Page 106 of Fate, Interrupted

“I know that.”

“And some things...” he stops. Starts again. “Some things are necessary. Regardless of the method.”

Outside the window, a group of people spill out of a bar, laughing, indifferent to everything outside their small, warm circle of the evening. I watch them pass.

“I’ll be back before morning,” I say.

“I know,” Greer says. “I’ll let your father know you had an errand.”

He hangs up first.

I put the phone in the cupholder and make the next turn, letting my wolf take over the navigation the way it knows how to, following the thread of scent that sits in my memory since I canvassed the alley.

The drive east takes me through neighborhoods I know from routes, pickups, and an operation that runs all over this city. I know which blocks have cameras and which don’t, which corners younger pack members patrol, and which streets rival operations avoid. I’ve spent my whole life learning Larkin one route at a time.

Tonight I’m not thinking about territory.

I’m thinking about an alley.

Two men positioned themselves between her and her car. The gap they left her—just wide enough to pass through, their gift to her, the one that said we’re giving you this so you understand we could take it away. She walked through it at her own pace, which is totally stupid and reckless in one sense, but totally something she would do. It’s been sitting on my chest since she told me about it.

I think about what it takes to be Norah in this city.

It isn’t only the alley. Customers pay more attention when a wolf walks into her shop. Conversations change when she’s seen with me. Pack meetings and carefully worded messages about optics and accountability shape a world she doesn’t see directly. She walked into all of it without asking permission, apologizing, or backing away.

The cold thing that’s been waiting since the call has a shape now. It’s not rage. Rage is hot and loud, and it peaks and passes. This is quieter than that. More durable. It’s the cold patience of my wolf that has identified the men who threatened her as a problem that needs addressing.

I follow the scent east, and there I find the broad one first.

He’s outside a convenience store on Marlowe, leaning against the building with a phone in one hand and a beer in the other. He’s alone and younger than I expected, late teens or maybe twenty, with the build of someone still growing into his size. Standing there, he looks more like a kid with nowhere to be than a threat.

The wolf knows him by scent. That’s enough.

He looks up from his phone when I pull to the curb.

It takes him a second, his face doing the work of placing me—the bookshop, the woman he cornered—and I watch him arrive at the conclusion as the color leaves his face.

He looks at the store’s door. Then back at me. He doesn’t move.

I get out of the truck.

I’m not moving fast. I don’t need to. As I cross the sidewalk at a normal pace, I look at him. When I stop about four feet away, I let my wolf come forward the way it’s been waiting since the phone call with Norah, and I watch his face change.

He’s seen wolves before. You don’t live in Larkin without having seen wolves. But there’s a difference between seeing a wolf and having one look at you like this. I remind myself that this kid was stupid enough to threaten the woman of a wolf, but smart enough to know that the thing standing four feet away from him has the desire and the capacity to rip his head off.

His drink slips from his hand, falling to the ground with a clunk. Soft foam sprays out over the sidewalk. His mouth hangs slack. He’s mute.

The tall one comes out of the store.

He stops in the doorway with a bag in his hand and takes in the scene—the truck, me, his mute buddy’s face, and I watch the same calculation happen in him, faster though because this one is smarter.

To his credit, he doesn’t run.

That’s interesting. Smarter than I expected.

I look at them both and say nothing. My wolf comes fully forward—not rushed, wholly present, the way it gets once the wolf has decided what comes next and there’s no reason to hurry it. I feel it in my chest, in the drop of my shoulders, in the way my hands open at my sides. My vision sharpens. The distance between us, four feet of sidewalk, is nothing. They know it and I know they know it, and none of us is pretending otherwise.

The broad one makes a sound. Not a word. Just an involuntary, low grunt when animal instinct overrides the part that knows how to be brave.