Chapter 3 #2
The room smelled like her. Cedar and something sweet, concentrated in a closed space, and my wolf went immediately to the forward edge of its restraint and I made it stand down with the same authority I'd spent fifteen years building.
This was not the moment.
"You don't get to do that," she said.
"I didn't do anything."
"You walked off."
"I needed air."
"You walked off because a man I was meeting with professionally put a hand on my shoulder and your wolf lost its mind and you left the room so you wouldn't do something stupid."
She was exactly right. There was no version of this conversation where she wasn't exactly right.
"It's a pack security concern," I said. "An outsider spending this much time with pack-adjacent businesses —"
"Don't."
"Fang is looking into —"
"Apex." Her voice cut through the rest of it cleanly. "Don't stand here and give me the pack security speech. I've known you six years. I know what that face was."
I held still.
"You don't get to act jealous," she said. "You don't get to react to a professional handshake like it's a territorial violation. You are not mine and I am not yours, and a man I'm considering a business relationship with has every right to exist in my space without you deciding it's a threat."
"You're my mate," I said.
"That is not your decision to act on."
"I know that. I'm not acting on —"
"You walked out of a room."
"I walked out of a room instead of doing something I'd regret. That's called restraint."
"That's called making your feelings everyone else's problem," she said. "Which is exactly what I've been trying to tell you for six years. You feel something and the whole room has to organize itself around it."
That landed somewhere it was supposed to land.
I thought about all the times I'd told myself that patience was enough. That showing up without demanding, waiting without commanding, being there without claiming — that it was sufficient. That it was different from what she'd grown up watching.
Maybe. Maybe not entirely.
I didn't move.
"That's not fair," I said, quietly.
"Maybe not. But it's true."
We stood across from each other in the small office and the air between us had the particular weight of six years of everything compressed into one room.
Her wolf was right there, pressing at the front of her, the bond pulling at both of us with the force of something that had been patient far longer than either of us.
"You are mine," I said. I heard how it sounded. I said it anyway. "I'm not claiming you. I'm not commanding you. I'm just telling you the truth. Your wolf knows it. You know it. And watching some man —"
"His name is Damien Park."
"— watching some man walk into your space and put his hands on you and smile at you like he's already deciding whether he wants more than a business relationship —"
"You don't know that."
"I know what that smile is."
"You know what you wanted that smile to be," she said. "Because it gives you a reason for what you felt."
The silence was very loud.
She was right again.
I hated that she was always right.
"I didn't want a reason," I said. "I just wanted —"
"What?" Her voice had an edge but underneath it something else, something that wasn't anger, something closer to exhausted wanting.
"What did you want, Apex? Tell me what you wanted.
Tell me what you want. Because you've been wanting it for six years and I've been watching you want it and I still don't know what you think the answer looks like. "
"I want you to choose me," I said.
The simplest version of it. The truest version.
She looked at me and for a moment something moved through her expression that I'd never seen before — not the studied neutrality, not the deliberate irritation. Something open and raw and almost painfully honest, there for a second and then gone.
"You just won't let yourself be," I said.
Wrong thing to say.
I knew it the second it left my mouth.
The open thing in her expression closed. Fast, clean, a door shutting with quiet precision.
She reached to her workbench beside the desk and her hand came back with a wrench.
It was not a large wrench.
It hit the door frame six inches to my left with a crack that said she'd aimed for the door frame and not for me, which was its own kind of statement.
"Get out," she said.
"Zara —"
"Get out of my shop."
I went.
I sat in my truck for five minutes in the parking lot with my hands on the steering wheel and the engine off and thought about the last two hours with the specific clarity that comes after adrenaline drops.
My wolf was quiet now. Spent. The territorial surge had burned through and left behind the particular hollowness that follows something you can't take back.
I thought about the wrench hitting the doorframe.
About the precision of it — deliberate, controlled, aimed exactly where she intended.
She hadn't thrown it at me. She'd thrown it at the space between us.
The warning was not that she wanted to hurt me.
The warning was that she knew exactly how to express what words weren't reaching, and that she'd learned the boundaries of her own anger well enough to aim it away from what she didn't actually want to destroy.
Including, maybe, this.
I hadn't started anything with Damien Park.
I'd controlled it, pulled it back, done the exact right thing in the physical sense.
But she was right that I'd made it visible. Right that I'd let it affect the room. Right that six years of restraint had its limits and today one of those limits had shown its edge.
I started the truck.
The tie rod end still needed attention. Torres hadn't even gotten to it.
I drove home.
On the way, I stopped at the turn above the south ridge and looked down at the town below — at the lit commercial strip, at the east end where the garage sat, her apartment windows above it.
My wolf was not howling.
It was sitting very still in the way it sat when it was thinking, which was worse than howling in some ways.
I needed information.
Not to give to Zara. She'd made very clear what she thought about my involvement in her business decisions.
But the pack security concern was real. Fang had said he was looking into it, and I trusted Fang, but I had my own sources and my own methods and I'd been the club's enforcer long enough to know that the most legitimate-seeming operations were worth the most scrutiny.
I drove home.
I called a contact in Billings.
The contact had access to business registration records, financial filings, a network of people who kept track of who was operating in Montana's commercial spaces.
"Meridian Racing Circuit," I said. "Managing director Damien Park. Tell me everything you can find."
"When do you need it?"
"Soon," I said.
I hung up and sat in my cabin with the lights low and thought about the look on Zara's face right before she closed it off.
That open, honest moment.
Something that looked like wanting.
I'd seen it clearly enough to know it was real.
I'd also been the one to shut it down.
You just won't let yourself be.
It was the truth. It was the wrong version of the truth, said the wrong way at the wrong moment, and it had cost me something.
But it was still true.
And the truth, I had learned over thirty-seven years, did not become less true when it made people throw wrenches.
I was still her mate.
She was still mine.
And something about Damien Park — the ease of him, the professional warmth, the way he'd looked at her garage like something he was deciding whether to want — was sitting under my ribs in a way I couldn't make comfortable.
I told my wolf to be patient.
My wolf told me it was trying.
We sat in the dark and listened to the wind come down from the ridge and thought about a woman who looked at me like I was everything and argued with me like I was nothing and had spent six years being the most important person I'd never been allowed to claim.
The contact called back within the hour.
"Meridian Racing is real," he said. "Registered, operating, verifiable."
"But?" I said.
"But the parent company has two subsidiaries that changed names in the last four years. Rebranded after regulatory inquiries in Nevada and Arizona. Nothing prosecuted, but the inquiries exist."
"What kind of inquiries?"
He told me.
The short version: financial irregularities in their contract structures.
Money moving through legitimate business revenue in patterns that didn't match operation scale.
The kind of patterns that showed up in money laundering investigations the way bruising shows up after a fall — not the cause, but evidence of something that had happened.
My wolf went very, very still.
"Who were the affected businesses?" I asked.
"Small independents," he said. "Specialty shops. Mechanics, fabricators, one custom furniture maker. Businesses with irregular revenue streams — cash-heavy, project-based, the kind of income profile that makes variance hard to explain."
The kind of business profile that matched Ironridge Auto exactly.
"Send me everything you have," I said.
He sent it. I read it.
Then I sat in my cabin with the lights on at eleven at night and read it again, slower, looking for the edges where the picture changed.
It was circumstantial. Regulatory inquiries didn't prove wrongdoing.
Rebranding didn't prove intent. The businesses in Nevada and Arizona had been left whole — no raids, no charges, the investigations closed without action.
Which meant either Meridian was clean and the inquiries were coincidence.
Or Meridian was careful.
I sat with it for a long time.
Then I made more calls.
I needed more than regulatory inquiries. I needed something concrete before I said a word — to Fang, to Zara, to anyone. Because if I went back to Zara with concerns and all I had were suspicions, she'd see it exactly the way she'd told me she would.
As jealousy.
I needed proof.
Whatever it took, however long it took, I was going to get her proof.
And this time, when I brought it to her, I was going to do it right.