Chapter Seven
Indy was sore in so many places he was walking funny. He still couldn’t believe Malik had claimed him. Still couldn’t believe he’d let him, especially knowing what was after his mate. Sort of. But most of all, Indy couldn’t believe he was back at the shop.
Only, now it was Colton babysitting him. Malik had said it was too risky for him to be there, and Indy missed him already.
Colton, as it turned out, was not the silent brooding type.
“The freesia,” he said, appearing at Indy’s elbow while Indy was wrapping a hand-tied bouquet for a woman who’d come in asking for something cheerful, “is the right call. The yellow ones. They’ll last longer than the roses in this heat.”
The woman, who was somewhere in her mid-seventies and had the energy of someone who had strong opinions about everything and enjoyed sharing them, turned to look at Colton with the expression of a person reassessing the room.
“Do you work here?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.” Colton smiled at her, and it was a real smile, easy and warm, the kind that transformed his face entirely. “Just helping out today.”
“He’s my very tall assistant,” Indy said without looking up from the ribbon he was cutting. “I keep him around for the high shelves and the intimidating presence.”
The woman laughed, a bright sound that bounced off the cooler glass. Colton took the freesia from Indy’s hand without being asked and held it out for the woman to smell, tilting the stems toward her at an angle that made the gesture feel natural rather than performative.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she said, leaning in with her eyes closed.
“They’re sweeter than most people expect,” Colton told her. “Most people think of roses when they want something that smells like a gift. But freesia is better.”
Indy looked up from the ribbon.
The woman was charmed. Completely and thoroughly charmed, which was evident in the way she was looking at Colton like he’d just said something both intelligent and personally intended for her. Indy finished tying the ribbon and set the bouquet on the counter.
“He’s right, for the record,” Indy said. “And I’m the one who sells flowers for a living, so I’m the expert here. But, yes, he’s right.” He slid the bouquet across the counter. “Add the freesia to the arrangement and it smells like someone actually thought about it.”
She bought them. She also bought a small potted succulent from the display near the door because Colton mentioned, entirely conversationally, that they were nearly impossible to kill and she’d said that sounded exactly like what she needed.
When she left, the bell above the door chiming behind her, Indy turned to look at Colton.
“You,” Indy said, “are a menace.”
Colton looked untroubled. “She was happy when she came in. She left happier.”
“She left forty dollars lighter.”
“She also left with flowers that’ll last two weeks and a plant she’ll probably name.” The panther moved unhurriedly back toward his position near the cooler. “That’s a good transaction.”
Indy pointed at him with the ribbon scissors. “You flirted with a seventy-year-old woman to sell a succulent.”
“I was friendly,” Colton said. “There’s a difference.”
“There absolutely is not a difference and you know it.” Indy put the scissors down. “Also, she was delighted, so I’m not even mad. I’m just noting it for the record.”
“Noted.” The corner of Colton’s mouth pulled up, and he leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed, returning to the contained watchfulness that was apparently his default setting when he wasn’t busy charming elderly customers out of their spending money.
Indy turned back to the counter and started clearing the wrapping scraps from the last arrangement.
The shop smelled like it always did mid-morning, the cool green exhale from the cooler mixing with the warmer air near the window, where the sunlight was hitting a bucket of sunflowers and pulling something honeyed out of them.
The freesia the woman had smelled was still faintly present, sweet and clean.
It was a good morning, objectively. Three completed orders, steady foot traffic, no unexpected visits from anyone who made Indy’s fox go rigid with the urge to bolt.
Colton had been at his back all morning, not hovering, not making a production of being there, just present in the way that large, dangerous things could be present without demanding acknowledgment.
Indy was aware of him constantly. Not in the way he was aware of Malik, which was a whole separate category of problem, but in the way you were aware of someone whose job it was to step between you and anything that came through the door.
He found it both reassuring and slightly claustrophobic, which seemed about right.
“You’re good at that.” Indy pulled a fresh sheet of kraft paper from the roll. “The customer thing. The smiling and being helpful. I would’ve pegged you for more of a lurks-silently-in-corners type.”
“I can do both.” Colton wiggled his brows.
“Versatile.” Indy set the paper flat and started arranging stems for the next order, a standing weekly arrangement for the law office two blocks over. “What’s your background? Before, you know.” He gestured vaguely. “Whatever you guys do.”
“Ran my own security firm.”
“Did security come with a customer-service component, or is that a natural gift?” Indy layered in some greenery, checking the proportions.
Colton was quiet for a moment. “People are easier when they feel seen.”
Indy’s hands slowed slightly on the stems, then resumed, quietly building a picture of the people his mate trusted.
The bell above the door chimed.
Indy looked up.
The man who walked in was built wide, with black hair cut close and a jaw that looked like it had been put together with concrete.
He was wearing a plain dark jacket and moving with an ease that said he was comfortable walking into places uninvited. His eyes swept the shop in a single pass, the way someone looked at a room when they were looking for exits as much as people.
Those eyes landed on Indy first. Then they moved to Colton.
The smell reached him half a second later.
Hyena.
The word surfaced from somewhere in the back of his fox’s understanding, not a thought exactly more like a recognition his body had reached before his brain caught up.
Colton had gone very still near the cooler.
Not the relaxed stillness he’d been maintaining all morning, the comfortable lean against the wall with his arms crossed.
This was something different, the quality of a large animal that had stopped moving because moving was no longer the priority.
His eyes were on the stranger, and his expression had lost whatever warmth had been in it thirty seconds ago when he’d been discussing the lasting properties of freesia with a seventy-year-old woman.
Indy stayed behind the counter. His hands were still on the kraft paper, resting flat, and he kept them there.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
The stranger didn’t look at him. He was studying Colton, and the look had weight behind it, the kind that had nothing to do with shopping for flowers.
“Been a while,” the man said. His voice was low, unhurried, with an accent Indy couldn’t immediately place.
Colton said nothing.
The stranger took two steps farther into the shop, moving past the window display without glancing at it. “Tell your people to stop meddling in our business.”
The words dropped into the room and sat there.
Indy’s pulse steadily climbed, beating fast. He kept his face still, kept his breathing as close to normal as he could manage.
His fox was unhelpful in the back of his awareness, pulled between the urge to bolt and the urge to put itself between the stranger and Colton, which was an instinct so stupid it didn’t deserve acknowledgment.
Colton’s jaw moved. When he spoke, his voice was completely level, which somehow made it worse than if he’d sounded angry. “Anyone who hurts dogs in a fighting ring deserves to be put down.”
The words landed like a door closing.
As if on a delay switch, Indy’s brain caught up two seconds later.
He stood there behind his counter, hands on kraft paper, and thought, with a clarity that felt almost detached, that apparently everyone in that house had someone gunning for them.
Malik had demons. Now Colton had hyenas.
There was probably a waiting list. He should start charging admission.
The hyena’s gaze moved slowly from Colton, traveling across the displays, the cooler, counter, before landing on Indy.
It stayed there.
The gaze moved over him from head to foot, taking Indy apart and reassembling him as something smaller, something that could be filed under nonthreatening.
Indy’s stomach turned over, and his fox pressed against the inside of his skin with a frantic, insistent urgency that he had to physically resist.
He held the man’s gaze because lowering his felt like the wrong move, even though every part of him wanted to look away.
“Walk out,” Colton said, drawing the stranger’s attention back to him, voice carrying the same flat, absolute calm as before, “or leave in a body bag. Those are the options available to you today.”
The air in the shop went very tight.
Indy did not move. He was aware of the counter between him and the stranger, aware of Colton positioned to his left near the cooler, aware of the exact distance between himself and the door to the back room. He was doing a lot of math very quickly, and none of it was about flower arrangements.
The stranger looked at Colton for a long moment. The silence stretched, filling the space between the shelves and the glass cooler and the sunflowers sitting in their bucket near the window. Indy could hear his own pulse and the faint hum of traffic, but nothing else.
Then the man smiled, an expression that didn’t reach his eyes.
“You’ll regret this.” His gaze drifted briefly back to Indy one more time.
The stranger turned and walked toward the door, his pace the gait of a man who was leaving because he’d decided to, not because he’d been made to. His hand found the door handle, and he pushed through it without looking back.
Indy was starting to really hate that chime.
From the sidewalk, just before he moved out of the frame of the window, the guy glanced back through the glass. His eyes found Colton, smiled, then he walked away.
Indy stood at the worktable for several seconds. The shop smelled like hyena and cut flowers and the faint metallic edge of his own adrenaline. The ribbon he’d been working with earlier was crumpled in his fist, no recollection of grabbing it.
“So,” Indy said, his voice coming out mostly level, which he considered a personal achievement of considerable magnitude, “that’s a thing that just happened.”
Colton turned from the window, the predator tucked away, but his gaze swept the room a few times. “You okay?”
“Completely fine.” Indy smoothed the ribbon flat on the worktable with two fingers.
“Totally unaffected. I do want to say, for the record, that when Malik said you’d all keep me safe, I interpreted that as a fairly low-key arrangement.
A bit of standing around, maybe some light hovering.
I didn’t anticipate a rotating cast of supernatural grudge matches being conducted in my shop. ”
Colton’s expression softened slightly at the edges. “It won't happen again.”
“That’s a very confident statement given the last forty-eight hours of my life.
” Indy looked at the door, at the empty sidewalk beyond the glass.
People were walking past, a delivery van double-parked at the corner, a woman wrestling with an inside-out umbrella against a gust of wind.
Everything appeared normal. “The dogs,” he said. “They came from a fighting ring.”
Colton gave a single nod.
Indy looked at the ribbon in his hands. He thought about the terrier sleeping in his lap the night before, the fractured leg and the matted fur, how all three of them had pressed together like they’d learned that closeness equaled safety.
Something moved through him that wasn’t quite anger and wasn’t quite grief but sat in the territory between them, hot and quiet.
“Good,” he said.
Colton looked at him.
“What you did.” Indy set aside the ribbon and picked up his scissors again, trimming the lavender. “Whatever you all did. Good.”
For a moment the shop was quiet, just the distant sound of the street, then Colton made a low sound of acknowledgment and turned back toward the window.
Indy’s hands were mostly steady, and the familiar smell of the stems rising as he cut them was grounding in the way the shop always was, the work requiring enough attention to keep his brain from running too far ahead.
He got through four bundles before he realized he was also listening, still tracking the street outside through the glass, waiting to see if the black-haired man would come back.
He didn’t.
By the time the noon light had shifted and flattened out across the front display, Indy had filled two more orders, reorganized the sympathy section because it had been bothering him for a week, and eaten half a granola bar he’d found in his apron pocket.
Colton had answered a call at some point, stepping just outside the front door and keeping it propped with one foot, his voice too low for Indy to catch the words.
When he came back in, his expression had changed.
“Malik’s coming,” he said.
Profound relief struck Indy, making his knees grow weak. “Well, that’s, um, nice of him.”
Colton smirked. “You don’t have to front. You know you want him here.”
More than Indy had realized. Already he was falling hard for Malik, and the separation was killing him.