Harper made a small sound that might have been relief as they sat at the little table by the window. Pav sat opposite her. They ate without trying to fill the silence. Without pretending either of them knew what came next. Just two people in a warm room doing something ordinary after something that hadn’t been.
He watched her hands around the wine glass. The marks from the zip ties still shadowed her wrists. His grip tightened around the stem of his glass.
She talked about her flight home, turning the wine slowly between her fingers. Morning flight. London. A connection through a city he immediately forgot.
She wasn’t pushing. He understood that. He said nothing. The silence acquired a different weight.
She tucked her hair back from her face with one hand, and he watched it happen. Something in him aligned so suddenly that it felt irreversible. He looked out of the window for a moment, turning Alexei’s watch on his wrist, the familiar drag of the strap against his skin.
He cleared his throat. “There were two wolves near my cabin. I watched them for three years.”
Harper stilled.
“They moved together. Hunted together. When she was injured one winter, he stayed close. Didn’t range far. Brought food back when he could.” He exhaled. “She died before spring.”
The room was hushed.
“For a long time, I understood the part where he kept going alone.”
“Pav.”
He looked at her. “I don’t anymore.”
He picked up his phone from the table. Opened the flight booking. The internal connection back to the region, the small northern city. The life he’d constructed specifically around the absence of anyone who could be taken from him. His thumb hovered over the confirmation screen. Then he canceled the flight with a swipe.
He set the phone face down and didn’t explain, because there was nothing to explain. Harper didn’t look at the phone. Instead, she watched him with an expression he was still learning the vocabulary for.
“I hear London is rainy most of the time,” he said. A warning, or something like one.
The corner of her mouth trembled. “You’ll hate it.”
“Probably.” He considered. “Show me anyway.”
Her breath left her slowly, shakily. He reached across the table, and his hand found hers in the quiet as if it already knew where to go. Perhaps it had known for longer than he’d been willing to admit.
Her fingers closed around his. He looked at their joined hands. Hers still marked by zip ties. His scarred and callused. Alexei’s watch on his wrist.
By any reasonable measure, neither of them should have been sitting here.
And yet.
For the first time in a very long while, Pav stopped listening for danger.
48
April sat heavy over London,turning the Thames the color of wet slate. Harper turned her collar up against the river wind and looked up at the warehouse.
It sat back from the Thames on a service road that didn’t appear on most maps, four stories of Victorian industrial brick with steel-framed windows running the length of the upper floors and a freight entrance wide enough to drive two vehicles through side by side. Rain had darkened the brick to deep rust-red, and the river smell had worked into every surface.
She’d seen it twice before. On paper and empty. This time there were lights on inside.
Harper pushed through the side door, and the warehouse rose around her, the ceiling climbing away overhead into steel beams and shadow, the floor a vast expanse of original concrete worn smooth by decades of freight and feet. Rain tapped against the tall windows in uneven rhythms. Somewhere in the building a freight elevator groaned to life and then stopped. The walls were exposed brick, pale in the afternoon light, marked with the ghosts of old signage and the outlines of machinery long since removed.
Good bones. That was what the surveyor had said. Good bones, some cosmetic damage, structurally sound throughout.
She’d thought about Pav when she said it.
“Harper.” Fox waved from behind a makeshift table constructed from two sawhorses and a sheet of plywood, blueprints weighted at the corners with coffee cups. His wife, Abbie, was beside him, a pencil stuck behind her ear. She hustled forward, wiping her hands on her jeans before she hugged Harper.
