"So let me get this straight." Matt paced the living room space between his father's old lazy boy and the football game playing on the flat screen. "Some drifter knocks on the door asking for work and you tell him, 'Sure, how's five an hour sound? Now go break into my son's house and have yourself a beer.'"

His father craned his head, still tethered to the television with every direction Matt moved. "Don't get your panties in a knot. Kid needed a place to stay, so I offered him work. Five an hour to help around the place. A warm meal in the morning and a beer at night didn't sound unreasonable to me."

"And you didn't think maybe you should...I dunno, vet him? You won't have your ancestry tested because you think the government is collecting our DNA, but yeah, sure. Let a guy in off the street to steal our shit and sell it for drug money."

His father's stark, gray eyes shot to Matt from beneath his deeply furrowed brow. "Mind yourself, boy. What was I supposed to do, ask for a background check? Kid's younger than you are. Now move your ass out of the way, the Patriots game is on and I'll be damned if I don't get to watch Brady get knocked senseless because you're havin' yourself a hissyfit."

"We don't need extra help, Dad."

His father rose from his chair, the weight of his gaze crumpling Matt down into a crushed lump of man. He was intimidating, the sheriff—lanky and tall, with the kinda face that sunk in places like a skull with all the meat picked off. He'd never laid a hand on Matt before, but for some reason, the feel of him approaching always put a lump in his throat.

"Lost my best hen last night because you didn't re-fence the coup like I asked you to," he said. "Lucy's gonna drop that calf any day now and I'm gonna need all hands on deck. This place won't survive with you slackin' off how you've been."

"I've been working—"

"You've been leeching." His fathers words curdled on the way out. Sick, tainted things that Matt couldn't stomach. "I've been working. Day and goddamn night, just to come home and tend to the farm because you can't pick up the fuckin' slack. The kid knows how to milk a cow. He knows how to pluck a chicken and he ain't afraid to get his hands dirty or bloody or calloused like mine."

"I can do that shit too, we don't—"

His father reached out, snatching him hard by the wrist. He turned Matt's hand palm-up and held his beside it in comparison. His father's hands were scarred, dirt wedged into the slits of his skin, fingertips hard and yellow, where tough skin had developed after years of rough work. Matt jerked his palm away before he could compare the soft, unmaimed flesh of his own.

"Look at your hands, boy. Those hands have never touched a calf right outta the womb. They ain't ever slit a chicken by the throat or shot a beast dead after the coyotes got to it. You're too damn soft and I can't afford to keep hirin' farmhands. My pop passed this land down to me because he thought I'd have a goddamn family to run it."

"So I'll cut hours," Matt said. "I'll work the farm. If you teach me how to do all that shit, I'll do it—"

"No you won't." He said it so calmly, each consonant biting deeper and deeper into Matt. Always eased his tone like that when he was too disappointed to yell anymore. Raising his voice just wasn't worth it. Seemed old Jack Richards had come to accept that long ago. That his kid was an unfixable fuck up, that all the life lessons bounced off his skin like rain. 

"This conversation's over," his father said, sinking back into his Lazy Boy. "Get out. I got a game to watch."

Defeated, Matt started for the door, pausing there at the threshold of the carpet. "He's not stayin' in the guest house."

His father waved a busy hand at him and grunted. "Fine. Put him in the barn."

Matt escaped down the paint-chipped front porch and onto solid ground. The breeze cut through his clothes, but the sun baked his skin in a strange, comfortable contrast. He recalled Sadie's request and it sat heavy on his shoulders the entire walk back to the guest house. Gasoline and a match, she'd said. But something deep it Matt's gut told him it wouldn't be so simple.

Bailey was still asleep on the floor of the living room when he stepped inside. It was strange how he slept—on his side with his arms folded around himself, facing away from the door. It was same way he slept during Perigee, unmoving save for the subtle rise of his body.

Matt gave him a nudge with the toe of his boot. "Get up, we gotta clean out the barn." When he didn't move, Matt gave him another nudge.

Something caught his ankle and Matt's world slipped out from under him. He landed on his back, head smacking against the floorboards with a force that made his eyes reel. And before he could understand what'd happened, Bailey was stepping over his sprawled body. "I heard you the first time."

Matt sat up, rubbing the pulsing ache in his skull. "Fuck—I was just trying to wake you up."

"We don't all communicate in yodels and turkey-calling." Bailey rounded the island into the kitchen, searching through the cupboards for a glass. "I'm not staying in a barn with asses and goats."

"We have more than one barn," Matt said. "You'll stay where we keep the supplies. Used to be for the horses, but we don't have 'em anymore. There's a second-floor loft—it's fine for livin' in and I promise, you'll be the only ass there."

Bailey set his glass down, gaze dark and narrow. His hair was mussed with sleep, sticking up in the back like ruffled feathers.

"Not a morning person?" Matt asked. "You wanna work on the farm, you gotta be up earlier than this."

"You think I actually want to be here?" Bailey asked. "I'm here to lead you to the dens. That's it."

The dens. The pieces clicked together. At first, Matt was relieved to know Bailey wasn't actually a hired farmhand. Then the memory of Sadie's words hooked into him and tore loose a wretched groan. "You're my partner? You? Give me one good fuckin' reason why Sadie thought it a brilliant idea to hire you."

Bailey held up a middle finger as if he was using it to tally. "One: I lived with the rogues for years. I know what they smell like, I know where to find them." Instead of adding a digit, Bailey lifted his other fist, middle fingers flicked to the heavens. "And the other reason is, go fuck yourself."

Matt sat there on the floor in silence, rubbing the pain in his skull and watching Bailey fill a glass with water and deplete it just as quickly.

After the silence wore heavy on him, Matt spoke up again, "My dad'll know if you don't—"

"I'll do the work." Bailey lowered his glass, his gaze set through the parted curtains of the kitchen window. "I've lived on a farm before."

"Good," was all Matt could think to say. He shoved himself to his feet and shifted toward the door. "Coffee in the pot is fresh. Meet me in the barn. The one by the chicken coup."

Bailey didn't reply and Matt didn't wait for one. He left the guest house, and though he wasn't sure if Bailey was still gazing through the kitchen window, he could feel those dark eyes pin him in the back. There was an ember of disappointment in his chest that he couldn't seem to squelch. Everything he and that bastard had been through and he was still such a prick. He'd seemed in a good mood last night when Matt nearly beat him with a broomstick...maybe he really wasn't a morning person. Or maybe Bailey was a bit like his pop—with emotions that climbed beanstalks and plummeted from the tallest leaf down to the depths of the ocean.

Matt pried open the hefty doors of the barn, a cobweb peeling apart over his head. The single naked bulb that burst on wasn't enough to skin away the shadows that turned all of the old farm equipment into ghoulish, monstrous shapes.

He took a broom from the supplies and dusted away at the staircase that led up to the loft. Daylight washed through a knothole in the ceiling, lighting all the dust and cobwebs that had made the place their home over the past few years.

Before the guest house had been built, Matt used to escape to the loft every Friday night when his dad came home from work. His old man would kick off his boots, open a beer or six and shout at damn near everything that crossed his path. Matt couldn't take the way the atmosphere changed when he was drunk. It was the kinda heavy that pressed into the skull.

Dusty pages of old comic books still sat on an upside-down milk crate in the corner, an outdated game system and its tangled wires shoved off to the side. There was a mint-can full of old joints stashed around here somewhere, but Matt couldn't recall which weak board he'd hidden them behind. Should probably come back one day, he thought. Find them before his pop did.

Matt took in a deep, stale breath, and went to work dusting away cobwebs and debris before the nostalgia could tear something open in him. He was balancing on the edge of a ladder, wiping the glass of the copula clean when the stairs creaked.

"Nicer than the last place I stayed at." Bailey threw his things to the wooden floor with a thud.

Matt climbed down from the ladder, satisfied by how much light the clean copula let into the place. Bailey looked a bit more put-together now—but just barely. Like he'd fixed his hair with his fingers, changed into some jeans with a few less gaping holes in the denim. At least he wasn't glaring anymore.

"Most kids had tree houses," Matt said. "I had this."

Bailey took a look around. The high ceilings and fair size of the loft didn't seem to impress him. He wandered to the window and cast his gaze on the farm below. "Guessing this was where you flicked through playboy and—" Bailey wrinkled his nose, picking a stale rag up from the windowsill with two pinched fingers. He dropped it to the ground and shoved it aside with his boot. "Discovered yourself."

"Sometimes," Matt admitted. "Mostly just came here to get away from my dad. Working a farm is a bullshit life for a kid."

Bailey gave him a sly little smile. "Keep a-busy, Cinderelly."

Cool regret pricked at Matt's cheeks. It wasn't that Bailey's apathy bothered him much—it was that he'd thought to say anything at all. Raven was right: No one gave a crap about his life story. Especially someone like Bailey, who—if he was being honest with himself—had definitely scuttled through thicker shit.

Matt folded the ladder and laid it down on its side. "So when you say it's better than the last place you stayed, we talkin' a cardboard box beneath a bridge, or a married man's bed?"

"Married men tend to know better than to fuck in their own beds." If his jab had bothered Bailey at all, he wasn't showing it. He was searching the wall beneath the window. His fingers dug into the cracks and he pried away a loose bored, unearthing the dusty old mint can beneath. "Thought I smelled it," he said, cracking the lid open and withdrawing an old, poorly wrapped joint like a buried treasure. His stark, black eyes climbed Matt's face and he snapped the tin closed. "Let's not play games, Cowboy. You don't care where I've been."

Matt held his gaze, just for a moment. Just long enough to know that whatever glimpse of the boy he saw that day in the city was gone now. Bailey didn't want to be known, and if that was the case, Matt didn't want to know him. But still, that disappointment bittered him. Last he'd seen Bailey, he was sure something had changed. He never expected they'd be friends, but in that heartbeat of a moment, on the city streets, Bailey didn't look at him with viper eyes. 

Fine. His choice.

If they never got along, Christ—Matt didn't give a shit. But if a rat had crawled into his kitchen, he wanted to know what kind of diseases it might carry before it tainted everything in his life.

He left for work after that, not another breath in Bailey's direction. The sun was setting when Quentin arrived at the door of the safety office, manila envelope in hand. "If he asks, you dug it out yourself," he said. "He may not be my wolf anymore, but I still don't want anything to do with this."

Matt ripped it open right there, slouched against the door frame of the security office. Behind him, talkies buzzed and CCTV cameras blinked from one scene to another. All the noises washed to a single static buzz when he found himself staring at the photograph of a small boy. Save for his ethnicity, he looked nothing like Bailey. His smile was toothless and gummy, eyes soft and round. He sat on a stool in front of a camera and grinned as if he'd just been told a joke with a punchline fit for the gods.

Bailey Walters, it said beneath. Walters. Matt had to read it four times over. His last name was Walters? It was so...normal. 

Beneath that read the words, "Date of Foster," along with the signatures of a woman named Cynthia and a man named Berry. Several lines of information had been typed in tiny font that Matt couldn't make out in the lightless security room—but one word stood out, big and bold, pressed onto the paper with the red ink of a rubber stamp.

PLACEMENT TERMINATED.

"How'd you get this?" Matt asked. "Did you go to St. Terrance? Do you know someone who works there?"

Quentin lifted his shades from his eyes and tucked them on the collar of his shirt. "I've got wolves everywhere. You know that. Still not sure why you wanted it."

"'Cause...I don't trust him."

"Trust is something to be earned, not to be taken from someone's past and rummaged through without their permission."

Matt considered his words, tucking the pages back into their envelope. He knew it wasn't right, but a feeling in his gut told him to dig. That there was something root-deep that he needed to see. He thumbed the smooth, tawny paper. "Does Jay ever talk about his past with you?"

Quentin's brows shifted closer together—curious, but not enough to ask. He shook his head. "We don't expect that of each other."

Matt recalled the look on Quentin's face that perigee night, when Gannon approached him like a hound on the hunt for an easy meal. For the slightest, flicker of a moment, he wondered what kinda things he saw. What he went through in the dens. "Do you ever talk about your past with him?"

"My life began when I met him," Quentin said. "Anything before that..." He stepped back, slid his hands into his jacket pockets. "It's all just a dream."

Silence after that. The comfortable kind, at least. Matt had no more questions left to ask—just the package in his hands, beckoning to be rifled through. Did he need another reason to hate himself?

Quentin gave him a touch on the arm. "Take care, Matt. Use that wisely." Then he turned to leave. His heels hit the floor after a few steps and he spun back around. "Ah, almost forgot. I'll call you when we're given the green light on the first location."

"Bronx," Matt said, before he could start to leave again. That wedding would come and it would go and despite everything Jay said, Matt knew it would wedge a chasm between them. Life had a way of doin' that. "You're gonna take care of him, right?"

Quentin gave him a grin, his head inclining with a confident nod. "How could I not?" Then he turned and left down the empty hallway and Matt found himself gripping the envelope until he made creases in the paper. Maybe he was right. Maybe this wasn't the way to do things.

He waited until the sound of Quentin's footsteps faded, then he dumped the papers back out into his palm.

Bronx was a better guy than he'd ever be.

AN; I knooow this chapter was super boring, I'm sorry. I had to cover some things before it starts to take off.