Chapter 15
chapter fifteen
. . .
denil
I checked the project channel at six in the morning for the third time that week, and Miner and Nitsa had been talking about typefaces since two.
The thread scrolled through my phone in the blue half-light of the guest house bedroom, their exchanges clean and professional and utterly devoid of anything I could use to feel better about my own silence.
Miner asked whether the font stayed easy to read at small sizes.
Nitsa replied with three examples and a link to a font maker she trusted.
Miner thanked her. She sent a thumbs-up.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand and got out of bed before their easy competence could make me feel worse about my own silence.
A month. The visit here had been a month ago, and I had spent it watching Miner and Nitsa build a working language I wasn’t part of.
Not because I’d been excluded. Miner handled client communications, Nitsa had been clear about boundaries, and I had respected both with miserable, rigid obedience, but I wasn’t blind to the occasional flirting between the two.
The site visit itself had been professional.
We’d shown her the property, walked her through the great room and the suites, answered her questions about light and flow and how the spaces would be used.
I’d kept my distance. I’d kept my scent contained.
I’d done everything right. And then I’d gone home and watched Miner’s inbox fill with her voice while mine stayed quiet.
The Portsmith thing was worse. Isak had mentioned it over breakfast two weeks ago, casual as anything, stirring honey into his coffee while I stood at the counter slicing an apple into pieces.
“She went to Portsmith yesterday,” he’d said. “The lighthouse property. For the guest experience notes.”
I’d set the knife down. “She didn’t tell us.”
“Apparently it was on the project calendar, but she said she was going to go on her own schedule.” Isak paused over his coffee. “The employees there are solid, Den. She was fine.”
I knew the employees were solid. I’d hired them.
I’d trained half of them personally. Portsmith was the most isolated of our properties, twenty acres of coastline with a lighthouse at the far end and six cabins arranged along the bluff, and every staff member there had passed my vetting process twice.
The facts were useless against the part of me that kept returning to the same point: she had gone somewhere isolated, tied to Stillwater, without telling me, and I had no right to know but wanted to anyway.
There it was. What I knew on one side, what I felt on the other, and three days of sleeping badly, checking the project channel before sunrise, and finding nothing from her addressed to me.
Celia and I had kept an unspoken truce. We talked weekly.
She asked about the main house renovation.
I asked about married life and her pack.
Neither of us mentioned Nitsa, and her name sat between us anyway.
I had the impression, never confirmed, that Nitsa knew Celia was working with us.
Maybe they’d discussed the commission, set boundaries, reached an understanding.
Nitsa hadn’t raised it in the group chat, so either she was okay with it or choosing not to make it a problem.
I couldn’t decide which possibility bothered me more.
Miner brought up the next big step for us over dinner. We were at the island, the three of us, plates between us, the kitchen windows dark with early autumn. Miner set his fork down, reached for his water, and let a pause settle over the table. Trouble was arriving politely.
“The Portsmith materials are finalized,” he said. “Nitsa sent the proofs this afternoon. In-room directory, safety language, the welcome packet. They’re good. Really good.” He took a drink. “One of you should approve them in person. Instead of making her drive back out here.”
The room went quiet. Isak’s fork paused halfway to his mouth.
“Both of us would be too much,” I said. Not a question. A fact I’d been carrying since the Shelton visit, where I’d watched Nitsa’s posture tighten every time we alphas moved in tandem.
“Yes.” Miner’s eyes moved between us. “One of you. Her shop in Bridgeport. Quick in-and-out, signature on the proofs, and you’re done. Professional. Clean.”
Isak set his fork down. “Arm wrestle for it.”
I looked at him. “What?”
“Arm wrestle. Right here. Right now. Winner goes to Bridgeport.” He was already grinning, pleased with himself and impossible to redirect. “Unless you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared of you.”
“Then put your elbow on the wood.”
It was ridiculous. It was also exactly what we needed.
Something physical, something with a clear outcome, something that would let the loser accept the result without having to examine why he’d lost. I set my plate aside and braced my elbow on the island’s sage-green surface.
Isak mirrored me, his forearm against mine, our hands clasped.
Miner sighed and moved his water glass out of the splash zone.
“Three,” Isak said. “Two. One. Go.”
His strength surprised me every time. Isak was lean where I was broad, built for movement rather than mass.
What he lacked in raw power, he made up for in leverage and seventeen years of losing to me.
Our arms locked. The island creaked. Miner took another bite of his dinner, resigned to us and the life choices that had brought him here.
I won. Not easily. Isak held me for a solid twenty seconds, his jaw set, his dark curls falling across his forehead, and for a moment I thought he might actually take it. Then something in his grip shifted, just enough, and I drove his arm down to the wood with a thud that made the plates jump.
“Damn it.” He shook out his wrist, grinning despite himself. “Rematch when you get back. I want another shot.”
“Deal.” I flexed my hand. My forearm burned. “Thursday. I’ll drive down after lunch. I’ll be back later.” I’d chosen the hour because it left room to ask her to dinner if the meeting went well.
Miner nodded and picked up his fork. “Don’t overthink it. It’s a signature on paper. That’s all she’s expecting.”
I knew better. I’d been inside Velvet Ink’s website enough times in the last month to have the floor plan memorized.
I knew the street-facing windows, the central display table, the sample books lining the wall.
I knew the address, the hours, the neighborhood.
I knew the bodega on the corner and the flower shop two doors down.
Knowing things was what I did. It didn’t make Thursday any easier.
I drove down in the Suburban with the windows cracked and the radio off.
Forty-five minutes of highway, then the exit for Bridgeport, then the slow crawl through neighborhoods I’d studied on maps but had never driven through with my own hands on the wheel.
The East Village unfolded block by block: brick storefronts, awnings, a city packed close before anyone thought to plan for parking.
I found a spot two blocks from Velvet Ink and walked the rest of the way with the folder of proofs from our cheap inkjet printer under my arm and my scent as contained as I could make it.
The door had a bell. I heard it before I saw it: a clear, bright chime that cut through the street noise as I pushed the glass open and stepped inside.
The smell hit me first. Paper. Ink. The warm, slightly wild honeysuckle that had been living in my memory for two months, now present and immediate and so much stronger than the trace I’d caught on Celia’s invitation.
Beneath it ran the herbal scent of her work, blue plant dye and oak-based ink with a faint iron tang.
The combination hit low and hard, leaving my next breath shorter than it should have been.
The shop matched every photograph and still surprised me.
Pale hardwood ran beneath plywood shelves; the brass fixture overhead held the late-afternoon light.
Cards spread across the central table, journals filled the A-frame displays, and bound portfolios occupied the wall behind the counter, each spine marking a piece of her working history.
The photographs had made the room seem generous.
In person, it was tight—honestly, cramped.
One person could work comfortably while two customers browsed, but the proportions had not accounted for a broad-shouldered alpha measuring every turn so his elbows did not send Nitsa’s careful arrangements to the floor.
“Nitsa?” I called, surprised by how cleanly her name carried.
“One sec!” From somewhere in the back, behind a curtain I hadn’t noticed, her voice. Warm. Familiar enough to tighten my chest. A drawer closed. Footsteps crossed hardwood.
She came through the curtain and stopped when she saw me.
Auburn-chestnut waves loose past her shoulders, and she was rolling one shoulder back as she came, working the stiffness out of muscles locked too long over a drafting table.
Olive-warm skin. Strong brows. The full mouth I had not prepared myself to see in daylight.
She smiled. Not wide. Not performative. A real smile, brief and bright enough to reach her eyes first. It was directed at me, and I had not planned for that.
“Denil.” She said my name like it was a fact she was checking. “You made it.”
“I made it.” I held up the proof folder. “Portsmith. Ready when you are.”
She nodded. The shop shrank around us, or I grew too large for it, and the counter became the only safe place between professional and not-professional.