Page 122 of Fate, Interrupted

I ease back into the booth, the truck vibration leaving my body, the tension dropping from my shoulders. The room moves around us: the crack of a cue ball, someone laughing at something, the bartender saying something to the woman at the end of the bar that makes her snort into her drink.

“This place already feels better than home,” I say.

Silas looks at me steadily. “That’s the general idea.”

“Is Paxton like this?”

“I imagine so,” he says. “The pack there has had time to build an established place for themselves rather than living inside rules everyone is still negotiating.”

I rest my chin in my hand. “And tomorrow you introduce yourself.”

“Tomorrow, I introduce myself.”

“And say what, exactly?”

“That we’re looking for a fresh start.”

“In those words.”

“In those words.”

I study him. “Will they ask you who ’we’ is?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not hiding you behind the curtain. I present as a wolf, but we present as a team.”

“I hope they don’t think they’re inviting trouble with us.”

He takes my hand in his, the warmth grounding me. “They’ll decide whether we’re worth the trouble,” he says. “That’s how it works. You show up, you tell the truth, they decide.”

“And if they say yes?”

He meets my eyes. “Then we start figuring out the rest.”

The simplicity of it catches in my chest and stays there.

“I’m going to open a bookstore,” I say.

“So you said.”

“Small. Nothing that tries to be everything. Shelves, a counter, another corner with chairs that don’t match.” I pause. “I did some Googling in the truck. There’s no wolf pack with its own independent bookshop. It would be a genuinely new development, and I intend to be part of it.”

“Someone has to keep wolves literate,” he says.

“Exactly. I’ll pass that along to the council as my primary qualification.”

He smiles, and the sight of it lights my insides.

The food arrives faster than expected, either a sign of good kitchen management or a miracle, and we eat and talk and let the warmth of the bar wrap around us. Two people in a booth, a casual dinner.

Silas pushes back from the table after a while. “Back in a minute,” he says.

“Take your time,” I say. “I’m going to sit here and appreciate the absence of existential dread.”

He goes.

I lean back in the booth and look around the room, at the pool table and the bartender and the woman at the end of the bar. Two guys have been arguing cheerfully about something for the last ten minutes, and I think—this is what ordinary, unremarkable ease feels like. When nobody in the room is keeping track of who you’re sitting with.

I’m still thinking about it when I notice the man at the bar looking at me.