Chapter 4
Nicholas
Another day. Same booth.
I'm aware of how this looks. A man who was told no days ago, still showing up, same order, same seat, same laptop arrangement.
If I were evaluating this behavior in someone else, I'd call it either stubbornly professional or mildly unhinged.
The line between those two things is thinner than most people think.
The bar is quieter today. I set up my workspace — charger left, notebook right, phone facedown — and open my laptop before flagging down the kid behind the bar.
Jason. I've learned his name by proximity, not introduction.
He's the one who brought me water yesterday without being asked, which I'm still not sure how to file.
"IPA and nachos?" he asks.
I haven't ordered yet. "Am I that predictable?"
"Little bit." He almost smiles. Not quite — more like the suggestion of a smile held in reserve. "Full order?"
"Full. Thank you."
He disappears to the kitchen. I open my email.
Daniel —
Extending the assessment through end of week.
The property file from Langford's office has significant gaps I want to document before submitting my report.
Traffic analysis, zoning research, and comparable sales data for the surrounding area are all thin or missing.
Either this was a rush job or someone didn't want a thorough assessment on record.
I'll have the full report by Monday.
— N
I read it twice, adjust the tone on the second sentence — too accusatory, dial it back — and send it. Daniel will read between the lines. He's good at that. He'll also cover for me with Langford, which is the part that matters.
The IPA arrives first. Jason sets it down with a napkin underneath, which is new. Small touches. The kind of thing a server does when someone stops being a stranger and starts being a regular. I don't know when I crossed that line. Sometime between day one and now, apparently.
I take a sip and open the spreadsheet I've been building — the one labeled LANGFORD - WHY THIS PROPERTY.
Three days of data and I still don't have an answer that makes sense.
The zoning doesn't support Coldwell's usual model.
The infrastructure timeline is years out.
The location is wrong for retail, wrong for residential development, wrong for office space.
On paper, this acquisition would be a loss leader at best, a write-off at worst.
Which means it's not about the property. It's about something else.
I make a note: Check Coldwell acquisitions in similar profile areas. Rural, low-density, shifter-adjacent. Pattern?
The nachos come. I eat the edges first. Laptop, nachos, IPA. This is my office for the week, and I've worked in worse. The motel in Spokane didn't even have functioning Wi-Fi.
No humans today.
I notice it about twenty minutes in. The pastry guy isn't at the counter.
The book guy isn't perched on his stool.
It's just — shifters. Five of them, moving through the space in their usual patterns.
The alpha in and out of the office. One somewhere in the garage — I can hear tools.
The quiet one in his corner. Jason behind the bar.
And the one with the spreadsheet, Ezra, on a stool near the register with his laptop and what appears to be an enormous mug of tea.
Five apex predators and me.
I wonder, with the detached calm of someone who processes anxiety through analysis, whether they killed the humans.
Ate them, maybe. Buried the bones in the back.
The librarian was small — that's maybe a day's worth of calories for a large predator.
The pastry guy would've put up more of a fight, based on the way he glared at me for the first two days. Maybe they saved him for the weekend.
I'm not actually worried. This is just what my brain does when it's idle — worst-case modeling. Risk assessment as white noise. If they were going to eat me, they would have done it on day one when I tried to buy their home. The nachos would've been a waste.
More likely, the humans have lives outside this bar. Jobs. The book guy probably works at a library. The pastry guy has a café or something — I've seen him with supply lists. They're not here because they're not here. Simple.
But it's different without them. The energy is different.
Quieter, more watchful, the low hum of predators in a shared space.
They're more relaxed, actually — fewer performances, less code-switching.
Jason's movements behind the bar are looser, less careful.
The mechanic came through ten minutes ago and said something to Ezra in a tone I couldn't parse — flat, short, almost a growl — and Ezra responded with a hand gesture that apparently communicated an entire paragraph because the mechanic nodded and left. Silas turned a page.
I realize I've been cataloging them.
Species. That's the thing I keep circling back to.
The gold eyes suggest big cat — wolves trend amber or pale, bears don't usually have the reflective quality I've seen in Knox's eyes when the light hits them right.
The predator stillness is wrong for canines, who tend toward restless alertness.
These men go still the way ambush predators go still. Patient. Conserving energy. Waiting.
Big cats. Lions, maybe, given the group structure.
Lions are the only big cats that live in social groups — prides.
The rest are solitary. If these were leopards or jaguars, they wouldn't be piled into apartments above a bar.
They'd have separate territories, minimal overlap.
The communal structure, the deference to Knox, the—
My phone rings.
Not the dating app notification that made me want to crawl under the table yesterday — I'd heard the shift in background noise when it went off, the way too many ears turned toward my booth. Shifter hearing. They all heard it. Probably knew exactly what app it was. I'd rather not think about that.
This is an actual call. The ringtone is specific — a ten-second clip of a Taylor Swift song that I didn't choose and can't figure out how to change because my sister set it from three thousand miles away and apparently locked it with a code.
CASS, the screen says.
I glance around the bar. Five shifters who can hear a phone vibrate from across a room are definitely going to hear a phone call. This is a terrible place to take a personal call.
I pick up anyway. I always pick up for Cass.
"Hey."
"Nico! Oh my God, I need you." She's breathless, which either means she's in crisis or she ran up the stairs to her room. With Cass, it's usually the stairs. "Are you busy?"
"I'm working."
"You're always working. This is an emergency."
"What kind of emergency?"
"Fashion emergency. Charlotte's party is Saturday and I have two dresses and I can't decide and Priya is useless, she said they're both fine, which is the most unhelpful thing anyone has ever said in the history of clothing."
I close my eyes. I'm sitting in a bar full of shifters who can hear every word of this conversation, and my eighteen-year-old sister is calling me about dresses.
"Cass, I'm at work."
"You're at a bar. I can hear the background noise. Bars aren't work."
"This one is."
"Whatever. I'm sending pictures. Two seconds."
My phone buzzes twice. I tilt the screen — not toward the room, instinct — and look. The first dress is green, structured, high neckline. The second is blue, softer, lower back. Both are fine. Both are perfectly appropriate for a party thrown by someone named Charlotte.
"The green," I say.
"Really? I thought the blue was more—"
"The green. It's more structured, it'll photograph better, and the color works with your complexion. The blue is pretty but it's trying to be casual and formal at the same time and it's not committing to either."
"See, this is why I call you. Priya would never say 'it's not committing.'"
"Priya is being nice. I'm being useful. There's a difference."
"You sound like a stereotype right now, you know that? The gay brother with fashion opinions."
"You called me specifically for the gay brother with fashion opinions."
"Fair point. Okay, green dress. What shoes?"
"The black ankle boots you bought in October. Not the strappy ones."
"You remember my October boots?"
"You sent me fourteen pictures of them from four angles. They're seared into my memory."
She laughs. I forgot how much I like that sound — bright, unguarded, nothing held in reserve. Cass doesn't perform. She's eighteen and she hasn't learned yet that most people do.
"Okay, emergency resolved. Thank you for your service."
"Anytime."
I should hang up. This is a bar full of people who can hear everything she's saying, everything I'm saying, and the longer this goes on the more of myself I'm leaving in this room.
But Cass doesn't hang up either. There's a pause — the kind that means she's shifting from the easy thing to the real thing.
"When are you coming home?"
"Portland? Few more days. End of the week, probably."
"No, Nico. Home home."
I lean back in the booth. The bar is very quiet.
Not silent — there's the ambient noise of a space with people in it, the clink of Jason washing something, the creak of Silas shifting in his chair.
But the kind of quiet that happens when people are listening without trying to look like they're listening.
"I don't know, Cass."
"You said last month you'd come visit."
"I said I'd try."
"That means no. 'I'll try' always means no with you."
She's not wrong. I rub the bridge of my nose.
London means Uncle Martin's house. Uncle Martin's house means the guest room that's been "my" room for twelve years and still feels like a hotel.
It means Cass across the hall and Martin downstairs and the careful, curated distance of a man who never wanted children and got two of them anyway.
We were born in Atlanta. Grew up there — me until twelve, Cass until six.
Then the accident, and suddenly we were on a plane to London to live with our dad's brother, a man we'd met twice at holidays and couldn't have picked out of a lineup.
Martin did what he was supposed to do. He took us in, hired nannies, found the right boarding schools.
He provided everything two orphaned kids could need except the one thing that would have made it matter.
He never asked us how we were doing. Not once in twelve years.
Not when I came home from school with a black eye, not when Cass cried for our mother every night for a year.
He just — wasn't built for it. Some people aren't.
He's not cruel. That's the thing people don't understand when I don't explain.
He's not neglectful, not abusive, not any of the words that would make the story simple.
He's just absent. Present in the house, absent in every way that counts.
A man doing his duty and waiting, patiently, for it to be over.
I left as soon as I could. Scholarships back to the States, loans, Yale, an ocean between me and the quiet house in Kensington.
Cass is still there. A few more months until university, and then she'll be out too, and Martin will finally have what he's wanted for twelve years — his house back, organized, efficient, and empty.
"A few months," I say. "Summer. I'll come for a week before you start at uni."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"A real promise? Not an 'I'll try' promise?"
"A real promise. I'll book a flight."
"Okay." She sounds relieved, and the guilt lands before I can brace for it. She shouldn't have to be relieved that her brother is going to visit. That should just be a given. But we're the kind of family where nothing is a given and everything has to be negotiated from across an ocean.
"Love you," she says. Easily, the way she says everything.
"Love you too. Wear the green."
"Already decided. Bye!"
She hangs up. The bar is still quiet.
I put my phone facedown. Stare at my laptop screen without seeing it. There's a nachos chip in my hand that I don't remember picking up.
When I look up, Ezra is watching me from behind the bar. Not with the curiosity from the past few days — this is something else. Softer. Almost careful. Like he heard something he wasn't supposed to and doesn't know where to put it.
I hold his gaze for a second. Then I eat the chip and go back to my spreadsheet.
Lions. They're probably lions.