"No," I say pleasantly. "We can talk here."
Something flickers across his face. It's quick and small and he covers it well, but I saw it.
"Right." He nods slowly, one hand pushing into his pocket. "Okay." He looks around the shop, taking it in, his gaze moving over Odette, Perrin by the Camaro, then back to me and Raff. "So you know these people?"
"They're my pack," I say, and the words come out so naturally that it surprises me to some degree.
Milo's eyes move to Raff. Then back to me. "Your pack," he repeats, like he's turning the information over carefully. "I didn't know you had a pack, Elle."
"There's a lot you don't know about me, Milo," I say.
He's quiet for a moment, and I watch him decide something behind his eyes.
"I found your purse," he finally says. "At the market. After everything went sideways." He swings the backpack off his shoulder and reaches inside.
Raff goes completely still beside me.
I feel it more than see it. The shift in his body, every muscle locking up at once, his weight dropping forward onto the balls of his feet. The alpha doesn’t actually move, but the readiness in him is so total and so immediate that the air in the shop changes by several degrees.
Milo looks up, reads Raff's expression in about half a second, and his whole body slows down, moving with exaggerated care.
He pulls out my small purse with two fingers and holds it toward me like he's defusing a bomb.
"Just returning this," he says, his eyes flicking briefly to Raff. "That's all."
Raff’s tense body stays locked in place, watching Milo's hands, as I reach out and take the purse from him.
I close my fingers around the worn leather. It's mine. Small and battered at the corners, the zipper broken on one side, exactly as I left it in the pharmacy tent when my heat hit and everything fell apart.
"Thank you," I say.
"Of course." Milo's eyes stay on my face, and for a moment he doesn't say anything else.
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other as his hand pushes back into his pocket.
I can see him turning something over in his mind, deciding whether to say it or not.
He looks at Raff, then at the floor, then back at me. "There was a work badge inside," he saysfinally. "From a pharmacy." He clears his throat. "Not the Morder." Another pause, shorter this time, like he's already committed to whatever he’s trying to say, and just needs to get it out. "Cassville Care Pharmacy."
The name of my parents' shop hits me somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
I can see the bright red and white sign. My mother's handwriting on the prescription labels. My father's laugh carrying through the back room on a slow Tuesday afternoon. The smell of the cleaning solution he used on the counters every single morning without fail.
I swallow hard, and for one terrible second I'm afraid I might cry.
"You went through my purse?" I ask softly.
"I was trying to figure out who it belonged to," Milo says, and his tone is reasonable and even and gives me absolutely nothing to push back against. "There wasn't much in there. The badge fell out of your wallet.”
I look at him for a moment, then down at the purse in my hands, my fingers tightening around the leather.
"Did you work there?" he asks, his voice casual. "At Cassville Care?"
I look back up at him. His expression is open and friendly and his eyes are doing that thing again, moving over my face with a careful, patient attention that has nothing to do with friendliness.
"For a little while," I say carefully. "Why?"
Milo shrugs one shoulder, the picture of casual. "No reason really. It's—" He pauses, scratching the back of his neck. "I grew up not far from Cassville. Small world, kind of thing." He smiles, and it almost reaches his eyes. "Did you know the owners? I actually think they were the Pérez family? Right? Any relation?”
