Page 123 of Fate, Interrupted

He’s been there a while, I think—one of those presences that stays at the edge of your awareness before you acknowledge them. He’s nursing something in a glass, and he doesn’t look away when I meet his eyes.

That’s the first thing that tells me this isn’t going to be nothing.

He stands and walks toward the booth slowly, with the purpose of someone who knows exactly what he’s going to say.

I don’t reach for my phone.

I don’t look toward the hallway where Silas went.

I fold my hands on the table, and I wait, because I have been waiting all evening for the panic to arrive and it hasn’t, and whatever this is, it is not going to be the thing that breaks me.

He stops beside the booth. That’s when I see the cap.

The logo stitched across the front is unmistakable—the dated design of the city I left over three hours ago, stitched in the colors of a hockey team that hasn’t had a winning season in a decade.

He glances toward the hallway. Then back at me.

His expression hardens with resentment that clearly started long before he crossed the room.

“That wolf you came in with,” he says. “You know what kind of trouble they’re causing back in Larkin?”

I look at him steadily.

I think about two guys in the alley behind my shop. I think about Silas sitting through formal dinners with a father who tried to shame him into ending a relationship he had no earthly hope of understanding. I think about a city that has been tightening for months around its need to keep wolves beneath humans.

But I also think about Silas saying “we could go,” and meaning it. How the highway opened up ahead of us like an invitation, and this place where the bartender nodded and went back to his bar rag.

“I know exactly who he is,” I say.

He doesn’t like that answer.

I watch it move across his face—from confrontational to openly angry, the recalibration of a man who expected deflection and got the opposite and isn’t sure what to do with that.

“You think you know what you’re getting into,” he says. “You don’t.”

“I think that’s my business.”

“It becomes everybody’s business when they start causing trouble.” He steps closer to the booth, not sitting, only narrowing the space. Meant to intimidate. “You know what they did to that Clement Street shop? To the corridor on the north side? That’s what happens. That’s what you’re choosing.”

“Wolves didn’t do that,” I say. “And you know it.”

His face flickers. Not even close to guilt—he knows it and has decided it doesn’t matter.

“Doesn’t change what they are,” he says. “Doesn’t change what happens to people who get too close.”

“Is that a warning?” I ask.

“Take it however you want.” He leans forward, one hand flat on the table, his weight coming with it, and his voice drops until it is nearly a threat. “Women like you think it’s romantic until it isn’t. Until your menfolk are paying for it.”

I don’t move. I don’t look toward the hallway.

I hold his gaze, and I keep my voice level, and I say, “You’re the farthest thing from my menfolk, and I think you should step back.”

He doesn’t step back. He opens his mouth to say something else—I can see another insult forming, uglier than the first. And then Silas is there.

I don’t see him cross the room. He’s simply there, between the man and the booth, and what happens next happens very fast.

Chapter thirty-four