4. Caius
FOUR
CAIUS
Ifile the incident report at midnight and don’t believe a word of it.
Unknown intruders. Motive unclear. No suspects identified. Bureaucratic language for a scene that told a very different story to anyone who knew how to read it—a search, not a robbery. Someone looking for something specific in Mathilda Thornwood’s effects, careful enough to make it look like chaos.
Someone who knew what they were looking for.
I send two wolves to watch the property overnight and don’t tell Anouk I’ve doubled the patrol. She’d call it excessive. She’d be wrong, but she’d call it that anyway, and I’m tired enough tonight not to want the argument.
Instead I sit at my desk with Mathilda’s case file and think about the way Anouk’s shoulder felt against mine over a pile of broken glass. The way she didn’t pull away.
We. She let the word stand between us like it belonged there.
I’ve waited years for smaller things than that.
My second, Bram, drops a fresh pot of coffee on my desk without being asked—a mercy I don’t deserve given how many hours I’ve had him running down leads tonight—and lingers in the doorway with the particular patience of someone who wants to say something and hasn’t decided how.
“You’re smiling,” he says finally. “At a burglary report.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“You are. It’s unsettling. Please stop.”
I don’t stop. I finish the report, sign it, and set tomorrow’s patrol schedule to route past the apothecary twice instead of once—not because the threat assessment requires it.
Because I want the excuse.
Small comforts. I’ll take them where I find them, for as long as she lets me.