"Stay behind me," Hank commanded softly.
The girl huddled against the cold laminate, her small hands coming forward to steady herself. Her fingers brushed against the front of his cut. Her tiny palm flattened right over the slate-blue patch on his chest, her thumb tracing the embroidered grey fur of the stalking predator.
Her breath hitched in her throat. She looked up through her swollen eyelid, staring at Hank’s bald head and heavy grey beard with an expression of stunned reverence.
"My mama told me..." she whispered, her voice trembling like a moth's wing. "My mama told me to run to the man with the wolf on his vest."
The air left Hank's lungs.
A ringing began in his ears, sharp and deafening, drowning out the hum of the neon lights and the grease spattering on the grill behind the counter. For a second, the Black Dog Diner ceased to exist; Hank was standing in a rain-slicked mobile home park outside Reno twenty-five years ago, watching a woman with wild auburn hair and fierce green eyes pack a duffel bag into the trunk of a rusted Pontiac.
Hank turned around in the booth until the wood creaked under his weight. He leaned down until his eyes were level with the little girl's terrified gaze.
"What's your mama's name?" Hank demanded, his voice dropping to a low, raw rasp.
The girl swallowed hard, wiping her nose with her sleeve.
"Rose," she whispered. "Rose Calloway."
The word hit Hank like a shotgun slug between the shoulder blades.
Rose.
Not a ghost from an old highway bar. Not an acquaintance from an abandoned rally. Rose was the daughter he had walked out on when she was barely four years old, convinced that a man who smelled of motor oil, jailhouse disinfectant, and barroom brawls had no right to raise a clean life. He had sent money orders every month from post offices across Oregon, Utah, and Arizona—never signing his name, only marking the back of the envelope with an ink stamp of his road crest: the stalking wolf.
He had believed he was protecting her from the rot of his world. And now, her child was bleeding in an all-night diner three miles off the interstate.
"What is your name, honey?" Hank asked, his hand coming down to rest on her small shoulder. His touch was feather-light, terrifyingly gentle for a man whose fists had broken jaws in three states.
"Lily," she sobbed softly. "His name is Carl. He came two days ago... he said Mama was sleeping, but she wasn't. There was broken glass everywhere. He took me in his truck. He told me if I made a sound at the gas pumps, he’d throw me in the mine shaft."
Hank’s eyes shifted. The sorrow behind them vanished, replaced by an ancient, predatory darkness that had laid dormant under his skin for two decades.
At the lunch counter, Carl had finally noticed the girl wasn't at the booth where he’d told her to sit. He spun around on the red stool, spotting the oversized lavender hoodie poking out from behind Hank’s massive back.