Kelly Meade - Black Rook

And that was just not acceptable.

Knight didn’t want to waste his last few hours in Cornerstone on good-byes; he wanted normalcy. If he thought about tonight’s rendezvous in the context of potentially never seeing his family again, he would lose it completely. And the only way his father would allow him to do this was if Knight maintained an award-worthy external façade of calm and determination. No one could know about the chunk of cold dread that sat in his stomach or the fear stitching a pattern of ice around his heart. No one could know that he knew exactly the life that waited for him with Fiona and her sisters, and that he had no intention of submitting to an existence as their sex slave.

Too bad he couldn’t thank Brynn for her Magus ring full of poison. Or apologize to Dr. Mike for stealing it out of his home lab.

Dr. Mike had removed the miniature glass vial of poison from the ring’s jewel in order to test it, and only a tiny amount was left. The vial was the size of a kidney bean, small enough to hide in the back of his mouth behind his molars, and it seemed thin enough to shatter with a good, solid bite. Knight hoped it was enough.

Not to say that he was suicidal. The last thing he wanted to do was die. He wanted a chance to live a full life. He wanted to fall in love, marry, and have children. He wanted to watch them grow and worry if they’d be Gray or cursed White like him. He wanted to see Cornerstone thrive, to see his brothers grow old with families of their own. He wanted to share his run’s joy and hope and love. It simply wasn’t to be.

He’d given brief consideration to some attempt at dosing Fiona with the Magus poison, but her sisters might interpret that sort of aggression as him breaking their pact. Cornerstone would still be in danger, with the Trouble Triplets more eager to drop vengeance down on their collective heads. No, trading himself and then taking the poison was the best option—Fiona wanted him, but her video did not specify the length of time she was allowed to have him.

For the first time in his life as a White Wolf—few though his remaining hours were—Knight felt like he was in total control of his own existence.

The decision to accept Fiona’s deal had been the hardest and easiest decision he’d ever made. Fiona had declared war on his entire species in order to further her goal of creating some kind of master race of supernatural hybrids. Going with her tonight would save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of loup garou—his Father and brothers and Shay included—and put a huge dent in Fiona’s plan when he took his own life via Brynn’s Magus poison.

The irony of the way everything had tangled together to give him a workable solution helped fuel him as he went about the rest of the day.

After his theft of the poison, he went upstairs to sit with Shay. She didn’t stir from her sleep when he sat down in the chair he’d come to think of as his. She only slept this deeply when she was sedated, which occurred more frequently than either Knight or Dr. Mike liked. Her mind was filled with horrors that surfaced when she tried to rest, which led to extreme bouts of agitation—all of which could lead to a forced shift if it wasn’t controlled. High doses of sleeping pills, carefully monitored, were the only way she seemed to get any real rest.

He liked sitting with Shay. At first, it had been a convenient excuse to avoid his family and their questions. He could hide up here under the flag of his duty as a White Wolf and use the time to not think about what Victoria had done. Now he came because he enjoyed being around Shay. Despite her injuries and the trauma she’d survived, he experienced an odd sense of peace when she was near. Peace he rarely felt from other loup and never so consistently. He longed for another White Wolf to speak with, to ask if they’d ever experienced such a thing. Had Father calmed their mother in a similar way?

He held Shay’s hand in his, absorbing that lifeline for a while, until Dr. Mike came upstairs and told him she’d likely sleep through supper. Knight thanked him, stayed with her awhile longer, and then kissed her forehead before he left.

The emotional temperature of the town was still at a feverish level, and Knight did his best to channel the turbulence around him. He visited the diner, the library, and several other businesses around town where large crowds had gathered for evening gossip. His own high spirits buoyed the spirits around him, giving the people he’d known his whole life—or likewise, their whole lives—a sense that things would turn out okay. Even if his high spirits were a complete farce.

No one outside of a secret circle of six knew what was happening tonight at midnight, and no one else could know. Devlin remarked on Knight’s strange good mood during their supper of burgers and onion rings at the diner. “Did you steal some antidepressants from Dr. Mike?” he asked, and Knight only laughed.

He hated not being able to tell his best friend the truth. Hated not being able to say a proper good-bye. They ate and joked and toasted their Cokes to O’Bannen, who had been an excellent enforcer and a good man who’d be missed.

Knight took an hour to slowly wander around the empty auction house, crossing floors he’d walked on since he was first able to toddle on his own two feet. He’d grown up here, surrounded by the hustle of auction day, the buzz of voices, and the bang of an auctioneer’s gavel. He remembered hundreds of auctions, thousands of pieces of merchandise, and more faces than he could ever recall names.

His only clear memory of their mother was in this room, probably within weeks of her death. It was auction night, cold and snowy outside, toasty warm inside. According to Bishop, Knight had been having a “toddler tantrum” and would not behave himself upstairs in the office. He wanted to sit with Dad up at “the big box and bang the hammer.” So after sorely testing her endless supply of patience, Mom took him down to the floor, marched straight through the center aisle to the dais, and plopped him down in her husband’s lap.

Alpha and auction house proprietor titles aside, Thomas McQueen knew when to not argue with his wife and life mate. Knight had spent the rest of the evening slamming down the gavel when Dad told him to and grinning like a prince at the audience—thus began a lifelong task of charming the buyers out of their money.

Knight walked up to the dais and ran his fingers over the age-polished wood. A fine sheen of dust had already settled over it. Considering the mix of treasures and trash that came through on a weekly basis, the building was never spotless, but he hated seeing this area unkempt. The only other time in his life that they’d shut down the auction for an extended period was after their mother died—no one worked for a solid month.

How long would Father shut it down for this time?

He slid onto Father’s stool, in the center between two others, where Father had held court for decades. Rows of empty chairs stared back at him, a hodgepodge of wood and plastic, old and new, very few that actually matched. They even had two sections of old movie theater seats on one side, the red velvet worn to bare threads, joints that squealed loudly when you put the seat down. The item tables were empty, waiting to be filled. Without people or merchandise, the building felt so empty. Lifeless.

He lost track of time as he sat there, tracing the edges of the gavel without picking it up. His father’s scent still lingered in the air and the wood and the thin seat cushion. Their combined scents permeated the auction house, just as generations of McQueens permeated every corner the land and soil of Cornerstone.