Page 57 of Fate, Interrupted

“You were right the first time. He does have his little spies. He always has.”

He keeps walking while the full weight of what started three weeks ago is in my chest. Even after a conversation with the patriarch and the prince, it’s not leaving.

My mother died in a car accident two miles from our house, on a road she’d driven a thousand times. The police came to the door in the late afternoon. My father left with them and came back alone. He met Logan and me at the door and said the words.

She was gone. No room to prepare. That’s the cruelty of it—not that it could have been prevented. That it was sudden, and sudden things leave no room for anything except the fact of them.

My father has never said directly that the speed of it broke his ability to trust that anything he loved would stay; the sheer indifference of how the world took her without drama or warning or any of the signals that would have let him prepare. But I was eight years old, and some things you understand before you have language for them.

And standing here now in the building he built around that loss, with Logan’s words still in the air and my father’s admonition pressing on my chest, I see that every warning I’ve been given this morning is coming from the same place.

Not from policy.

Not from pack politics.

But from a man who watched his wife drink herself to death over a life that made her miserable. Who has been carrying that for almost twenty-five years. Who is trying, in the only way he knows how, to make sure his sons don’t end up in the same place.

I stand with that for a moment.

Then I go back to work.

Chapter sixteen

Silas

Ipull up outside Norah’s rowhouse ten minutes earlier than I need to and sit there with the engine idling before I shut it off.

The late morning street is quiet after everyone has already gone where they need to be. A couple pushes a stroller. A man and woman sit in rockers on a wide wooden porch while a FedEx truck makes a slow turn at the intersection.

And here I am sitting outside a human woman’s house ten minutes early, with a picnic basket on my passenger seat and a book of poetry wedged beside it that I’ve been having misgivings about from the moment I stashed it in the car.

The basket is Logan’s idea. Not the basket exactly—the observation, delivered two days ago with characteristic economy: if I was going to see her, I’d take her somewhere that has nothing to do with work. Not a bookshop. Not a hardware store. Not a bar. Plan a pleasant afternoon that looks intentional.

First, I noodle it out. After our last conversation, Logan was hardly on board with me seeing Norah. I can only decide that by facilitating it, he’s only hoping to push it faster to its conclusion.

I packed the basket myself, already more effort than I give most things that aren’t business-related. Turkey and Swiss sandwiches made with a dollop of mayo and a smidgeon of brown mustard on fresh rye. Fruit salad I cut up myself, fresh from the farmer’s market. A bottle of lemonade because it seems right for an afternoon boating at the lake, and because I don’t drink alcohol in the middle of the day. A soft, plaid blanket folded and tucked beneath everything else so the basket would sit level.

And the poetry book.

My gaze moves to it again, resting on the spine where it’s wedged against the side of the basket.

I picked it up off our home library bookshelf three days ago. Not exactly on purpose, mostly because I recognized the cover. And when I looked down at what was in my hand, it was a collection I’d been required to read for a college literature class. I’d read it once and held onto it because I was too lazy to sell back my textbooks.

Also, the thought ran through my head: she runs a bookshop. She has opinions about everything that’s ever been written. She would either find this interesting, or she would find it amusing. But either way it would be better than showing up with nothing but sandwiches and lemonade.

That reasoning had seemed sound.

Now, sitting outside her house with a book of love poems for a leisurely row on the lake sounds pathetically cliché and cringeworthy.

I’m about to take it out.

My hand moves toward the basket. I stop and look at the front door instead.

Logan’s words have been running underneath everything for two days. Wolves don’t flirt. We don’t experiment. When instinct locks onto someone, it changes things.

He wasn’t wrong. That’s the part I keep returning to. He looked at the situation and called it correctly, and I’ve been avoiding the word ever since because naming it means I have to deal with it.

Real things require decisions. Routes, accounts, territory, negotiation; all of it has edges I can work with. This doesn’t.