Chapter 2
THE WRECKAGE WE TEND
DANIEL
The Harrington house sat at the end of Birchwood Lane like a wound that refused to close.
I'd driven past it dozens of times in the months since the attack. Told myself I was checking on things. Making sure nothing lurked in the shadows where Anna Harrington had taken her last breath. Making sure the house that had become a crime scene was healing the way houses were supposed to heal.
Lies. All of it. Lies that got harder to swallow every time I found myself turning down this road when I should have been anywhere else.
The house came into view through a break in the trees, and my chest did something complicated.
It looked different than it had six months ago.
The door that had been torn off its hinges had been replaced.
The broken windows were whole again. Fresh paint covered the porch, white over white, like trying to bleach out a ghost.
Michael's truck sat in the driveway. Beat-up Ford that had seen better decades, bed loaded with lumber and construction debris.
I pulled Evan's truck in behind it and killed the engine. Sat there for a moment, hands still on the wheel, listening to the tick of cooling metal and the distant whine of power tools from inside the house.
Get out, I told myself. Stop being a coward.
The smell hit me before I reached the porch.
Beer. Stale and sharp, the kind that came from bottles left open too long. Underneath it, sawdust and fresh paint and sweat and exhaustion. And something darker. Something my wolf didn't want to name but recognized anyway.
Grief. The kind that soaked into walls and floors and skin. The kind that didn't wash out no matter how much you scrubbed.
I could hear Michael's heartbeat from here. Faster than it should be, irregular with the stuttering rhythm of someone running on fumes. His breathing was shallow, ragged at the edges. When he moved, I could track him through the house by sound alone, footsteps heavy with fatigue.
The front door was propped open. I stepped through and found myself in a house trying very hard to forget what had happened here.
New drywall covered the places where rogues had torn through plaster.
New flooring replaced the hardwood that had soaked up too much blood to ever come clean.
The furniture was different, cheaper stuff that didn't quite fit the space, like Michael had bought whatever was available without caring if it matched.
Beer bottles lined the kitchen counter. I counted them without meaning to, wolf senses picking out each one. Eight. No, nine. Empty soldiers standing guard over nothing.
And there, in the living room, Michael Harrington.
He had his back to me, wrestling with a piece of trim near the far wall.
Same clothes he'd been wearing three days ago at the hardware store.
Same stubble shadowing his jaw, grown into something that might have been a beard if he'd been doing it on purpose.
His hands trembled as he lined up the wood, and when he swung the hammer, he missed the nail by a full inch.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Your aim's off,” I said.
Michael spun around so fast he nearly dropped the hammer. His heart rate spiked, I could hear it, jackhammering against his ribs before it started to settle.
“Damn it, Daniel.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Make some noise when you walk, would you? Normal people don't just appear out of thin air.”
“I knocked.”
“No, you didn't.”
“I thought about knocking. That should count.”
“It really doesn't.” But some of the tension bled out of his shoulders. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to watch you miss that nail three times.”
“I missed it twice.”
“I heard three.”
Michael's eyes narrowed. “You heard me. From outside.”
“I have good hearing.”
“You have freaky supernatural hearing.” He set the hammer down on the windowsill, and I watched the fine tremor in his hands. Watched the way he braced himself against the wall like he wasn't sure his legs would hold him up. “What are you doing here, Daniel?”
Good question. Wish I had a good answer.
“Checking on the renovation,” I said, because it was easier than the truth.
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” Michael crossed his arms, and despite the exhaustion carved into every line of his face, there was something sharp in his eyes.
Something that refused to back down just because an Alpha was standing in his living room.
“You don't give a damn about my renovation.
You've been circling this house for months, finding excuses to show up, and I'm too tired to pretend I don't notice.”
My wolf went very still. Caught. Cornered by a human who had no business seeing through me so easily.
“I'm making sure you're okay,” I said.
“I'm fine.”
“Michael.”
“I'm fine.”
I looked at the beer bottles. Looked at the dark circles carved like bruises under his eyes. Looked at the way his hands wouldn't stop shaking no matter how hard he tried to hide them.
“You're not fine. You're running on caffeine and stubbornness and whatever's left in those bottles, and you look like you haven't slept in a week.”
“Four days, actually. But who's counting.”
“Apparently not you.”
Michael's jaw tightened. “I don't need a babysitter, Daniel. Especially not one who thinks he can show up unannounced and tell me how to live my life.”
“I'm not telling you how to live your life.”
“Really? Because that's exactly what it sounds like.”
“I'm telling you that you're going to collapse if you keep this up.”
Michael pushed off the wall, took a step toward me.
He was shorter than me by several inches, softer around the edges in the way humans were, but there was nothing soft about the way he held my gaze.
“You come into my house. My house, Daniel.
The place where my wife died. And you stand there with your Alpha judgment and your wolf senses and you tell me I'm not handling things the right way.
How exactly would you handle it? If it was your house? Your wife's blood on the floor?”
“I wouldn't handle it,” I said quietly. “When Claire died, I took apart the pack house with my bare hands. Tore down walls that didn't need tearing down. Broke things just so I'd have something to fix. Grief doesn't make sense, Michael. It just makes you move.”
Something shifted in Michael's expression. The anger didn't disappear, but it made room for something else. Something that looked almost like recognition.
“You never talk about her,” he said. “Claire.”
“No. I don't.”
“Why not?”
Because it hurts. Because thirteen years isn't long enough to make the memories feel like memories instead of fresh wounds. Because some part of me is terrified that if I start talking about her, I won't be able to stop.
“Because some things are easier to carry when you don't put them into words.”
Michael was quiet for a long moment. His heartbeat had steadied, I noticed. Still too fast, still running on exhaustion, but calmer than before.
“Anna made lists,” he said finally. “For everything. Grocery lists, to-do lists, lists of lists. She had this whole system, color-coded and organized, and I used to tease her about it. Said she was the only person I knew who needed a spreadsheet to buy milk.”
His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, kept going.
“Now I open the fridge and I don't know what to buy.
I walk through the store and everything looks wrong because she's not there to tell me we need eggs or that the bread's gone stale.
I can rebuild a house, Daniel. I can't rebuild the part of my brain that knew how to function because she was handling everything I couldn't.”
“So you drink instead.”
“So I drink instead.” Michael laughed, bitter and broken. “Don't worry, it's not as dramatic as it looks. I'm not going to drink myself to death. I just... the quiet gets loud sometimes. Beer helps make it softer.”
“There are better ways to make quiet softer.”
“Yeah? Like what? Tearing down walls?” He raised an eyebrow. “I'm doing that too, in case you hadn't noticed.”
“I noticed.” I looked around at the half-finished room, the careful repairs, the evidence of weeks of work done by hands that should have been resting. “You're doing good work.”
“I'm doing adequate work. My hands won't stop shaking long enough for good.”
“Then let me help.”
Michael blinked. “What?”
“Let me help. With the renovation.” I shrugged, tried to make it casual. “I'm not useless with a hammer. And you need sleep more than this trim needs finishing.”
“Daniel.” Michael's voice had gone strange. Careful. “You're the Alpha. You don't have time to play contractor for the grieving widower.”
“I have time for whatever I decide I have time for. That's the privilege of being Alpha.”
“That's not...”
“Michael.” I took a step closer, and something in the air changed.
Charged. “You can argue with me. You can tell me to leave.
You can throw things at my head if it makes you feel better.
But you're not going to convince me you don't need help, because my wolf can smell the exhaustion on you from across the room.
So either let me help, or give me a good reason why I shouldn't.”
Michael stared at me. His heart was doing that jackrabbit thing again, but this time it felt different. Less fear, more something else I couldn't quite name.
“You can smell exhaustion?”
“I can smell everything. The beer on your breath. The sawdust in your hair. The coffee you had this morning, which was four cups minimum. The laundry detergent you use, the shampoo you ran out of three days ago and replaced with hand soap.” I paused. “You need to buy more shampoo.”
“That's...” Michael shook his head, but there was something that might have been a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “That's incredibly invasive.”
“That's wolves.”
“How do you turn it off?”
“We don't.”
“So you just walk around smelling everyone's business all the time?”
“Pretty much.”