The rain hit the windshield like gravel, and the wipers pushed it aside only for the next wave to arrive. I had been driving six hours through the kind of Scottish landscape postcards love and I had learned to distrust. Pine trees, black lochs, hills that looked soft from a distance and were not soft at all. Eleven miles to the Blackmuir gate. I counted them down out of habit. The road narrowed to a single track and the GPS gave up around the third cattle grid. I knew where I was going. The Council's file on Blackmuir ran to two hundred pages and I had read all of it twice. A thousand square miles of forest and loch. Duncan Blackmuir, Alpha for thirty-one years. Ninety-four wolves. A sheep farm, a hydro scheme on the burn, and a land deal that did not add up. That last part was my job. The Council of Alphas pays a small, unloved group of wolves to walk into a pack house, smile at its Alpha, and find the rot underneath. We are called auditors. The packs call us other things. The gate appeared at half past seven: two stone pillars, an iron arch with a wolf's head worked into the metal, and a lodge beyond it with warm windows. I stopped the car and listened to the rain and the tick of the cooling engine. Then I took the small silver pin with the Council's mark from my jacket and put it on my lapel. It weighs nothing. It has ended more than one conversation before it began. Duncan was waiting on the steps under the porch light, a tall, broad man in his early sixties with silver hair and eyes the colour of a winter sky. He wore a good wool coat and the expression of a landlord inspecting a tenant. "Mr. Calum," he said. "The Council said you would come before the week was out. They did not say you would come in weather fit for drowning." "The weather does not take my calls, Alpha." He laughed, warm and practiced. "Come in. Fiona has kept a plate for you. You will want a bath and a bed before we talk business." The warmth hit me in the hall: woodsmoke, wet wool, cooking, the smell of a pack house where ninety wolves have lived in the same rooms for years. Underneath it I caught something faint and clean, like green things crushed in the hand. I put it out of my mind. The job did not include sniffing the furniture. Fiona was a short, round woman in her sixties with grey curls and the sharpest eyes in the building. She set a plate of lamb and potatoes in front of me and sat down opposite without being invited. "Eat," she said. "You are thin. The Council does not feed its people." "The Council feeds us documents. They are less filling." She smiled, a real one, and I noted it. Omegas remember kindness. "You will want to know about the land sales. I am not the one to ask. I only cook." "You cook for everyone who signs the papers." Her spoon stopped for half a second. Then she picked it up again. "Eat your dinner, auditor." I was halfway through the lamb when the kitchen door opened and the smell from the hall came back, stronger, and a woman walked in with her hair damp from the rain and a basket of herbs under her arm. She was tall. Black hair pulled back and coming loose at the temples, a long face with a narrow jaw and green eyes that landed on me and stayed there. Mud on her boots. She looked at the silver pin on my lapel, then at my face, and the floor moved under me. I have had a lot happen in pack houses. I have been threatened, flattered and once locked in a cellar for a night. I had never had the ground shift and my own wolf, usually silent and sardonic, sit up in my chest and howl. The bond is not a metaphor. It starts in the chest and goes outward, through the ribs and into the hands, and it does not ask permission. I gripped the edge of the table. "You are the auditor," she said. Her voice was low and flat. "Isla Blackmuir. I am the healer here." "I know who you are." "Of course you do. You read the file." She put the basket down with a thump. "Fiona, I need the dried yarrow from the top shelf. The one on the left." Fiona found it, and the two of them spoke about a sick child in the east cottages while I sat with my heart going like a bird in a box. Isla did not look at me again. I could feel her not looking at me. I finished my dinner, thanked Fiona, and asked Duncan where I could wash and sleep. "Second floor, end of the corridor," he said. "The green door. There is a lock on it, though you will not need one here." The corridor was long and lit by one bulb, and the wind pressed at the windows. The green door opened onto a room with a narrow bed, a writing desk and a view of nothing but rain. I set my bag down and counted my exits: the door, the window, the roof below the window. Two ways out, one way in. I always count them. Someone knocked. Isla stood there with her arms folded, her hair down and wet at the ends, and the bond came up through me again, hot and insistent. She stepped in past me without waiting and I closed the door because it seemed worse to leave it open. "You are going to ruin my father," she said. "I am going to find out what he has been doing with the pack's land. Whether that ruins him is his decision." "He is an Alpha. He has been Alpha since before I was born. Do you know what happens to a pack when its Alpha is dragged in front of the Council?" "I know what happens when an Alpha sells his own territory and lies about it in the ledger. I have seen three packs fold that way." She looked at me for a long moment. Then she put her hand flat on my chest, over the bond, and the heat went through my jumper and my shirt and into the bone. "You feel that," she said. It was not a question. "Yes." "So do I. And I want you to understand something, auditor. I have spent my whole life being careful with my father. If your audit brings him down, half this pack will blame me before they blame you, because everyone knows a daughter can always be got at." Her hand did not move. "I am not going to let a stranger with a silver pin tear this place apart. Not for a bond I did not ask for." "I did not ask for it either." "That makes two of us." Neither of us stepped back. The rain ran down the window. Her heart was going fast under my hand, and I had not noticed my own hand moving until it was on her waist, over the wool of her jumper. She smelled of rain and herbs and something underneath that was just her, and my wolf had stopped howling and gone very quiet and very watchful. She kissed me first. I will hold on to that, later, when it matters. She kissed me hard and angry and over too soon, and then she kissed me again and it was not angry at all. We did not reach the bed. The writing desk was closer, and the wall was closer still. There was a moment when my mouth was on her throat and her fingers were in my hair and she said my name, and it sounded like a curse and a blessing at once, and I stopped thinking about the audit and the ledger and the exits. She pulled my jumper over my head and I lifted her onto the desk and the lamp rocked and neither of us cared. I wanted to know what she sounded like. I found out. Afterward she sat on the edge of the desk with her jumper pulled down over her knees and her hair in her face, and I stood by the window with the rain at my back, and neither of us said anything for a while. I should have been suspicious. I have been doing this job for a decade, and the one rule I have never broken is that I do not let a pack get close to me. A woman could be used to get at an auditor, and a fated mate could be used more easily than most. But she had kissed me first, and I was still stupid with it, and so I only said, "That was not how I expected the evening to go." She laughed, once, without much humour. Then she slid off the desk, pulled her jumper straight and came toward me, and she reached up and touched the silver pin on my lapel with one finger. "You should be more careful," she said. "You left this on." "I usually do." "I am not talking about the pin." She looked up at me, and her green eyes had gone flat and hard again, and the warmth of the last hour drained out of the room. "You are here to find out what my father has been hiding. That is your job. I understand that. But you should know what you have walked into, Calum of the Council." I opened my mouth to say something clever, and she leaned in close and said the next words into my ear, quietly, the way you would tell someone the time. "I know you are a spy. I knew before you came through the gate." She stepped back. "Good night, auditor." The door closed behind her. I stood there in the dark of my first night at Blackmuir with my hand still raised and the bond still pulling at my chest, and I counted my exits again, because it was that or admit that I had already missed the only one that mattered.

I did not sleep. I lay on the narrow bed with my boots off and my jacket over the chair, and I listened to the rain thin out and the wind change direction and the lodge settle around me. Every so often a door opened below and a voice murmured and closed again. I counted the footsteps in the corridor until I lost track. She knew. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Not suspected, not wondered about, not heard a rumour from a cousin in the Council offices. Knew. The Council does not advertise its auditors. My name is not on a door anywhere. I had arrived under a false name at the gate and a true name in the file, and she had looked at me across a kitchen table and known. I got up at six, washed in cold water, and went down to find her. The infirmary was at the back of the lodge, in what had probably been a gun room in the days when men came up here to shoot deer. Isla was already there. Her black hair was tied back properly now, and she had a white apron over her jumper and a mortar of crushed leaves in front of her. A boy of about twelve sat on a stool with his sleeve rolled up and a cut on his forearm. "Hold still, Peter," she said. "It is not deep. You fell off the wall because you were showing off, and now you will sit there while I clean it." "I was not showing off." "You were standing on the top course with your arms out. That is showing off." She wiped the cut and the boy hissed. "There. A plaster, and no climbing until Friday." He saw me in the doorway and stared. Isla did not look up until the plaster was taped, and when she did her green eyes were flat and unwelcoming. "The auditor," she said. "You are up early." "I wanted to talk to you before the Alpha wakes." "Then talk." Peter slid off the stool and left, glancing back twice. Isla wiped her hands on a cloth and waited. "How do you know my name?" I said. "I read it in the Council letter. It arrived three weeks ago." "The letter does not say what I do. It says the Council is sending an auditor and gives a date. Your father read it out to the pack, I imagine, and no one in that hall thought about the word until I walked in wearing this pin. So I will ask again. How did you know before I came through the gate?" She put the cloth down. "There was a man at the Council offices in Inverness two summers ago. He drank too much at the market and told a Blackmuir wolf that the Council was building a file on us. He said there was one auditor they always sent when a pack needed taking apart, and he described him. Grey hair, hazel eyes, a face like a lawyer who has never lost." She picked the mortar back up. "I have been looking for that face for two years." I have been recognised before. It is not usually a comfort. "And what were you planning to do when you found it?" "Whatever was necessary." She said it plainly, without heat, and I believed her. I had come into her home to take her father apart, and she had spent two years preparing for me. "I am not here to take the pack apart," I said. "I am here to find out what has happened to the land sales. If your father has done nothing wrong, the audit will say so and I will leave." "Will you." "Yes." "Then you will be the first auditor in history to leave a pack without a story to sell." She turned away and began setting jars on a shelf. "Breakfast is at seven. Fiona does not like people who are late." The dining hall was a long room with a vaulted ceiling and three tables, and about forty wolves were already seated. Duncan sat at the head table with a heavy-shouldered Beta who had a shaved head and a scar through one eyebrow. The conversation dipped when I came in and rose again when I sat down. I ate porridge and listened. That is half the job. A pack will tell an auditor more in one breakfast than in a week of formal interviews. The sheep on the east hill had foot rot. The hydro scheme needed a new turbine. Someone's cousin had gone to Inverness and come back with a bad attitude and a good jacket. And under all of it, the thing nobody said, which was the land on the north side of the loch and who had bought it. I was reaching for the salt when a young man came in through the far door with a plate in his hand. He was maybe twenty-five, brown-haired, quiet in the way of someone who has learned not to take up space. Broad across the shoulders and careful with it. He sat down at the end of the second table with two other warriors and said nothing to anyone. Nobody at the high table looked at him. That was what caught me. In a pack of ninety-four, an Alpha knows every face in the room, and Duncan Blackmuir had not looked at that boy once. The boy looked up. Our eyes met across the hall, and his nostrils flared, and something crossed his face that I could not name and did not like. Recognition. Not the recognition of a stranger who has seen a face before, but the older thing, the way a wolf knows a scent from a den he cannot remember. My wolf came awake in my chest and did not howl. He turned and stood, silent and certain, and looked at the boy with an attention I had never felt from him before. I put my spoon down. "Who is that?" I asked the grey-haired woman beside me. She glanced over. "Ewan. One of the border warriors. Quiet lad. Good with the dogs." "How long has he been with the pack?" "His whole life, near enough. His mother died when he was small." She said it the way people say a fact they have never questioned. "Why?" "No reason." I finished my porridge. Ewan did not look at me again, and I did not look at him, and both of us were lying. After breakfast Duncan took me to his study and spread the pack accounts across the table with the air of a man laying out a winning hand. The farm had made a loss for three years. The hydro scheme had covered it. The land sales to the north had been small parcels, sold to a forestry company in Aberdeen, all above board, all signed. He had the paperwork. He wanted me to see it. I looked at the paperwork. The figures were neat, the signatures clear, the dates consistent. And the hydro scheme had been making money for eleven years, not three, which I knew because the Council's file had the turbine output in it from the year the thing was installed. Someone had been moving the profit into a column it did not belong in. "Thank you, Alpha," I said. "This is very clear." "I told you it would be." He smiled his warm smile. "We are a simple pack, Mr. Calum. We keep sheep and we keep to ourselves." I walked out with the accounts under my arm and the taste of a lie in my mouth. The corridor was empty. I stopped at the window and looked down at the yard, where Ewan was carrying a feed sack to the dogs with the easy strength of a wolf who did not know how strong he was, and my wolf watched him and would not be quiet. "Mr. Calum." I turned. Isla stood at the far end of the corridor with a tray in her hands and her green eyes on mine. "Your Alpha has just shown me his books," I said. "They are very neat. Almost too neat." "Are they." Her face did not change. "The hydro scheme has been making money for eleven years. His accounts say three." She held the tray a little tighter. "Then you have found something." "I have found a hole in a ledger. What is on the other side of it is your father's business." She walked past me, then stopped, and without turning around she said, "Ewan is not to be part of this." The words landed wrong. "Why would he be?" "Just keep him out of it." She walked on down the corridor, and the infirmary door closed behind her, and I stood at the window with the accounts under my arm and the taste of two lies in my mouth.

Duncan sent word through Fiona that I was expected at the Alpha's table that evening. It was not a request. I spent the afternoon in the archive with the accounts he had given me and a second set I found in a filing cabinet that had not been locked, which told me how safe Duncan felt in his own house. The two sets did not agree. I wrote the differences in my own ledger, in pencil, in the small precise hand I had developed over ten years of writing things down where other people could not see them. At seven I put on a clean shirt and the silver pin and went down. The Alpha's table was at the head of the dining hall, on a raised platform under a window that looked out on the loch. The rain had stopped and the water was the colour of a knife. Duncan sat at the centre with his Beta on his right and an empty chair on his left. He gestured at it when I came in. "Mr. Calum. Sit." I sat. There were eleven of us at that table. The Beta, whose name was Robert and who said almost nothing all evening. Two warriors with the flat watchful faces of men chosen for their size. An older woman with iron-grey hair who turned out to be the pack's Gamma. A young woman with red hair introduced as a visiting cousin from a pack in the south, who watched me the way a cat watches a bird. And Isla, at the far end, in a dark green dress with her hair down, looking at her plate. Duncan poured the wine himself, which Alphas do when they want you to notice that they are pouring it. "You have been in my archive all afternoon," he said. "Did you find anything interesting?" "I found that your pack keeps very good records." "We are a careful people." He cut into his meat. "The Council sends an auditor every few years. The last one was a woman from the Borders. She stayed a fortnight and left with a clean report and a bottle of our whisky." "That sounds like a good outcome for everyone." "It was." He chewed and swallowed. "She understood that a pack is a family, and a family has private business. Things that look like one thing on paper look like another thing in a house. You will find that here, I expect." "I expect I will." "Good." He smiled. It was a fine smile, open and warm, the smile of a man who had been told all his life that he was good company. "Because I would hate for you to spend a month in my house and leave with the wrong idea about us." The threat was in the pause after the word month, not in the words themselves. I drank my wine and said nothing. The dinner went on. The warriors talked about a fence on the east boundary that needed mending. The Gamma defended a calf born with a twisted leg. Duncan told a story about a Council meeting twenty years ago in which a rival Alpha had made a fool of himself, and everyone laughed, and I laughed too, because that is what you do. Robert ate his dinner and watched me over his fork. I studied the faces. A pack's faces tell you where the power actually sits, as opposed to where the seating plan puts it. The Gamma deferred to Duncan on everything except the calf, and he let her have it. The red-haired cousin watched Duncan more than she watched anyone else. The two warriors watched the doors. And Isla watched me. She did not look away when I caught her. Her green eyes were steady and cold, and her mouth was set in a line I had seen before on the faces of people who had decided to hate me and were enjoying it. She was very good at it. I had kissed her less than twenty-four hours ago and she looked at me as if I were a stain on the tablecloth. That was the performance. What I did not understand was why she was bothering. If she had already told her father what I was, there would be no need to pretend. Which meant Duncan did not know what she knew, which meant she was keeping a secret from her own Alpha. I filed that away and reached for the salt. "Mr. Calum," Duncan said. "Tell me something." "Anything you like." "You have been an auditor for a long time. You must have seen many packs. What makes a pack strong, in your professional opinion?" It was a test, dressed as a question. The table went quiet. Isla's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "Strong leadership," I said. "A clear border. Enough food to get through the winter. And a reason for the young ones to stay." Duncan nodded slowly. "A reason to stay. Yes. That is the thing, isn't it. A wolf who has no reason to stay is a wolf who leaves, and a wolf who leaves is a rogue, and a rogue is a problem for everyone." He set his knife down. "I have kept this pack together for thirty-one years. Every wolf at this table was born here or came here as a child. There has not been a rogue in my territory in a decade. Do you know how I managed that?" "Tell me." "I give them a reason to stay." He picked up his wine. "And when a wolf threatens that reason, I remove the threat." The red-haired woman laughed, a small bright sound, and the Gamma said something about the calf again, and the moment passed. But Robert had not looked away from me, and Isla had put her fork down, and I understood that I was being told, politely and in front of witnesses, that I could leave with a clean report or I could leave in a way that would not be clean at all. After the plates were cleared Duncan stood and the table stood with him. He came round to my chair and put a hand on my shoulder, and his grip was friendly and hard. "Walk with me," he said. We went out through the hall and onto the terrace above the loch. The night was cold and clear and the moon was three days off full, a fat white shape above the far hills. Duncan put his hands in his pockets and looked out at the water. "I like you," he said. "I want you to know that. You are careful and you do not drink too much and you have not tried to bed any of my wolves. That is better than the last one." "Thank you." "The Council is a machine, Mr. Calum. It eats packs and calls it order. I have kept Blackmuir out of its teeth for thirty-one years, and I will not lose it now because a forestry company paid a fair price for some trees." He turned to look at me. His eyes were pale in the moonlight. "You have found a hole in my ledger. I know you have. I put it there myself, three years ago, when I moved the hydro money to cover the farm. That is the whole of it. That is my crime. A man who moves money from one column to another to keep his people fed." "That is not what the ledger says." "The ledger says what I wrote in it." He smiled his warm smile. "You should ask yourself who wrote the other one. The one you found in the cabinet." I did not answer. We stood on the terrace in the cold and looked at the loch, and then Duncan went back inside. When I went in, the hall was empty. I walked through to the corridor and Isla was standing at the foot of the stairs with her arms folded and her green eyes on mine. "You were warned," she said. "By you, or by your father?" "Both of us, though he was politer about it." She stepped closer, and her voice dropped. "The ledger in the cabinet. The one you found this afternoon. Who told you it was there?" "No one. The cabinet was unlocked." "It is never unlocked." She looked at me, and her cold face slipped, and underneath it I saw something that looked like fear. "Someone wanted you to find that ledger, Mr. Calum. Someone in this house is using you, and I do not know yet whether it is to hurt my father or to help him." She turned and went up the stairs, and I stood in the corridor with the cold of the terrace still in my bones, thinking about an unlocked cabinet and a hole in a ledger and a smile that had been warm right up until the moment it was not.