Chapter 5
Five
Eli
I’m up before the others. I always am.
Five in the morning, the bay dark and cold around me, and I’m at the window with a coffee I’m not drinking, watching the back of the bakery for a light that hasn’t come on yet.
This is new. I don’t trust new.
The light comes on at ten past. Warm and yellow through the frosted glass over her back door.
Then her shape moving behind it, small, quick, up before the birds like me.
She’s tying an apron. I can’t see that from here.
I know it anyway. I’ve seen her do it every morning for a week now, like a man tracking weather he can’t do a thing about.
My whole body goes tight at the sight of one lit window.
I’ve spent my life keeping still. You learn it in this job. Put your heartbeat where you want it and leave it there while a building burns. Then a woman I’ve said maybe forty words to switches on a light across the road, and everything in me stands up and points.
Mine.
The word arrives on its own. It arrived at the breakfast too, the second her scent reached me across the griddle. Warm vanilla. Sugar. The bright peel of an orange, and under it, fresh bread, the smell of the one thing this house has gone without so long we quit letting ourselves say the word.
It hit me low. It hit me hard enough that I had to lock my knees.
My hands wanted her. My mouth wanted the soft place under her ear, wanted to put my teeth there and leave a mark that said this one is looked after now, this one is ours.
My cock went hard behind the griddle like I was seventeen, and I stood there flipping pancakes for the whole town with a growl sitting in the back of my throat, holding it down by main force.
I gripped the edge of the griddle until the metal bit my palm. I did not move. I’m the prime of this pack, and the prime does not lunge at a woman who came to this town for a little peace.
So I plated her the best pancake instead. Set the cream by her hand before she reached for it, because I’d seen her take it that way through this same window. Small things. Provisions. The only shape I could give the wanting that wouldn’t send her running.
She has no idea. Good. That’s how I want it.
Down in the shop the light steadies. She’s baking now. If I cracked this window, in an hour the whole alley would smell like her, and I’d stand here breathing it in like a man with no pride left to lose.
Best to be honest about what this is. Not a crush.
Alphas don’t crush. My body has named an omega, feed her, guard her, knot her, and it didn’t ask me first. A feeling I could manage.
This is older than feelings, the part of a man that came before words, and it wants to build her a den and stand in her doorway so nothing gets past me to reach her.
I’ve kept it chained. One tray of goddamn pancakes and it’s testing the chain.
It’ll get worse before it gets better. Her scent’s already changing, a richer note under the sweet that wasn’t there last week.
I know what that note means. Her first heat’s coming.
And when it lands, the smell of her is going to walk into this firehouse and take the legs out from under three grown alphas who’ve spent six years pretending they don’t need what she is.
I’ve thought about it more than I should.
Not like Rhett thinks about it, loud and grinning.
Quieter than that. What it’ll cost her to go through a first heat alone and scared in that little apartment over the shop, three alphas forty feet off who’d give an arm to be let in, all of us too decent to say so out loud and too far gone to quit wanting it.
She doesn’t know that’s coming. I do. And there’s not one honest thing I can do with the knowing except keep the good flour on her step and my mouth shut.
I came to Ember Hollow a few years ago with a duffel bag and no plan to stay.
Where I come from, you didn’t ask for things.
You kept your wants to yourself and were glad of what landed in front of you.
This town took me in and never once made me explain myself, and I’ve paid it back a call at a time ever since.
I still keep a bag half-packed in the back of my head.
Habit. I don’t test the things I’d hate to be wrong about.
Cal will tell you I’m prime like it’s the plainest fact in the world.
Rhett says the same with a worse joke on it.
How a man who feels like a guest in his own life got to be the one the other two set their backs to, I can’t explain.
I carry it. You keep the fire banked, and you tell yourself a warm-enough house is the same as a warm one.
It isn’t. I knew that the second she walked into our breakfast smelling like the one thing I’d quit letting myself want.
A pack of three alphas with no omega isn’t broken.
We function. We’re good at the work, good to each other, good men on the better days.
But there’s a cold spot in the middle of us where she should be, and we’ve spent six years learning to sit around the edge of it and keep our mouths shut.
Then Dot planted this woman at our table, and the cold spot ached like a bad tooth.
Upstairs, Cal stirs. Rhett won’t surface for an hour, and he’ll be unbearable when he does. I’ve got a few minutes left of the quiet that belongs only to me.
I make the decision in that quiet, the only way I ever make one. Alone. No word to anyone.
I’ll help her. The festival, the shop, whatever weight she’ll let me take. Quiet. Nothing back. She gets to choose her own life. I won’t be a thumb on the scale.
Good plan. Clean.
It held right up until yesterday’s breakfast. Rhett pushed too hard, like only he can, and she looked him dead in the eye and told him she’d been working overtime not to meet anyone. And a laugh came up out of me before I knew it was on the way. Out loud. In front of the whole crew.
I don’t laugh. Ask anyone. Rhett stared at me like I’d sprouted a second head.
She did that. Reached into a man who keeps everything shut, turned a lock she didn’t even know was there, then went back to buttering her toast like nothing had happened.
That’s the trouble with the plan. It assumes I can stand next to her and stay level. I’m no longer sure that’s a promise my body will keep.
I finish the cold coffee. There’s one thing I can do this morning that’s allowed.
In the store cupboard there’s a sack of the good flour, the wholesaler Marigold swore by, the one Cal wouldn’t know from cake mix.
I know it because I pay attention. Paying attention is most of what I’m good for.
I write the supplier’s number on a card in block capitals that could belong to anyone.
No name. Then I carry the flour down, cross the dark alley, and set it on her back step where she’ll find it when she takes out the trash.
No knock. No note that points back at me. Just a thing she needs, arriving like weather, from nobody at all.
I’m back at the window before her door opens. She comes out with a bag of trash and stops dead. Looks down at the flour. Picks up the card, turns it over, finds nothing on the back. Then she lifts her head and looks up and down the alley, slow, trying to work out who.
For one second, she looks straight at the dark window I’m standing in.
She can’t see me. I know she can’t. I step back anyway, heart going like I’ve been caught red-handed, which I have.
Down in the alley, Wren Bailey holds a sack of flour against her chest like it matters, smiles to herself, and carries it back inside.
I stand in the dark a long time after her light is the only one left on the street.
For years, I’ve kept one boot by the door. This is the first morning I’ve wanted a thing enough that walking away quietly is off the table.
I don’t tell the others. Some weight a prime carries on his own.