Page 51 of Fate, Interrupted

“Since when are you the calm one?”

“I have my moments.”

“You answered a phone call.”

“Exactly. I’m basically a hero,” she says. “Norah. You drove across the city and walked onto a loading dock full of wolves and told a man he matters to you. His father most certainly already knows about you. And you’re not scared off.”

It isn’t a question, but it sits like one.

“No,” I say.

“Then you already know what this is,” she says. “You’re just not ready to name it yet.”

I don’t answer, which is its own kind of answer, and Jewell lets it be one.

“Go home,” she says. “Eat something. Call me tomorrow and tell me everything, in person, with snacks. I will answer the door because I’m a good friend who answered an actual phone call today and is therefore operating well above her baseline.”

“You are,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” she says. “Drive safely.”

She hangs up first, which is her thing, and I sit for another moment in the amber blink of my hazards. Then I turn them off and pull back into traffic and start the drive back home.

She’s right.

I already know what this is.

I’m just not ready to say it yet.

I think about what Silas said at Hannigan’s. About fated mates. The wolf recognizes first. It’s permanent.

I asked if he’d met his. He didn’t answer.

I filed that away as a no. I’m less sure about that now.

Chapter fifteen

Silas

My father’s office sits in the far corner of the second floor, above the warehouse floor and loading bays. By the time the noise from the business reaches it, most of the sharp edges are gone.

The presses are already running by the time I take the stairs. Steam releases in steady bursts below me, metal plates locking and lifting in their rhythm, and one of the delivery vans has backed into the dock hard enough to rattle the freight door. The vibration carries up through the structure and into the soles of my boots, fading before I reach the landing.

Today I notice all of it.

Standing outside his office now, there will be no reprieve. Greer doesn’t deliver messages for operational matters. There will be no discussion on the Myers contract, the status on the new delivery van we’ve ordered, or the quote I received for new copper pipe in the steam room. My father doesn’t send someone to collect you from the floor for contracts or accounts. He comes down himself for that and moves through the building present and obvious.

That he sent Greer this morning means he wants the desk between us.

That he did it while Norah was here means he wanted me to think about it on the way up.

I’ve thought about it.

The door stands half-open. I knock once on the frame and step inside.

He’s behind his massive mahogany desk, papers laid out in neat stacks, a pen resting across a ledger he’s working on. The room hasn’t changed in the twenty-five years I’ve been old enough to notice it: old books along one wall, newer filing cabinets beside them, the large map behind him marked with pins showing every Coulter location in the city. The floor to ceiling window to his right looks out over the dock and the parking lot, morning light coming in flat and even.

He looks up when I enter and gestures to the chair across from him.