Grace
The supply room off the ops wing has three shelves of first aid stock, two rolling carts, and a door that swings inward. I’ve restocked it four times since I started helping out around the compound. Nobody else comes in here unless they’re bleeding.
Today I’m counting saline packs, because last week’s requisition manifest has a discrepancy, and right now wading through stock is just the sort of mindless task I need.
I work from the top shelf down. Saline, gauze rolls, tensor bandages. I keep the count in my head—which is probably a mistake, because right now my head is full of other things.
Serenity. The meet at the depot. Finding some way to survive this whole mess.
What the hell am I going to do?
I’m on the second shelf when the door opens.
The room changes before I see him. The air doesn’t shift, the temperature doesn’t drop…
nothing I could point to. But it gets smaller, the way a room does when something large and very still comes into it.
The part of me that learned in the facility to feel a person’s weight before their footfall goes quiet and alert.
I turn around.
The man I’ve seen twice in the corridors is standing three feet inside the door. I suck in a breath. I knew he was big, but up close it’s like looking up a cliff face. Bear, someone in the dormitory wing said two days ago.
Calm down.
He’s not doing anything threatening. He’s just there, taking up the space he takes up, with the stillness of something that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Before I know I’m doing it, I do the thing I’ve done since I was seven and my mother showed me how to use my power. I reach for the glamour and pull it close—don’t see me, look past me, I’m no one—the same practiced compression I’ve worn so long it fits like a second skin.
He looks at me.
Directly. The way you look at a person, not through them, not past them. Like the trick isn’t working.
I go very still. Stillness is what the glamour leans on. I know this. I also know the glamour doesn’t fail. Not on anyone. Not since I was a child still learning how to use it.
Except, apparently, on him.
“I’m looking for an airway kit,” he says. Low, unhurried. “Someone said they’re kept off the ops corridor.”
“Top shelf,” I say. “Left side, in the red case. You might need the—” I stop. Telling him he’ll need a ladder seems fairly redundant.
He goes to it. He doesn’t try to ease around me, doesn’t make himself smaller the way tall men sometimes do in close quarters. He moves where he needs to move, and I step toward the cart to make room.
Not enough room.
He’s close enough that I could have reached the same shelf. If I’d had the ladder.
He leans over me, his chest inches from my nose, and I catch myself pulling in a deep, heady breath.
Oh, my God.
He smells like…like sin. Rich. Earthy. Warm. Male. So damned male. Something shifts under my skin, and I know it’s my wolf, closer to the surface than she’s been in years. Paying attention. Her interest is strange to me. So is my own.
I drop my chin and fix my eyes on the button in the center of his chest. His very wide, very thick chest. In a soft denim shirt, faded and well-worn, molded to him.
My face barely reaches the top of his ribs.
And the urge to lean in and rest my cheek right there, over his heart, is suddenly overwhelming.
Because clearly I’ve lost my freaking mind.
He reaches the shelf without stretching, finds the case, opens it, checks it, closes it again. Steps back.
I pick up a clipboard and write a number. I don’t know what number. I don’t even know where the clipboard came from.
He doesn’t leave.
“You were here Tuesday,” he says.
Not a question. I look up from the board. He’s not looking at the case anymore. He’s looking at me, and it makes me want to squirm.
“I help out where I’m needed,” I say. Then, because I feel like I have to: “Um. I’m Grace.”
“Decker.”
Decker. Strong. Solid. It suits him.
I nod at the case. “You’ll want to sign it out at the equipment desk. First door past the corridor junction.”
“I know where it is.”
He’s still there.
There’s a pressure that comes from being looked at by someone who doesn’t seem to need anything from you and is still looking.
Being looked at is something I’ve spent years avoiding, for a lot of reasons.
I’ve felt every kind of attention and learned how to manage all of it: the scanning kind that wants to know if you’re a threat, the absent kind that looks through you to the thing it actually wants, the practiced kind that performs interest without meaning it. I know how to deflect all of them.
This is none of those, and I don’t know what it is, and my body is doing something I never gave it permission to do. Mostly shaking.
I take an involuntary step back and bump into the shelving. And suddenly he’s looming overhead, pressed right up against me this time.
“What—?” I squawk, my heart going a mile a minute.
His bicep is over my head, my face against the chest I’d just been imagining myself nuzzling into.
God, he’s warm.
I look up in time to see him push a box back onto the shelf where it had been about to tip off.
“Don’t want that falling on you,” he says, and steps away.
Something in me moves.
Not away from him. That’s the part that makes no sense.
I’ve spent two years keeping careful distance from every person I meet, and what happens in my chest when he’s that close is not distance.
It’s a pull, low under my ribs, animal and certain, there before I can stop it.
It frightens me more than a raised hand would, because I don’t know what to do with it.
“You okay?” he says.
“Yes. Thanks,” I manage
I look at the clipboard where I’ve dropped it. I stoop and pick it up.
He’s quiet a moment. Then: “Clean count?”
I look up.
“The list,” he says. “You’ve started over twice.”
My hand doesn’t tighten on the board. “I found a discrepancy.”
He nods once, slow, like that answers something that wasn’t the question he asked.
I understand, with the cold clarity of a woman who’s spent too many months being careful, that this man did not come in here for an airway kit.
I don’t change my face. I’ve had a lot of practice.
“Long week,” I say, which isn’t a lie.
He holds the case at his side and looks at me with that unnerving intensity again.
“Thanks for the help,” he says finally. “Grace.”
He says my name the way you say a thing you mean to keep track of.
Then he goes.
The door swings shut. The room comes back to its right size.
I stand there a full minute. The glamour’s still loose around me; I can feel it, sitting unset, the way it does when something’s gotten too close to the surface for the trick to cover.
I put the clipboard on the cart and start the count again from the top.
He came in for something ordinary, or he didn’t. He saw me, which nobody does. He stood close enough that I felt the heat coming off him, and something in me answered before I could stop it, and that—that animal pull—is the part I can’t put down.
My wolf has been folded away so long I’d half-convinced myself she was just quiet by nature. She’s not folded now. She’s aimed at the door he walked through, steady and certain. I press the heel of my hand flat to my breastbone. The pull doesn’t move.
“Breathe. Just breathe,” I tell myself.
He’s big and scary. That’s all.
I finish the count. I write the numbers in the right column, correct this time, and I don’t let myself think about the look on his face when he’d fixed it on me.
He’s the first person in years the glamour hasn’t touched.
That should be the thing I’m afraid of.
It is. It’s just not the only thing.