Greed (Demon Daddies #2)

Chapter 1

Nora

The thing about minus twenty-two is that it stops being cold and starts being personal. Like the air has opinions about you. Angry ones. January in Anchorage looks at your exposed skin and thinks, yeah, I’m going to kill that.

Covenant House sat squat and stubborn against the cold, a concrete rectangle that had never been beautiful and wasn’t trying to be.

The heating vents above the entrance door exhaled thin plumes of steam that froze almost immediately into wisps of ice crystal.

Someone had taped a handwritten sign to the glass: CAPACITY FULL — PLEASE SEE STAFF FOR ALTERNATIVES.

I’d written that sign three days ago. Truth was though, there were no alternatives.

Inside, the shelter smelled over capacity: too many bodies, not enough ventilation, industrial disinfectant fighting a losing war against wet wool and unwashed skin and the particular sour undertone of people who’d been sleeping in their clothes for weeks.

I breathed through my mouth for the first thirty seconds—not because I judged anyone for it, but because my gag reflex hadn‘t developed the same philosophical flexibility as the rest of me.

Twelve beds over capacity.

I counted the cots as I walked the hall: lined up along the east corridor like a field hospital, blankets humped over sleeping forms, a few faces visible—weathered, wind-burned, slack with the particular exhaustion that comes from never being warm enough.

The heating system in the east wing had been making a sound for the past week that I could only describe as tubercular, a wet rattling wheeze that suggested the whole unit was preparing to die without dignity.

The temperature back here was maybe fifty-five degrees. Better than outside. Not by enough.

Two new arrivals waited at intake, stamping their feet on the rubber mat like they were trying to remind their legs they existed.

The first was a woman in her forties, fingers waxy and white at the tips—classic superficial frostbite, the kind that looks deceptively mild until you warm it too fast and the pain hits.

The second was a kid, maybe nineteen, who wouldn’t make eye contact and held his hands against his chest like he was cradling something breakable.

When I peeled his gloves off his fingertips were mottled purple and grey.

Deep tissue. He was going to lose at least one nail, possibly two.

I warmed them both according to protocol—lukewarm water, not hot, never hot, despite every instinct screaming to blast them with heat.

Ibuprofen. Dry socks. I wrapped the kid’s hands in loose gauze and didn’t say the word hospital because I could see in his shoulders that the word hospital was the same as the word bill was the same as the word debt was the same as the word gone.

I said, “We’ll keep an eye on those,” which was shelter code for I’ll worry about this so you don’t have to.

After intake, I did the supply closet. I did the supply closet the way some people do a rosary—ritualistic, dreading the count, hoping the numbers would be different this time even though numbers don’t work that way.

Four days of canned food. Six blankets. Zero thermal underlayers.

I stared at the empty shelf where the thermals should have been and felt the one I was wearing shift against my skin beneath my flannel.

My spare set was currently keeping a woman named Deb alive—Deb, who’d walked in last night at eleven PM in a cotton hoodie and yoga pants, and I hadn’t even thought about it, hadn’t performed any calculation more complex than she‘s cold, I have a thing, the thing fixes the cold. I’d pulled the thermal top over my head in the back hallway and handed it to her still warm from my body, and she’d started crying, and I’d said, “Don’t worry about it. ”

I closed the supply closet. Wrote the numbers on the whiteboard. Drew a small skull and crossbones next to the thermal count, because if you can‘t fix the problem, you might as well editorialize.

Marcus found me in the kitchen at noon. Marcus was sixty-one, a Tlingit man with a voice like gravel being dragged over more gravel, a regular at Covenant House since before I started.

He’d missed dinner last night because he’d been picked up for public intoxication and spent eight hours in a holding cell downtown, which meant he’d gone roughly eighteen hours without eating, which at minus twenty-two was the kind of math that killed people.

“Missed you last night,” I said, pulling my lunch from my bag. Peanut butter on wheat, made at 6 AM in my kitchen with the precision of someone who had exactly enough peanut butter for one sandwich and no margin for error. “Heard you had a spa night downtown.”

Marcus grunted. “Worst hotel in the city. Wouldn’t recommend.”

“The reviews are terrible.” I handed him the sandwich. “Here. I already ate.”

He looked at me. Marcus had the kind of eyes that had seen so much bullshit they’d developed a permanent filter for it, and I watched the filter engage as he assessed my offer.

But hunger won over suspicion, the way it always does, and he took the sandwich with both hands, carefully, like it mattered.

“Thank you, Nora.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I watched him eat my lunch and felt nothing about it—not virtue, not hunger, not sacrifice. Just the clean, simple satisfaction of a problem solved. He needed food. I had food. The transaction was complete.

Dev caught me an hour later, restocking the first aid kit by the front desk. Dev, who was six-foot-two and gentle as a Labrador, had this infuriating habit of paying attention to things I didn’t want anyone to notice.

“Hey.” He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “Did you eat today?”

“Grabbed something earlier,” I said, not looking up from the box of adhesive bandages I was sorting by size.

“Nora.”

“Hmm?”

“What did you grab?”

I paused. Considered lying with more specificity. Decided it wasn’t worth the energy. “Coffee counts as a meal. The sugar.”

Dev sighed—a long, patient exhale that carried the weight of every conversation like this we’d ever had. “I have an extra granola bar in my—“

“I’m fine. We need to talk about the east wing heating before it gives out completely, and I want to get a count on—“

“Nora.”

“I’m fine, Dev.”

He looked at me the way Marcus had looked at the sandwich—assessing, weighing, deciding whether to push.

He didn’t push. People rarely did. I was very good at making fine sound like a closed door, and Dev, for all his gentle persistence, knew when he was standing in a hallway that didn’t lead anywhere.

He went back to work. So did I. The hunger sat somewhere below my ribs, small and patient, waiting for me to acknowledge it.

I didn’t. There were beds to turn over, intake forms to file, a heating system to beg the landlord about, and somewhere in the east wing a nineteen-year-old kid with frostbitten fingers who needed someone to check his gauze in an hour.

My feet were cold. My stomach was empty. My thermal was on someone else’s body.

I didn’t notice any of it. I was already moving.

Greg Halston from Prudhoe Bay Energy arrived at two o’clock wearing a Canada Goose parka that cost more than my monthly rent and carrying a reusable coffee tumbler with the company logo embossed in silver.

He shook my hand with the firm, practiced grip of a man who’d been trained in handshake psychology.

His palm was warm and dry and moisturized, which told me everything I needed to know about the distance between his life and the lives of the people sleeping twelve-to-a-hallway on the other side of the wall.

“Nora, right? Greg. Pleasure.” His smile was expensive—white, even, the product of orthodontia and professional whitening. He scanned the intake office with the benevolent interest of someone touring a museum exhibit about poverty. “Quite an operation you’re running here.”

We sat in the director‘s office—me, Halston, Dev against the back wall with his arms crossed, and Linda, our director, behind her desk with the expression of a woman who’d been running a shelter for fifteen years and could smell money the way dogs smell fear.

Halston laid it out like a man who’d given this pitch before.

Forty thousand dollars. Unrestricted—well, mostly unrestricted.

Intended for winter operations: food supply, bedding, heating repairs, staff support.

Prudhoe Bay Energy’s commitment to the Anchorage community, their passion for making a difference where it counted, their belief that corporate responsibility meant more than just a line on a balance sheet.

I did the math while he talked because the math was involuntary.

Forty thousand bought us out of the supply crisis.

Forty thousand fixed the east wing heating.

Forty thousand meant three months—ninety days—of not staring at the whiteboard tallying our countdown to collapse.

Forty thousand meant I could stop rationing canned goods and start feeding people like they were people instead of equations.

The number sat in my chest like something warm and alive, and I wanted it so badly my teeth ached.

“Now, in terms of partnership visibility,” Halston said, transitioning with the smooth gear-shift of a man who’d practiced this in a hotel mirror, “we’d love to explore a few opportunities for mutual benefit.”

There it was. The hinge. The place where the gift became a deal.

The east wing would be rebranded as the Prudhoe Bay Community Suite.

There would be signage—tasteful, he assured us, very tasteful—and a launch event with media presence.

A photo opportunity with Mr. Halston and some of the shelter‘s residents, “to put faces to the impact.” Quarterly reports with what he called “impact metrics”—occupancy numbers, success stories, before-and-after narratives that could be featured in Prudhoe Bay’s annual Corporate Social Responsibility report.