Chapter 4
Lola
The café is called Tristan’s, which I know because Elsie told me and also because it says so on the sign in hand-painted letters that manage to look deliberate rather than cheap. The font is slightly uneven. I find this endearing and I don’t know why.
It’s early. Early enough that the carnival crew is still setting up and Main Street has that morning wake up atmosphere. Cool air, long shadows, the smell of coffee strong enough to be a physical force from half a block away.
I’ve slept three hours on a mattress that was better than I deserved and I’ve had exactly none of the coffee required for human functioning. I am therefore operating at approximately fifty percent capacity and with considerably less patience than usual.
The fifty percent reduction is Jack’s fault.
I push open the café door. The bell above it announces me cheerfully.
The man behind the counter looks up, and I perform the automatic checks that I always perform—threat assessment, exit locations, how many other people, what are their body orientations—and land on one staff member, four other patrons spread across tables, and no obvious problems.
Then I recalibrate, because the man behind the counter is something worth looking at.
He’s tall. Dark-haired, with muscled forearms that come from actual work rather than a gym.
He’s holding a cloth in one hand and looking at me with an expression of such immediate, uncomplicated warmth that I feel my own face do something complicated in response before I can stop it.
“Good morning,” he says. His voice is low and unhurried. “Sit anywhere you like.”
I sit at the counter because I have never in my life sat at a window table, which is a visibility problem I solved at age seven and have not revisited since.
He puts a menu in front of me and then doesn’t hover, which I appreciate. Most people hover. He goes back to whatever he was doing and I look at the menu and feel, for the first time in several days, something approaching calm.
Not safe. I’m not na?ve. My panic is just quieter than it was.
I order coffee and eggs on toast. He brings the coffee first, and it’s good. Not just functional, genuinely, ridiculously good. I wrap both hands around the mug and feel approximately thirty percent more human.
“New in town?” he asks, not in a prying way. More in a making conversation kind of way.
“Passing through,” I reply.
He smiles. It does something to his face that I register and file away under not my problem. “That’s what everyone says.”
“Do they stay?”
“More than you’d think, actually.” He sets a small plate of something next to my coffee without being asked. A pastry of some kind, golden and glossy, smelling of butter and something faintly citrus. “On the house. Carnival week special.”
I eat it without any further feigned reluctance because I am hungry and it smells incredible.
It’s extraordinary. I say nothing about this, but something in my expression must shift because he looks quietly pleased in a way that isn’t smug, just satisfied.
Like feeding people well is genuinely the point, and I’ve confirmed it.
“Are you Tristan?” I ask.
“That’s me.” He extends a hand across the counter. “You are?”
“Lola.”
His hand is warm, his grip is firm, and he holds it a beat longer than strictly necessary. When he lets go there’s a faint print of warmth across my palm that I am absolutely not thinking about.
The bell above the door goes.
I know before I turn around.
Not the general pressure-shift I felt driving into town last night. Something more specific than that. Something that has been sitting at the edge of my awareness since midnight like a frequency I can’t turn off, a low hum that goes in the direction of the door before I’ve decided to look.
The partial bond.
I haven’t named it yet—I’m not naming it, I’m not giving it the dignity of a name—but I know what it is.
Jack bit me. In the height of passion when things were going so well.
I had a lot of fun with him…before he went and ruined it.
I was never supposed to see him again and now I’m lumped with this damned bite mark that will never go away.
I left him as soon as it happened. Fast. Angry. Taking my bag and my fury and exactly none of his explanations.
Then I spent the rest of the night in Doris Harrow’s bathroom staring at the mark in the mirror and the pull of it—toward him, toward the territory, toward something I did not choose—and being livid about all.
I know that pull now. It’s what just walked through the door.
Something in the back of my neck prickles, and I take a slow breath. I turn on my stool with the casualness of someone who has been surprised by bad news often enough to know how to look like they weren’t.
Three of them.
Not Jack alone. Two other men, and Jack behind them. My jaw sets before I finish the turn.
The one in front is tall and broad with dark eyes and the body language of someone who has decided they have a problem with me and are about to explain this at length. Behind him, slightly to the right, Jack.
My no-strings-attached-fuck-buddy is looking at me like he has been preparing for this and has discovered that preparation does not actually help.
His eyes find the mark on my neck immediately.
I’ve got my collar up but not far enough, apparently, because he sees it and smiles just a little.
I am not going to have feelings about that.
He opens his mouth.
“Don’t,” I warn.
He closes it.
The one in front—dark eyes, has-a-problem energy—stops a few feet from the counter and looks at me like I’m something that requires an explanation. “You’re new,” he says.
“Good morning to you too,” I say brightly.
His jaw tightens. “I’m not being rude. I’m asking a question.”
“You’re really not doing one, and you really are doing the other.”
Behind him, the blond one makes a sound that is definitively a suppressed laugh, which he converts unconvincingly into a cough. Jack says nothing. I can feel him saying nothing, which is worse than if he said something.
The dark-eyed one—and he is, objectively, unfairly attractive—steps slightly closer. It’s not aggressive exactly. It’s territorial in a way that makes my skin prickle, and not unpleasantly, which is annoying.
“This is a small town,” he says. “People notice strangers.”
“Then people should work on their social skills,” I reply pleasantly. “Noticing someone and immediately questioning their right to exist in a café are different activities.”
“I’m not questioning your right to—”
“You walked in here, looked at me like I’d stolen something, and your opening line was ‘you’re new.’ What would you call it?”
His eyes narrow. “I’d call it an observation.”
“And I’d call it a territorial display, which—again—could use some polish.”
The silence that follows this has a particular feel.
The blond one is no longer pretending not to laugh.
Tristan, behind the counter, is keeping his face very professionally neutral but his eyes are bright.
And Jack, behind all of them, has the panicked look of watching something he caused and cannot stop.
Good.
“Archer,” the blond one says, in the tone of someone pouring water on a small fire. He steps around his companion—Archer, apparently—and leans against the counter two stools down from me with the ease of someone who has done this ten thousand times.
Jack looks at me directly. I meet his gaze.
The partial bond hums. It’s not loud. Not the crashing wave of this morning when I woke up with the mark on my neck and the horrible understanding of what had happened.
It’s just recognition. A frequency I’ve been carrying since midnight locating its source across twelve feet of café counter, and the source is him, handsome and laughing and looking at me with an expression that has gone very carefully still underneath the easy surface.
He knows I know.
I know he knows I know.
The café continues around us for approximately two seconds while we have this entire silent exchange.
“You,” I say. Flat. The tone I’ve been saving since one a.m.
An expression moves across his face. Not the deflection I’d expect from someone caught, but something real, something that costs him. I hope it’s guilt. “Yes,” he says quietly. “Me.”
“Jack,” I say.
“Yes?”
“You’re in a pack?”
A beat. The hesitation of someone who understands exactly what that sentence means to the person saying it. “Yes,” he replies.
I breathe in through my nose.
Four Alphas. A pack I didn’t know existed. A partial bond I didn’t agree to that connects me not just to him but—at the edges, faintly, in a way I’m only now understanding—to all of them. To this territory. To these people.
To this café where I walked in for coffee and eggs and somehow walked into the rest of my life without being consulted.
“We’ll talk,” I say. Not a question.
“Yes,” he agrees. “Whenever you’re ready. However angry you need to be first.”
“Very angry.”
“I know. You’re entitled to it.”
At least that’s not deflection. That’s not the relaxed grin. That’s something more careful. Something that understands it caused harm and is not rushing the repair, and my anger, which has been running hot since one in the morning, goes one degree quieter despite itself.
“Later,” I say.
“I’ll be here,” he replies.
I breathe.
All right then.
Archer has redirected his attention to me again.
He moves to the stool between me and Jack.
He doesn’t take it, just stands at it, close enough that I have to make a conscious choice not to shift back, and I don’t, because I don’t move for territorial displays.
He smells like cedar and snow and an uncategorizable essence below.
My category system is apparently not prepared for any of the men in this room.
“You’re staying at Doris Harrow’s,” he says.
I observe him. “Did you ask her, or did you track me?”
“Small town,” he replies again, shrugging.
“Apparently.” I hold his gaze. “Are you going to tell me I shouldn’t be there?”