dark-green cotton and she flinched. So did he—she had nearly sweat through the thread-bare fabric and her bones were too prominent. She had always been slimmer than ideal for a mate–his mother's words–but bones shouldn't rush to the touch like that. And she was cold, so cold he could barely feel her body heat at this proximity.

She shrunk from him, too embarrassed to face him head on, too suspicious to give him her back.

There was a spare chair in the corner for when the interrogator wasn't brave enough to sit on the table's attached cement bench. It was metal and cold, but when he brought it to her, she sat.

Her sheared hair exaggerated the sharpness of her lines. In the mountains, the mourning signs were respected. Here, in the white electric light seven floors below the city streets, it made her look wild and lost. Barely at an inch, whoever had cut it had botched the job.

"I'm fine, I'm sorry," she managed, clearing her throat to unstick the words from her tears. "I'm fine."

"No. You're cold." Thomas crouched by her chair to look her in the eye.

Had no one thought to bring her a damned change of clothes? Why the hell wasn't he wearing a coat to offer?

"Are you hungry?" he asked. Not that he could solve that problem either. There were hollows under her eyes, a chalkiness to her beautiful bronze skin. "I'll call the medic back."

"No." As commandeering as ever, Suzette grabbed the fabric at his shoulder when he went to stand. Her sleeve rode up and her bare wrist brushed the scar at his throat.

Thomas stilled, as did she.

Her touch spread through him as slow as dawn, familiar and snug like the first sun of winter. The fissure of familiarity passed down his spine with something like pain. Good pain.

It was the bond of close pack kin. Even after seven years, Thomas wasn't White Pine enough to share it with anyone yet.

But Suzette... her scent sang to him in old colours that didn't match the hewn bone room around them. It was soft blues and lavenders, silk curtains blowing from the winds of their old Pack house.

She felt it too; her hand shifted so her wrist pressed against his neck, the cold of her pulse warming to his, and her tear-damp eyes fluttered closed.

They were back in open woods of full sun. Not blood-sticky shadows of his memory, but a mountain he'd forgotten entirely. Where spring green was a carpet under running feet. Where ice water fell fresh from falls to pound his back. When they were too young and happy and wild for the blood fires and wine.

Thomas had found Suzette crying once. It had been his brother's doing. Thomas had pushed her around for snivelling, then went after Jude to set things straight. Later that night, Suzette had stood behind the soup cauldrons and smiled at him as she passed him his bowl.

His brothers had watched them too closely—teased him too ruthlessly for Thomas to brave a smile back then. But now, in his memory, he did.

Suzette jerked away.

"You shouldn't be here." Her whisper was low and tangled; frightened. She pulled her sleeves over her skin.

Thomas touched his neck where her hand had been, corking that childhood feeling inside. Her eyes locked on that hand to his neck.

"I won't hurt you," Thomas said, as soft as a brawler could.

She kept her eyes lower than his, but off the floor and always almost on him; a strategic submission that refused to grovel. While her fear made him furious, her pride was nostalgic like that feeling in his chest. He stooped to see her more clearly, not caring it bared the line of his throat to her.

Prominent eyes he'd thought bug-ish as kids, now lost in lashes and caution. The slight bump in her nose and groomed arch in her brows. The beauty mark at the crest of her left cheekbone.

This childhood friend, now a woman, in a plain dress that gapped when she slouched. Her scent familiar, yet singed with the strangeness of time like sun spots in eyes used to sleep.

"It's been what?" Thomas cleared his throat. "Seven years?"

Her eyes flicked up to his, then hid behind those lashes again. "Almost eight," she said.

"And you were... seventeen when I left?"

She scoffed; this time her eyes held his a second longer. She even bared her teeth a little. "Try seven months shy of nineteen."

"Oh," he managed.

Nineteen was the age potentials became mates in the mountains. The strangeness of her scent became less strange by the second.

She smelt of a wolf he didn't know. A wolf with a reek to him so strong, Thomas had to roll out the tension in his neck before he could smell anything else.

And beneath that— Holy hell.

Thomas toppled back to the floor.

Suzette reached for him as he fell, but caught herself. "Thomas," she began, but all of his senses were attuned elsewhere.

A pup.

Beta had said it herself, but the words had been displaced in the shock of recognition.

Thomas ran a hand over his face, but the scent lingered; more than a scent. New and soft, near sacred. A pack thread as thin as the veins in a butterfly's wing, yet lacing Thomas with enough protective instincts to fell a mountain.

Saints above. She was pregnant.

"Oh, God," Thomas managed.

"Oh, God," Suzette echoed, a hand over her sheared hair. "You weren't meant to know."

"Not meant to—" Thomas gestured to the one-way mirror. "They know!"

It took a scout breed to scent a new pup for the first trimester— a good scout. Thomas hadn't known he'd remembered her scent well enough to place her child as pack without obvious scent markers.

He couldn't seem to look away from her. A mother. A pup, right there between them.

Suzette looked just as alarmed, suspicion and submission melting away to panic. "I was sure you wouldn't notice."

"Notice?" Thomas rubbed his chest. The pup's presence was a fishhook caught between his ribs. A baby heart tinier than a humming bird's, quickened as all pups did by that primal sense of a pack bond.

"Of course not!" She fisted her hands in the skirts over her belly. "It's been seven years!"

"Yes, but we..." Thomas waved his hands between them. When that didn't dislodge the words from inside, he pushed to his feet and paced to the other side of the room.

He stretched out his shoulders, the memories layered between them chaffing like callouses. Two deep breaths. Three. When he felt he looked less the monster, he turned.

She, too, had repieced her composure. Shoulders straight, hand folded in her skirts, eyes that askance sort of nowhere that aggravated him. Where in all seven levels of hell had she learned that?

She tilted her head to the side at his study. The collar of her dress with its scalloped lace was nearly to her chin; he watched it catch on her swallow. "I am sorry," she said, a hint of genuine grief hidden under the flatness of her tone. "My goal was not to burden you."

Despite his best efforts to use his words, a growl escaped him. Had she not felt that bond between them? They were kin, friends, Pack.

But his training nipped at the corners of his attention; some overridden instinct whispering danger.

Thomas dared a few steps back toward her chair. "Is the child a wolf?" he asked quietly, blocking her from the window to mute their conversation from whoever waited outside.

She bristled. "Of course."

"There is no 'of course' for potentials here in the city." Thomas tried to gentle his tone. "Why else refuse a medical exam? They could get you somewhere better than this." He gestured to the small room, cement table, and patched-up cot in the corner. The silver chains he remembered all too well on the floor. "You need to be somewhere better than this!"

She followed his motion and shrugged.

His memory of her was dusty. But the Suzette he'd known had been prouder than the devil, sharper than a whip, and meaner than winter. Never was she indifferent.

"Is this blood oath you're under the reason you won't let them help?"

"Ha." Her laugh was as empty as Beta's. "No."

"Is there even an oath?"

Her eyes flashed fury; mountain wolves never lied. "There is. But I keep my silence for more reasons than that."

"Name one."

Her upper lip lifted slightly, making the gap in her teeth near wolfish. "Is that scar on your throat truly from a criminal collar?"

Thomas fisted his hands to avoid rubbing his neck. "They'd never do that to you," Thomas said. "They treat potentials differently here."

"Potentials." She echoed with disdain. "No one has bothered to explain this word, yet it is thrown at me as a second name."

Thomas grimaced. "Humans with breeding potential." In the mountains, they were simply called mates.

Suzette laughed again, but this time the sound dislodged a tear. She smeared it away. "If they can be ruthless in their assessment of what I can offer, I can be ruthless in mine."

Thomas found his hand at the groove of the purple scar around his throat. "Have you a crime?" he said. She was clever enough; ruthless enough.

She stood with her shoulders set and her neck straight, but moved so the chair was between them. Her knuckles paled on the chair's back. "Set a breeding contract before me; then evaluate my potential."

She met his eyes, and Lewis' words from years ago echoed back. "Even beasts have their uses."

Thomas watched her until she looked away. The sweat dripping down her neck meant she hid something. He'd not thought of what would become of her; in his mind, she was still young and free in the woods. But leave it to his mother to see all loose ends tied up. In fact, that collar was all too high. High enough to cover a mark.

He advanced a step. "Where did she send you?"

Her hand flit to the lace at her throat. "Don't."

"I can help," Thomas promised, hunter quiet.

"No." She met his eye—the dead sort of scared that drowned out his reflection in their depths. "The more you pry, the more I think. And thinking—" She glanced at her shaking hand and buried it in her skirts. "Hell."

Thomas growled. "Which pack, Suzette?"

She bared his teeth at him in earnest, but he deserved to know that much. She held up a hand when he stepped forward. "Sun's Dagger." The name came from a deep-cut place inside her, engraved like a wooden cross at a hasty grave. "Three months after you left."

A deep mountain pack; so deep they didn't attend the blood moon gatherings with everyone else. Thomas knew little more than that.

Suzette licked her teeth like she could taste the spite in her tone and nodded at his silence. "You asked," she said, and raised her left fist between them. With a deep breath, she uncurled her fingers. Short nails, ashy dark skin. And a missing ring finger.

Thomas couldn't even curse to replace the wolfish sound wrung from his throat. He spun and paced to the end of the room, then back again, resisting the urge to grab her hand and inspect the missing joint himself.

"A blood pack," he snarled, surprised his mouth could still form human words.