14. Briar
brIAR
I’ve stopped sleeping well in the east wing. My room is scentless by protocol, and I lie awake there. In the lobby, surrounded by woodsmoke and the faint scents of three men, I fall asleep over my notes.
That’s how I come to be walking the halls with a cold cup of chamomile when I see light bleeding under the west wing door.
The west wing is shut, sheeted, off every rota. This light’s moving, lantern-grade, and there’s one set of fresh scuffs through the dust at the threshold, so I do what any credentialed professional does at that hour in a dying lodge. I follow it.
Three doors down, Rhys Hale is sitting on the floor between sheeted armchairs with a camp lantern and the guest ledger across his knees. He looks exhausted and does not try to smile.
“Busted,” he says quietly. “You want the operations version or the real one?”
“I always want both. I bill them separately, and the real one costs more.”
“Operations version, I’m checking the shut wing for damp, which I actually do, so it isn’t even a lie.” He tips the big book toward the lantern. “Real version, this is the guest ledger, and I come out here some nights and read it.”
I lower myself onto the sheeted ottoman across from him, cold chamomile and all.
Around us the furniture stands in its shrouds, and under the dust, faint as a watermark, the room still carries scent, the pack’s four old signatures steeped into upholstery nobody sits on.
Three of them I could name in the dark by now.
The fourth is soft, lilac under old rain, half-faded, and nobody in this lodge will ever say its name in front of me.
Rhys finds the page he wants without looking.
“There’s an entry in here, generations old, where a guest complains the mountain’s too visible from his room.
Otherwise perfect, he writes. Gideon’s grandfather answers in the margin, offering to move the mountain for a modest fee, quote, as soon as the spring rush concludes.
Guest takes the room again the next year and reports the mountain regrettably unmoved.
The correspondence runs three more visits, and the final entry, in the grandfather’s hand, says relocation of mountain remains under consideration, in the interim we have relocated your room.
” He closes the record softly. “Gideon used to read that one aloud every winter, doing both voices, and it killed every damn time.”
His scent fills the closed room. Heat spreads from my wrists to my nape, and for once I stop pretending the response is merely clinical.
“You didn’t come out here for damp or comedy,” I say. “You come out here to keep it company.”
The lantern hisses gently. Rhys looks around the room, and when he answers, his voice has the flat honesty of the meeting room, the day the petition surfaced.
“This was the after-dinner room. Guests in the lounge, pack in here, one lamp, whatever was left in the coffee pot. We were a working pack in this room, is the point. When we shut the wing, everybody said the word seasonal, and then nobody ever said any word about it again. So yes, I keep it company, because the alternative’s agreeing that it’s storage. ”
“And the petition?”
“The petition.” He laughs without much in it.
“You know what I actually risked, Briar? It wasn’t the charter.
The charter was dying anyway, politely, in the family style.
I risked being the one who made us say it out loud.
Gideon can forgive me for going behind his back.
What’s harder is that every time he looks at me now, the mark date’s right there, proof his second thinks the pack alpha would’ve chosen the quiet death.
And the hell of it is I don’t think that.
I think he was waiting for permission to fight, and a county form was a coward’s way to hand it to him.
It was also the only way I had. I read three statutes looking for a better one. There wasn’t a better one.”
“And Soren?”
“Soren’s administering justice.” Rhys holds up a hand, ticking off sanctions.
“My dinners are technically perfect and come with no bread. My coffee’s fresh and arrives without comment.
Last night there was dessert for three, and mine was, I want to be accurate about this, slightly smaller.
He’ll thaw when he thaws. In this pack you don’t get yelled at, you get portioned.
” He rubs his face, and the lantern light catches the tired under the charm.
“There’s your real version. The performance is over.
This is the whole backstage, one man and a lantern, reading jokes to furniture. ”
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “the backstage is considerably better company.”
The look he gives me then arrives with no charm on it whatsoever, and it turns out that was the dangerous version all along.
He moves the record off his knees and shifts closer. Heat spreads down my spine. I lean toward him before I stop myself.
“You know what you smell like?” His voice drops.
“I’ve been sitting on this since the first morning.
Rowan berries in the sun, right at the top, and underneath it sweet cream.
First week, I honestly thought housekeeping had changed the furniture polish.
Then I realized I only smelled it when you were nearby.
” A breath. “Rowan berries, Briar, in this town. You’ve seen what’s planted all the way up the mountain.
I’m not saying tradition’s right. I’m saying if you wanted a pack of grown men to lose their minds quietly, you couldn’t have designed it better. ”
“Biology has a sense of humor. It’s why I have a rule.”
“I know the rule.” He is close enough that I can feel the heat from his hand before he raises it. The movement is slow, visible, and easy to refuse. His palm stops just short of my jaw. “May I touch you, Briar? I need a clear answer.”
I want to close the distance. Heat runs from my nape down my spine, and his scent fills the sealed room. I breathe him in and hold still. Wanting him does not change the rule, and he waits without moving his hand.
Then I invoke the clause, because nobody else in this room is going to save us, and it was never going to be him.
“The rule applies.” I lean back. “Nothing gets named or acted on. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry it was you who asked.”
His hand lowers. What happens on his face isn’t the crash I braced for, and it isn’t performance either. He takes it in, and then, with the elastic grace that’s going to be somebody’s ruin someday, he smiles his smallest true smile.
“Then I’ll still be here when the contract expires,” he says. “I can wait.”
“It’s the burning out by midwinter that people remember,” I say, and it’s unkind, and he takes it standing.
“Not this particular sunshine. This one’s on the rota.”
He walks me back to the east stairs with the lantern, respectful about it, telling me one more note on the way.
A couple, generations back, called off their bonding ceremony over breakfast and rebooked it before the dinner service, and the grandfather’s margin note reads held the pavilion regardless, weather I can predict, people never.
Rhys recites it from memory in the old man’s voice, and I understand all at once that hope, in this man, is hereditary.
If his arm never quite brushes mine on the stairs, it isn’t for lack of pull on both sides.
At my door he pauses. “One professional question, then. Under clause four, what’s the policy on courting gifts?”
“Prohibited. Obviously.”
“Prohibited,” he repeats, far too cheerfully, and bids me goodnight.
Inside, I reach for the hamper and stop. The cardigan carries his scent. I put it on the chair instead.
The official log gets one line before I turn out the lamp. Symptoms noted, gland activity, bilateral, wrist and nape. Attributed to circulation. We both know circulation is a lie.
Then I sleep, all night, which hasn’t happened once in my sanctioned quarantine.
I don’t wash the cardigan. I’m not going to, either.