She hits the edge and she hits it back.
She’s not aggressive. She’s justthere.Fully present, fully herself, not an inch of ground given, and she’s looking at me like I’m a puzzle she’s decided to solve at her leisure and she’s in no particular hurry.
I have no idea how to handle that.
I have never not known what to do.
“Go back to the carnival, Lola.”
She looks at me for one more moment. She’s assessing, unreadable, and then something small moves in her expression, something that’s not quite amusement but lives next door to it. Her hand drops from her neck.
“Goodnight, Archer,” she says.
She turns and walks back up the river path.
She doesn’t hurry. She doesn’t look back. She moves with the even pace of someone who has left on their own terms. The carnival lights catch her when she reaches the edge of the trees, and she steps back into the warmth and noise of it without breaking stride.
My hand is cold where I let go of hers. My chest is warm where her scent still is.
I stand at the fence for a long time. Distress, old and sustained. And underneath it, the thing I’m not naming yet. The thing that my pack instinct has been translating for days and that I now have no way to un-know.
She smells likeours.
She already smells like ours.
I breathe in the river air and I try to find the clinical distance I came here with and it is simply not available anymore.
I walk back to the carnival.
I don’t tell Ryan what the assessment found. Some information requires sitting with before it becomes a report.
Chapter 10
Lola
I walk back into the carnival and immediately want to walk back out of it. Not because of the noise or the crowd or the lights, which are all still doing their warm-excessive thing across every surface.
Because I can still feel Archer’s fingers around my wrist.
Not in a bad way. That’s the problem. That’s the big problem I’m carrying back through the lantern display and past the stage and toward the food stalls. My jaw is set and my pace even, working very hard on the outside at presenting a woman who is perfectly fine and thinking about nothing in particular.
On the inside, I’m running a damage assessment.
Damage: he saw something. Noteverything—I’m certain it’s not everything, I’ve been careful, I’m always careful—but something. The truth underneath the surface that I don’t let people near, the layer of actual situation that lives below the deflections and the competence and the forward momentum.
You’re running from something.
He was accurate. Infuriatingly accurate in the way of someone who has looked at a lot of people in motion and learned what it looks like when the motion isn’t optional.
The scent doesn’t lie.
I didn’t know Alphas could scent distress so well. I knew the broad strokes—pack instinct, Omega recognition, the biology of it—but not that it was thatprecise.Not that someone could smell the difference between a person in motion and a person in flight.
That’s a problem. That’s a material problem that changes my threat assessment of this entire situation. I shove my hands in my jacket pockets and my right hand finds the small trophy. I close my fingers around it without meaning to.
Jack finds me before I find anywhere else to be. He’s positioned at the border of the central stage, leaning against one of the speaker towers with a drink in each hand. He straightens when he sees me with the alertness of someone who has already done the math on my expression.
“Archer,” he says. Not a question.
