The band on the central stage finishes a song.
The crowd applauds.
The carnival runs.
I stand in my game alley and I feel the enormity of what has just happened. The town, without coordination, without a meeting or a plan or anyone saying the wordprotect,doing what it does. Closing around one of its own.
Except she’s not ours.
She’s not. She didn’t agree to the border, she said so at the ring toss, she’s said versions of it every time the question got close. She’s here temporarily. She’s passing through. But the town just lied to the police for her. The pack spent forty minutes running interference for her.
Archer, who didn’t trust her on day one and ran perimeter checks on her presence for a week, stood at the game alley entrance and was a wall between her and the law.
I held her face in my hands and told her she wasn’t alone.
I think about the pier. The way she looked at the water tonight with the expression I’ve been watching get closer and closer to something I recognize, the look of someone who’s found her place and is fighting the finding.
She told us. She stood on the pier in the blue-red light and she looked at Ryan and she put down the thing she’s been carrying alone, and she told us.
The pack bond runs quiet between the four of us.
This is the moment everything changes.
Honestly, it already changed. I think it changed the moment she walked into Tristan’s café and sat at the counter and looked at us like she could eat us alive.
I just needed the sirens to know it for certain.
Chapter 22
Lola
The pier has never felt small before. It feels small now. Ryan is beside me and Tristan is at my back and the blue-red light is doing its thing through the trees on the far bank and I can hear the approach.
Two officers on the river path.
Moving at the pace of people who are looking rather than searching, which means they haven’t confirmed yet, which means we have a window that is closing.
“Ryan,” I say.
“I know,” he replies.
“The path is—”
“I know.” He’s already reading the ground. I can see him do it, the rapid assessment, the same thingI do but with seven years of knowing this place. His eyes move from the river path to the carnival ground to the main approach and back. “Two minutes. Maybe less.”
“They’ll reach the pier access in ninety seconds,” I say.
“I know, Lola.”
“I’m just—”
“I know.” He looks at me. “When I say move, we move. Not before.”
Tristan is completely still behind me. Not frozen. The Tristan version of stillness, present and ready, the stillness of someone who has assessed the situation and is waiting for the right instruction. His hand is at my back, light, just contact. Just here. For me.
I breathe.
I watch the tree line.
