The bell above the door chimed.
Indy looked up.
The man who walked in was built wide, with black hair cut close and a jaw that looked like it had been put together with concrete.
He was wearing a plain dark jacket and moving with an ease that said he was comfortable walking into places uninvited. His eyes swept the shop in a single pass, the way someone looked at a room when they were looking for exits as much as people.
Those eyes landed on Indy first. Then they moved to Colton.
The smell reached him half a second later.
Hyena.
The word surfaced from somewhere in the back of his fox’s understanding, not a thought exactly more like a recognition his body had reached before his brain caught up.
Colton had gone very still near the cooler.
Not the relaxed stillness he’d been maintaining all morning, the comfortable lean against the wall with his arms crossed. This was something different, the quality of a large animal that had stopped moving because moving was no longer the priority. His eyes were on the stranger, and his expression had lost whatever warmth had been in it thirty seconds ago when he’d been discussing the lasting properties of freesia with a seventy-year-old woman.
Indy stayed behind the counter. His hands were still on the kraft paper, resting flat, and he kept them there.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
The stranger didn’t look at him. He was studying Colton, and the look had weight behind it, the kind that had nothing to do with shopping for flowers.
“Been a while,” the man said. His voice was low, unhurried, with an accent Indy couldn’t immediately place.
Colton said nothing.
The stranger took two steps farther into the shop, moving past the window display without glancing at it. “Tell your people to stop meddling in our business.”
The words dropped into the room and sat there.
Indy’s pulse steadily climbed, beating fast. He kept his face still, kept his breathing as close to normal as he could manage. His fox was unhelpful in the back of his awareness, pulled between the urge to bolt and the urge to put itself between the stranger and Colton, which was an instinct so stupid it didn’t deserve acknowledgment.
Colton’s jaw moved. When he spoke, his voice was completely level, which somehow made it worse than if he’d sounded angry. “Anyone who hurts dogs in a fighting ring deserves to be put down.”
The words landed like a door closing.
As if on a delay switch, Indy’s brain caught up two seconds later. He stood there behind his counter, hands on kraft paper, and thought, with a clarity that felt almost detached, that apparently everyone in that house had someone gunning for them. Malik had demons. Now Colton had hyenas. There was probably a waiting list. He should start charging admission.
The hyena’s gaze moved slowly from Colton, traveling across the displays, the cooler, counter, before landing on Indy.
It stayed there.
The gaze moved over him from head to foot, taking Indy apart and reassembling him as something smaller, something that could be filed under nonthreatening. Indy’s stomach turned over, and his fox pressed against the inside of his skin with a frantic, insistent urgency that he had to physically resist.
He held the man’s gaze because lowering his felt like the wrong move, even though every part of him wanted to look away.
“Walk out,” Colton said, drawing the stranger’s attention back to him, voice carrying the same flat, absolute calm as before, “or leave in a body bag. Those are the options available to you today.”
The air in the shop went very tight.
Indy did not move. He was aware of the counter between him and the stranger, aware of Colton positioned to his left near the cooler, aware of the exact distance between himself and the door to the back room. He was doing a lot of math very quickly, and none of it was about flower arrangements.
The stranger looked at Colton for a long moment. The silence stretched, filling the space between the shelves and the glass cooler and the sunflowers sitting in their bucket near the window. Indy could hear his own pulse and the faint hum of traffic, but nothing else.
Then the man smiled, an expression that didn’t reach his eyes.
