Chapter 10
Lola
I walk back into the carnival and immediately want to walk back out of it. Not because of the noise or the crowd or the lights, which are all still doing their warm-excessive thing across every surface.
Because I can still feel Archer’s fingers around my wrist.
Not in a bad way. That’s the problem. That’s the big problem I’m carrying back through the lantern display and past the stage and toward the food stalls.
My jaw is set and my pace even, working very hard on the outside at presenting a woman who is perfectly fine and thinking about nothing in particular.
On the inside, I’m running a damage assessment.
Damage: he saw something. Not everything—I’m certain it’s not everything, I’ve been careful, I’m always careful—but something. The truth underneath the surface that I don’t let people near, the layer of actual situation that lives below the deflections and the competence and the forward momentum.
You’re running from something.
He was accurate. Infuriatingly accurate in the way of someone who has looked at a lot of people in motion and learned what it looks like when the motion isn’t optional.
The scent doesn’t lie.
I didn’t know Alphas could scent distress so well. I knew the broad strokes—pack instinct, Omega recognition, the biology of it—but not that it was that precise. Not that someone could smell the difference between a person in motion and a person in flight.
That’s a problem. That’s a material problem that changes my threat assessment of this entire situation. I shove my hands in my jacket pockets and my right hand finds the small trophy. I close my fingers around it without meaning to.
Jack finds me before I find anywhere else to be. He’s positioned at the border of the central stage, leaning against one of the speaker towers with a drink in each hand. He straightens when he sees me with the alertness of someone who has already done the math on my expression.
“Archer,” he says. Not a question.
“I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine. That face isn’t not-fine, it’s pissed.” He holds out one of the drinks. “A new cider. From Tristan’s, not the bar.”
I take it because my hands need something to do. “I don’t need—”
“Nobody said you needed it.” He falls into step beside me, matching my pace, and we are walking with no particular destination in the way that Jack seems comfortable with and that I am using because moving is better than standing. “What did he do?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“I know you could handle it. I’m asking what he did.”
I drink the cider. It’s warm, and the familiarity of it is nice. I push that down. “He followed me to the river path and asked me what I’m running from.”
Jack is quiet for a moment. “He’s not wrong that you’re running from something,” he says, carefully.
“That’s not the—” I stop. Restart. “He grabbed my wrist.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.” The speed of my answer surprises me. “He didn’t. He just grabbed me. Like he’d decided I was going to leave and he was intent on stopping me.”
“Sounds like Archer.”
“Is that your defense of him?”
“It’s not a defense. It’s a description.” He looks sideways at me. “He’s not subtle. The way he cares is physical. He gets between things. It’s not always the right call and he knows it and he does it anyway because the alternative, for him, is not doing anything, and that’s worse.”
I process this.
“I told him to let go,” I say.
“Did he?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Jack nods, once. “Good. That’s… yes. Good.” He pauses. “Are you actually okay?”
“I said I was—”
“Lola.” He stops walking, and because I’m pacing with him I stop too. He pivots to face me with the version of his expression that isn’t the playful surface but the real thing underneath. “Are you actually okay?”
The question lands differently the third time, or maybe it’s the way he’s asking it. Directly, without the elaborate machinery of care that sometimes makes receiving care feel like a transaction. He’s just asking. Looking at me and asking and waiting with patience.
“Yes,” I say. And then, because it’s true and because he’s looking at me like he’ll know if I’m lying: “I’m shaken. Not… not badly. Just a bit.”
“He’s good at finding the edge of things.”
“He found something.” I look at my cider. “He’s not wrong.”
Jack doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t fill the space with reassurance or pivot to a distraction or make the acknowledgment smaller than it is.
He just stands there, in the noise of the late-night carnival, and exists next to me in a way that is the most useful thing anyone has done for me in several days.
“He won’t tell the others what he thinks he knows,” Jack says eventually. “Not without more. That’s not how Archer works. He doesn’t raise alarms without evidence, he just keeps watching until the picture fills in.”
“I know,” I reply. And I do know this, somehow, already. Maybe it’s the partial bond. “That’s its own kind of pressure.”
“Yeah,” Jack agrees. “It is.”
We stand there for another minute. The stage band is finishing a set, the crowd applauding in that loose end-of-night way. The Ferris wheel is doing its slow last rotations with the cars mostly empty. The lights are reflecting in the river below the pier.
“I’m not,” I say. And then I stop.
Jack looks at me.
The thing I was going to say is: I’m not running from something dangerous to you.
Which I don’t actually know if it’s true.
I thought it was true when I arrived. I chose Sweetwater Valley specifically because it was nowhere.
Because whatever is following me is a legal problem and not a violence problem.
Because the men looking for me carry badges and file reports and don’t generally torch small-town carnivals.
But Amber had a partner that I don’t know much about yet. I know this because the heist was too clean for one person. And Amber’s partner is not a known quantity.
The part of me that has been refusing to fully think about this for three days sits up now, in the middle of a late-night carnival, and makes itself felt.
“You’re not what?” Jack asks.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
He stares at me for quite some time. He knows it’s not nothing. He’s too intelligent to not know. But he does something that Archer didn’t do and I find I can breathe around it. He lets me have it. The unfinished thing, the stopped sentence, the choice to close a door. He nods and doesn’t push.
“Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
The something is the Ferris wheel in its last rotation of opening night.
He knows the operator, of course, and they have one of those wordless exchanges that mean a long history of mutual tolerance.
Then we’re in a car and the wheel is turning and Sweetwater Valley is falling away below us in concentric rings of light.
From up here the carnival is a different shape.
Smaller, contained, the logic of its layout visible in a way it isn’t when you’re inside it.
I can see the food row and the game alley and the shadow maze and the river path and the pier.
I can see, from this height, what I couldn’t see at ground level.
That the whole thing is built around the river.
Every element oriented toward it, drawing the crowd toward the water.
“Why the river?” I ask.
“The town was founded on it. Mill, fishing, everything. The carnival started as a river festival. Boats, floating lights, the whole shebang. It moved to the ground eventually but it kept the orientation.” He looks out over the valley, relaxed and comfortable in the swaying car in a way that suggests this is a regular spot.
“Sixty years of the same celebration. People come back and they know where everything is. Where they stood last year and the year before.”
“That sounds nice,” I say. It comes out more honest than I intended.
He looks at me. “Not something you’ve had?”
“Fixed geography?” I shrug. “Not really my thing.”
“Whose thing is it? You’re born into it or you’re not.” He looks back at the valley. “I wasn’t, for a long time. Three years on the circuit, different town every month. You learn not to know where things are.”
“What made you stop?”
“Ryan.” Simple, immediate. “He asked me to come home, and I realized I’d been waiting for someone to ask.” He pauses. “I didn’t know that until he asked.”
I look out at the valley. The river is a dark ribbon below, the lanterns long gone, just the reflection of the carnival in its moving surface.
“I don’t have a Ryan,” I admit. Which is not a sentence I meant to say out loud. That is a sentence that surfaced from somewhere below the levels I’m currently monitoring and got out before I could catch it.
Jack doesn’t make it a moment. “You might,” he says, and it’s not pointed, not loaded, just placed there. An observation.
I look down at the carnival from four stories up and think about Archer’s hand on my wrist and Ryan in the lantern light saying right now, I want you to stay for the lanterns and Tristan’s forearm against mine.
And Jack, beside me right now, who has been beside me in one form or another since that night at the pub and hasn’t once made me feel followed.
I glance at him. He’s already looking at me. The Ferris wheel car rocks gently on the updraft and we are very close in the small space of it, the carnival spread below us and the sky very dark above, and this stupid bond lighting up like it’s made of gold.
I close the distance.
The kiss is intense. My mouth on his, warm and direct, and he produces a tone that is soft and sincere. His hand comes up to my jaw. One hand, steady, not pulling, just holding, the way you hold something you weren’t expecting to be given and want to be careful with.
He kisses me back.