KNOX’S POV
“No.”
“He raised you.”
“He saved me.” Nathaniel’s voice is stripped to the bone. “I was eleven. Living in the drainage tunnels under the old industrial district. Eating whatever I could steal. He found me during one of his community rounds — the pack clinics he ran in the low-income districts. I had a fever that should have killed me, and he brought me home and treated me for three weeks, and when the fever broke, he didn’t send me back to the tunnels.” A pause. “He gave me a bed. He gave me books. He gave me a name on medical forms and a place at his table, and he never once made me feel like a burden.”
I let that sit. This image of poor, sickly Nathaniel rearranges everything I thought I knew about him.
“His name was Petrov,” Nathaniel says. “And your father killed him.”
