Epilogue
The distillery smelled like good whiskey and questionable decisions, which meant the night was going exactly right.
Gray had opened the reserve shelf and cleared the barrel table for cards.
Cal was dealing. Shaw had already lost enough chips that he'd stopped keeping track out loud and started keeping track silently, which was worse.
Fen sat at the far end giving nothing away, the way he always did, and Diego had materialized on his way home, looked at the table, and pulled up a stool like he'd been invited.
Gray had even pulled in Bram, one of the harbor wolves, who had actually shown up, which would have been unthinkable six weeks ago, before a certain witch had given him a reason to leave the marina.
Ryker laid down his cards and raked in the chips, taking his time about it.
"Oh, come on." Shaw stared at the table. "Are you kidding me?"
"What can I say? Good cards."
"You've had good cards all night." Shaw shoved his remaining stack to the side. "It's suspicious."
"Mated wolves cheat at poker," Cal said, dealing the next hand without looking up. "It's well documented."
"That's not a thing," Ryker said.
"Statistically proven."
"By who."
"Me. Just now." Cal set down the deck. "I'm documenting it."
Shaw pointed at Ryker across the table. "You know what the worst part is? A few months ago you sat in that exact chair and told me you weren't interested in her."
"I wasn't."
"You were absolutely interested in her."
"I was handling it."
"You were handling it," Shaw repeated, to the table generally. "That's what we're calling it."
"He handled it right up until he opened his mouth and inserted his foot," Diego said, pushing chips to the center. "I’m still surprised she forgave you instead of turning you into a toad or something."
"I raise," Ryker said, refusing to rise to the bait Diego was dishing out. He knew a distraction when he saw one.
"That's not a response."
"It's the only one you're getting."
Cal leaned back. "My personal favorite moment, and I have given this real thought, was the stockroom. When he had her cornered and then just—"
"I fold," Ryker said, giving in as quickly as he’d planned to not let them get to him.
The whole table lost it. Gray set down his hand and turned away, shoulders shaking.
Fen made a sound that had no business coming from a man that quiet.
Bram looked around at everyone, still working out the rhythms of this particular group and deciding it was absolutely worth staying for. Diego raised his glass without a word.
Shaw wiped his eyes. "He folded."
"The cards were bad," Ryker said.
"The cards were fine," Cal said. "I could see your cards from here."
Ryker picked up his whiskey and let them have it.
They'd earned it. Every single one of them had watched him be a walking disaster for too long.
The fact they were all still here said something about the quality of his pack and something equally unflattering about his behavior.
He could take the ribbing. He'd be taking it for years and he was fine with that.
Cal caught his eye across the table. Brief. Quiet. Cal had been calling him an idiot since he got a stick up his ass about Willow. He'd been right. Neither of them needed to revisit it. Cal went back to his cards.
Ryker's hand found the poker chip in his pocket out of habit, turned it once, let it go.
"For the record," Gray said, dealing, "I was right."
Everyone looked at him.
"About Willow." He didn't look up from the deck. "I was right from the start."
"I disputed it," Ryker said. "Loudly."
"You did." Gray set the deck down and finally looked at him, with the expression of a man who had been patient for a very long time and was now savoring his moment. "I was still right."
Ryker was still laughing when the door opened.
The cold came in, and with it a woman nobody had scented coming.
That landed first, before he'd taken in anything else about her.
A room full of wolves whose senses should have registered a stranger at the bridge, and she'd walked the whole path to their door in complete silence.
He saw the same realization cross every face at the table in the same instant, that cold, quiet flicker of unease.
She was small. Soaked through, standing in the doorway with water dripping off her coat onto the floor, dark hair wild around her face in a way that had never met a brush.
Wide eyes the color of deep water moved around the room fast, cataloguing the copper stills, the barrel rows, the faces turning toward her one by one.
Not with wariness but with the focused hunger of someone who had been starved of new things and intended to make up for it.
Her clothes sat strangely on her. Ryker couldn't have named how, only that they did. Her coat was inside out and he was fairly certain she hadn't even noticed.
Cal was the one who broke the silence. "Can we help you?"
She turned those wide eyes on him. "I'm looking for the siren," she said. Clear, direct, no softening in it. "I heard my sister found sanctuary here. I need to see her tonight and I don’t have much time."
The word sister hit the room like a thrown match.
Every wolf at the table went rigid. Chairs scraped back.
Shaw was on his feet first. Fen had moved from the doorway to a position that put him between her and the interior of the room.
Cal's hand had gone flat on the table, cards abandoned, his eyes locked on her with the focused stillness of a man running threat assessment at speed.
Even Bram, who'd spent most of the evening learning the group's rhythms, had gone golden-eyed and motionless.
A siren's sister. In their distillery. Having walked through the door without any of them scenting her coming.
Ryker's wolf was at the surface in a heartbeat, every instinct screaming.
Sirens lured and compelled. They didn't need to open their mouths to start pulling at you, it was in the blood, in the air around them, and half the stories about what sirens could do to shifters were not stories anyone wanted to test. He could feel it moving through the room, that collective spike of alarm, every wolf present suddenly very aware of where the exits were.
She blinked at them. Looked at Shaw standing, then at Fen's new position. Looked at the gold burning in Cal's eyes and tilted her head as if taking careful notes.
"You're a siren?" Cal's voice came out flat and hard, with an edge of warning.
"No." She looked almost offended. "I'm her sister." A pause. "By choice, not blood. I'm a witch." She looked around at the taut, wired silence and added, with what appeared to be genuine helpfulness, "I can't sing."
Shaw sat down slowly. Fen didn't move yet. Cal's eyes stayed gold for another long moment before fading back, and even then he didn't look away from her.
Ryker's wolf stepped back from the surface, reluctantly. The alarm didn't vanish so much as recalibrate, shifting from the specific dread of siren compulsion to the more general category of unknown supernatural in the room. Still elevated. Still watchful.
She seemed unbothered by all of it.
Every man at the table was still watching her when Gray spoke. "Where did you come from?"
She looked at him with those deep-water eyes, considering. "That little island right next to this one," she said. "The one you call Dead Man's Island."
The silence that followed moved through the room like a current. Cal's hand froze halfway to his glass. Shaw's boots came off the crate. Fen straightened in the doorway. The hair on the back of Ryker's neck rose before his brain caught up with why.
Dead Man's Island. The place the pack kept their distance from, not because any alpha had declared it off-limits but because every wolf who'd gotten close enough in the water had come back wearing a look that needed no translation.
The silhouette on the horizon in the muted light.
The sounds that carried over the water on certain nights.
The place that made instinct scream turn around before you could name the reason.
The place nothing supposedly survived long.
And this small dripping woman had come from there? What the hell was going on?
She looked at their faces. Something shifted in hers, the first uncertainty she'd shown.
She pulled her coat tighter, then looked down, noticed it was inside out, and turned it the right way around with brisk efficiency, as though this were a perfectly reasonable thing to do mid-conversation. "Did I say something wrong?"
The silence held another beat.
Then Ryker caught movement in his peripheral vision.
Damien stood in the doorway to the back room, arms crossed, expression unreadable.
Nobody had heard him come in, which meant he'd been there long enough to hear all of it.
He looked at Cal with the expression of an alpha who has made a decision and expects it executed without discussion.
Cal looked back with the expression of a man who had done nothing to deserve this moment.
Neither spoke.
Cal set his glass down. Pulled the stool beside him out and jerked his chin at it.
"Sit," he said. "You're dripping on the floor."
She looked at the stool, then at Cal. "I don't need to sit. I need to find the siren. I told you, I can't stay long."
"Five minutes while we sort out what's happening."
"I've been gone since this morning." The shake in her voice told him she really was quite nervous. "How long will this take?"
Nobody had an answer for that.
She sat anyway, folding herself onto the stool with the economical movements of someone accustomed to small spaces, and immediately began taking in the room again, all of it absorbed with the same systematic focus.
"What are those for?" She pointed at the stills.
"Distilling," Cal said. He was not looking at her.
"Distilling what?"
"Whiskey."