“Can you run a food stall?” he asks.
“I can run anything.”
“That’s either very confident or very true.”
“In this case, both.” I worked a café for eight months when I was twenty, an actual café with actual volume, not a nice small-town operation with one staff member and goodwill carrying the weight. I know how to manage a rush, how to keep a prep line moving, how to smile at strangers for hours without it touching my actual face.
He nods, once. “Saturday and Sunday, main days. Ten to close. That’s usually around ten at night. Sixty cash a day.”
“Eighty.”
He looks at me. A pause. “Seventy.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Done,” he says, and he’s doing that quiet-pleased thing again, which I refuse to find cute. “Can you do prep work this week while we set up? Half rate, three hours a day.”
This is more days than I planned. This is potentially a full week, which is… fine. This isstrategic. I need themoney and the carnival is a good cover. Nobody looks for a fugitive who’s cheerfully working a food stall in a small-town festival. Hopefully.
“Fine,” I say.
“Good.” He hands me an apron from a box, that is slightly oversized. I put it on and feel immediately ridiculous and also, somehow, slightly less like I’m about to fly apart. “Do you want to start now?”
“Sure,” I reply.
And that is how I end up elbow-deep in prep work for Tristan’s carnival stall at eleven in the morning, which was not in any version of my plan and which I am categorically fine with.
The work is good.
This surprises me, or… not. It doesn’t surprise me. Work has always been good. Work is concrete and physical. It requires your hands and enough of your brain that the rest of it, the part that runs scenarios and tracks threats and replays the moment Amber’s voice saidrun, has to stand back and wait its turn.
Tristan works beside me, and he talks sometimes and doesn’t talk other times. He has the rare ability of making silence feel companionable rather than loaded. He explains the menu. It’s more ambitious than I expected, built around things that smell incredible in the open air and scale well under pressure. He asks the right questions about my experience and doesn’t make me prove myself, just watches me work and adjusts accordingly.
By the second hour I’ve stopped noticing that he’sthere in the way I was noticing it before. He’s just present. Just another Alpha.
I notice when he reaches past me for the stock list.
He’s close—closer than the workspace strictly requires, though it’s not deliberate, the prep table is compact—and he smells like coffee and butter. Warm. It’s the only word I’ve got for him. Warm in the way of something that has been warm a long time, not the sharp heat of a fire but the sustained heat of something that doesn’t go out.
My body does something that it does not have permission to do. Nothing dramatic. Just a shift in awareness, a recalibration of where I am in space relative to where he is, a sudden acute consciousness of the distance between his arm and mine. My skin is paying attention in a way that skin should not be paying attention to a near-stranger during prep work.
I step slightly left, creating an extra few inches. He doesn’t react because there’s nothing to react to. I am doing prep work. I am fine.
I’mfine. Hear me, universe? I’mfine.
Archer appears at two in the afternoon. He doesn’t announce himself. He’s just there, suddenly, at the edge of the stall, and my body clocks him before my eyes do. I have good situational awareness. I track people in my environment. I do not get surprised by arrivals.
And yet.
He’s carrying something—a hardware item,something for the stall frame—and he stops when he sees me. His expression pivots. He was not expecting me to be here. He is recalculating.
“You’re working the stall,” he comments.
“Evidently.”
He looks at Tristan, who looks back with an expression of complete serenity. “She asked,” Tristan says. “She’s good.”
Archer looks back at me. He has, I’ve noticed, a way of looking at things that is less observation and more occupation. Like his attention has physical weight. “You know how to work with food?” he asks.
