Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Stella turned the deadbolt on the front door of the Fate Mountain Diner. The dining room was empty. The last customer, a long-haul trucker who’d nursed a coffee and a slice of pie for an hour, had just pulled out of the lot in a rumble of diesel.
Front-of-house staff had cashed out an hour ago.
The booths were wiped, the salt and pepper shakers were squared up, and the napkin dispensers were refilled.
The mural on the back wall caught the overhead light.
Lake, firs, a bear standing on a ridge. Her mom had commissioned it from a local artist when Stella was in middle school. She turned off the dining room lights.
Eddie had broken down the line and walked out the back twenty minutes ago, leaving the kitchen clean and the prep list for the morning shift taped to the pass. The grill was off. The fryers were drained. The walk-in was closed. The dish pit was empty.
She walked down the hall to the office. The receipts from both registers were on her desk, banded and labeled.
Stella sat and ran the numbers, pulled the deposit together, signed the slip, and locked the cash bag in the safe for the morning bank run.
Eighteen hundred and change. She did her last walk.
Back doors locked. Office door locked. Walk-in temperature reading on the log. Alarm pad set to night mode.
She went to turn off the lights in the staff room.
There was a bank of cubbies along one wall where the servers and line cooks left their bags and jackets.
A time clock by the door. A long corkboard beside the time clock, where Stella pinned the staff schedule, the health code postings, the food handler certifications, the OSHA wage-and-hour notice, and the various official documents that needed to live somewhere visible.
She hung her apron on a peg and picked up a sweater Nell had left over the back of a chair and folded it.
As she turned to leave, her eyes caught a photo on the corkboard.
Six faces in a neat row across the bottom, printed off the internet by her father.
Below it was a sign in black marker that read “DO NOT SERVE” in her father’s blocky handwriting.
Stella had been at a wedding in Bend the week her father had put it up. She’d come home to half the booths in pieces, two of the front windows boarded over with plywood while they waited on new glass, and a staff who was all mildly traumatized.
Savage Steel MC claimed they didn’t start it. Her dad hadn’t cared. He didn’t care who threw the first punch. He cared who was still in his dining room with their fists up when the police arrived. Five men and a woman.
The whole pack had ridden into town that day and torn up the place Shane and Lily Keenan had built together for thirty years. Shane had told every staff member that anyone who served this wolf pack was fired.
The faces on the wall stared out at the staff room in their grainy printout resolution.
She knew them by sight. The MC had opened a business down Main Street called Steel Protection.
They’d helped the local PD with a few cases, and their reputation in the village had improved a lot.
It had not improved with the Keenan family.
As she turned to leave the break room, her phone buzzed in her purse. She pulled it out. There was a notification on the lock screen.
Congratulations! We’ve found your fated mate.
Stella braced herself against the cubbies, pressed her hand to her chest, and tried to breathe.
She tapped the profile. His photo loaded.
Dark brown hair. Bright blue eyes. A jaw that looked like it had been carved out of something harder than bone. A nose that had been broken more than once. A full mouth that was set in a hard line. He was at a bar, scowling at the camera.
Stella’s mouth dropped. She knew that bar. More importantly, she knew that face. She turned her head slowly and looked at the corkboard. He was third from the left. Her stomach sank, and she almost lost her dinner.
She looked back at her phone. The username under the photo read Fighter Wolf. The stats below ran Wolf shifter. 34. The bio was short. Threat Response Specialist. Pack matters. Cooking is good. Quiet is better.
Her hands were shaking. Her bear was on its feet inside her, roaring and clawing at the backs of her eyes.
Mate.
Her bear knew. Stella’s body knew. Some bone-deep part of her that had been quiet for thirty-four years looked at a photograph and said, that one.
That’s mine. She wanted to message him and tell him her whole life story.
Stella sat down before her legs gave out.
She stared at the corkboard. Her father had banned the whole pack. How could one of them be her mate?