The Kidnapper's Brother

Tarik's mouth was warm against the back of my neck, and his hand had found the hem of my shirt before I had even locked the dispatch office door behind us.

"You are late," I said.

"I am exactly on time. You are early." He turned me around by the shoulder. The desk lamp caught the auburn in his hair and the pale blue of his eyes. "You look like you have not slept in three days."

"Two. I counted."

He laughed and pulled me close. The ferry horn sounded below us on the water, and the window rattled in its frame. The terminal was empty at this hour. Ozan had gone home at ten, and the only light left was the desk lamp and the strip above the registry board, and the pale glow of the screen where the hotline waited.

Tarik kissed me before I could say anything else. He was careful at first, the way he always was, as if he expected me to step back. I did not step back. I got a hand into his hair and pulled him down to me, and the careful part of him ended there.

We had been doing this for five years. Five years of midnight ferries and stolen hours, of meeting on the European side where nobody from my pack would smell him on me, of washing my hands twice before I went back to the terminal. Five years of a bond I had never declared to a single living wolf. When his fingers found the waistband of my trousers, I stopped thinking about the registry, about Cem, about the law I had sworn to follow.

He pressed me against the desk. Papers slid under my back and scattered on the floor. His mouth moved down my throat, slow and deliberate. I got my hands under his shirt and felt the heat of his skin. The office smelled of him, of rain and pine and something beneath it that no human nose would ever name, and my wolf woke up in my chest and turned toward it the way a plant turns toward a window.

"Emre," he said against my skin.

"Don't talk."

"I have to talk. I came here to tell you something."

"Tell me after."

He laughed again, and then he stopped talking. His hands were on my hips, the desk creaked, and the strip light above the registry board flickered once and steadied. I closed my eyes and let the world outside that little room go quiet.

Afterward we lay on the floor together with my coat under us both, and Tarik traced the line of my collarbone with one finger. My hair had come loose from its tie and fallen into my eyes, and he pushed it back.

"You look like a man who has been holding his breath for a month," he said.

"Maybe I have." I turned my head to look at him. "What did you come to tell me?"

He was quiet long enough that I heard the water slapping against the pilings under the terminal. "Deniz is back on this side," he said. "He crossed two nights ago. I thought you should know."

My wolf went still. Deniz. Tarik's brother, a name he said as rarely as he could manage. "Back where?"

"I don't know. He does not tell me where he sleeps." Tarik sat up and reached for his shirt. "He asked about the terminal. About the schedule of the night watch."

"That is not a question a rogue asks for any good reason."

"I know." He pulled the shirt over his head. "I told him nothing. But he asked, and now you know."

I sat up too. The clock on the wall read eleven forty. "Does Baran know he is here?"

"I did not ask. You know what happens when I ask too many questions about Baran." He found his shoes. "I should go before Ozan comes back for his tea flask."

"He forgets it every other night."

Tarik stood and looked down at me. "Emre. If Deniz comes near this terminal, you call me before you do anything else. Not the Alpha. Me."

"Why you?"

He did not answer. He crossed to the door, opened it, and the cold air off the Bosphorus came in and took the smell of him out of the room.

"Lock this after me," he said, and was gone.

I got up, put the papers back in order, and took my place behind the desk at three minutes to midnight.

The hotline is not a phone in the ordinary sense. It is a number, and the number is a joke the pack has kept alive for thirty years, because the humans who dial it think they are reaching a lost-and-found line for the ferry company. They get a recording. The wolves get me. The registry pulls the caller's scent from the line, and if the caller is one of ours, the board lights up with their name and their last known position in the territory. I have worked that board for five years. I know every wolf in the Boğaziçi Pack by the weight of their footsteps in a corridor.

At twelve exactly I logged the shift open. The board was quiet. I drank half of Ozan's tea standing at the window, watching the lights on the far shore where the European pack held its ground.

At twelve nineteen the board pinged.

I set the cup down and turned. The signal had come in on the emergency channel, the one that is only supposed to open from a phone registered inside the pack house. The name field was empty. That happens when the caller is too frightened to hold still long enough for the registry to read them.

The location field filled in a moment later, and I read it twice before I believed it.

Luna wing. Sub-level two. The locked corridor.

Nobody goes into the Luna wing. Not the warriors, not Nadia, not Cem, not me. The wing is sealed between Luna candidates, and there had been no Luna in the Boğaziçi Pack for eleven months, not since the last one left. Selin had arrived three weeks ago as the new candidate, and she had been given the wing and a healer's room and nothing else. The lock on that corridor answers to two people. Cem, and the woman inside it.

I put my hand on the console and opened the line.

"Boğaziçi rescue," I said. "Who is this?"

Breathing. Fast, shallow breathing, and then a woman's voice, low, close to the mouthpiece as if she were lying on the floor with the phone against her cheek.

"Emre," she said. "Is that you?"

I knew the voice. Selin. The healer with the chestnut hair and the calm green eyes, the woman Cem had brought to the pack house and presented to us all with a speech about new beginnings. She had smiled at me that night and asked my name, and I had told her, and she had said, "The dispatcher. They say you never sleep."

"I am here," I said. "Where are you?"

"Sub-level two. The corridor past the healer's room." A pause. "The lock is still on. I cannot get out."

"Who is with you?"

"No one now." Her voice caught. "The code to the Luna wing is seven four one nine two. Do you have that?"

I had it. I also had the cold feeling that had started in my hands and was moving up my arms. Seven four one nine two is not a code a Luna candidate is given when she arrives. It is the code the Alpha gives to a healer in an emergency, and there is only one healer in the Luna wing.

"Where did you learn that code?" I said.

"Someone used it tonight. Someone opened my door from the outside and stood in my room, and I heard them speaking to a man on a phone, and they said my name, and then they said another name, a name that was not mine. They said it was a mistake. They said the wrong woman was in the wing."

I looked at the board. The signal was still live. Somewhere in the sealed corridor under the pack house, Selin was on the floor in the dark with a phone she should not have had, telling me that the lock on her door had been opened by someone who knew the Alpha's own code.

"Stay where you are," I said. "I am coming."

"You cannot come. The corridor is sealed from the outside. Only Cem can open it."

I was already reaching for my coat. "Then I will find Cem."

"Emre." Her voice dropped, and I had to press the phone hard against my ear to hear her. "The person who stood in my room was not a stranger. They knew the pack house. They knew the schedule. They knew my name before they opened the door."

The line went dead.

I stood there with the phone in my hand and the board glowing at me, and the ferry horn sounded again down on the water, and I thought of Tarik at the door saying, Call me before you do anything else. Not the Alpha. Me.

I picked up my coat and ran.