Chapter 10 #2
Not with the urgency I might have expected from Jack, who does most things with enthusiasm.
He kisses me slowly. Deliberately. Like he’s decided that if this is what he’s getting he’s going to be entirely present for it, and the care of it does something to me that the urgency wouldn’t have, something that hits in the chest rather than the nerves.
The car rocks.
We separate. Not far, the space of a breath, his forehead almost against mine, his hand still at my jaw.
“Lola,” he says. Just my name. Breathless.
“Don’t make it a moment,” I reply.
He pulls back. Looks at me. And then—because he is Jack, because this is exactly who he is—he nods. Once. And lets it be what it is rather than what it could become.
“Okay,” he says.
I keep my mouth shut.
Ryan is waiting when we come down. He’s there, standing at the base of the wheel with his hands in his pockets and the stillness he carries everywhere.
He looks at me when I step off the platform with the expression that gives me nothing and somehow gives me everything, the one I keep failing to decode.
Jack does the thing where he evaporates. He’s said goodbye and crossed two meters away before I’ve processed that he’s leaving. Then it’s Ryan, and the late-night carnival around us, and the sound of the wheel slowing to a stop.
“You all right?” Ryan asks.
“People keep asking me that.”
“People are noticing things.”
“People should mind their own business.” I say it without heat, which is different from how I’d have said it a few days ago. He notices. I see him notice.
“Archer,” he says. Not an apology on Archer’s behalf, just the word, acknowledging the source.
“He’s not wrong,” I say, for the second time tonight. It’s getting easier to say, which is its own warning.
Ryan looks at me for a moment. “No. He’s not.” He says it evenly, without apology for that either. “He’s also not always right about what the right response is.”
“He grabbed my wrist.”
“I know.”
“Did he tell you?”
“The bond,” he replies simply. “Not details. Just… I felt the moment.”
I file this. Pack bond, physical events, the Alphas all connected in ways I don’t fully understand. More information about the perimeter of my situation.
“I handled it,” I say.
“I know you did.” And the way he says it—not of course you did with its edge of surprise, not I’m sure you did with its note of performance, just plain and direct, something he knows to be true and is stating—sits differently than it should.
I look at the Ferris wheel, now fully stopped, its lights doing their slow blink into overnight mode.
“Ryan.” I say his name and then don’t continue, and he waits. He holds space without filling it.
I’ve been framed for a bank robbery. That’s the sentence that wants to come out.
Three states are looking for me, my face is in news alerts, and the person who did it was my best friend, and I have no evidence and no allies and no plan except to keep moving until I can think clearly enough to build one.
It’s right there.
I can feel it in the back of my mouth, the truth. The weight of two weeks of carrying it alone pressing outward like something that wants release.
I’m so tired.
The thought arrives so plainly that it almost takes me out at the knees.
Not the running, not the logistics, but the aloneness of it.
The exhaustion of knowing something enormous and having no one to put it down with, even temporarily.
Even just the weight of saying it out loud to someone who is looking at you the way Ryan is looking at me right now.
I close my mouth.
I breathe.
“I should go,” I say. “It’s late.”
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t pull. He stands where he is and looks at me with that calm that isn’t distance, that steadiness that isn’t coldness, and he says: “I’ll walk you back.”
“I know the way.”
“I know you know the way.” He falls in line with me anyway.
We walk out of the carnival ground and down the main street, cobblestones quiet under our feet, the clock tower reading a quarter to midnight. He doesn’t talk. I don’t talk. The silence between us has the quality it always has. Full rather than empty.
At the corner where Main Street turns toward Doris Harrow’s place, I stop.
“You were going to say something,” he says. “At the wheel.”
“I changed my mind.”
“All right.” No pushback. No pressing.
I regard him. I do this every time, I look at him and I lose the thread of whatever I was thinking. I don’t know if it’s his face or his attention or the frequency of whatever the pack bond sends toward me when he’s close, which I shouldn’t be able to feel, which I’m feeling anyway.
“It’s nothing you need to know,” I say.
“Okay.”
“It’s not… I’m not a danger to the pack. I want to be clear about that.”
He gazes at me for an extended period. “I didn’t think you were.”
“Archer—”
“Archer thinks in terms of threat assessment. That’s his role and it’s valuable and it’s also not the only way to read a situation.” His eyes are locked on mine. “I don’t think you’re a danger to us.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“No,” he agrees. “But I know enough.” A pause. “I’m starting to know you.”
I should tell him it’s not enough. That starting to know someone across a few days of carnival prep and river paths and Ferris wheels is not knowing, not the kind that earns the weight I’m almost putting down.
I should say it and I don’t.
“Goodnight, Ryan,” I do say.
“Goodnight, Lola.”
I walk the rest of the way to Doris Harrow’s alone and I am furious with myself in the way I get when I’ve done something I know better than to do.
I almost told him.
I almost stood at the base of a Ferris wheel in a small town and told a man I’ve known for less than a week something that could get him and his pack involved in a federal situation that has nothing to do with them.
All because he was standing there being steady and looking at me like he already knew something important and I am apparently not as done with wanting to be known as I thought I was.
This is Amber’s fault.
No. This is my fault. Amber is a separate category of problem. This is my fault. The vulnerability of someone who has been alone long enough that the first warm thing they walk into starts to look like home.
Sweetwater Valley is not home.
The pack is not mine. I will never be a bonded Omega. That requires staying in one place for far longer than I ever have. The moment Jack finds out how to completely sever this partial tether, I’m gone.
Ryan is not someone I can hand this to and I hate that he looked at me like I could.
I hate that Tristan feeds me things without asking and that Jack lets me have my unfinished sentences and that Archer, who doesn’t trust me and has said so, grabbed my wrist not to threaten me but because he didn’t want me to leave.
I hate that it’s working.
Whatever it is, whatever the pack is doing, it’s working. I can feel it. The edges of my perimeter softening in ways I haven’t authorized.
I sit on Doris Harrow’s very comfortable bed.
I am not crying. I don’t cry. I am simply sitting in the dark with my jacket on and the small tin trophy in my hand, pressing its edges into my palm, thinking about a few days ago when I drove into this valley and my only problem was a bank heist I didn’t commit.
Now I have a bank heist I didn’t commit and four men whose orbit I cannot seem to leave and a pack bond that shouldn’t apply to me reaching through the air of this town like a tide pulling at my ankles.
I almost told him.
I squeeze the trophy until the edge of it bites.
I am not doing this. I am not going to be the person who trusts the wrong people twice in a row.
Amber was the wrong person. I know exactly what the wrong person looks like now.
I know how trust gets built from the small kindnesses, the consistent warmth, the making-you-feel-seen that turns out to be maneuvering.
Except…
Except Amber was maneuvering. There was always something she wanted from me. Always a transaction somewhere under the warmth, always a position she was building toward.
I have been inside the pack’s orbit for less than a week and I have not been able to locate what they want. This is the part I cannot calculate my way around, and I’ve tried.
I pull off my jacket. I put the trophy on the nightstand. I lie down on the pine-scented bed and I look at the ceiling. I think about Ryan saying starting to know you. In the tone of someone with genuine feeling.
I hate that I almost trusted them.
I hate that I still want to.
These are not the same thing and tonight I can’t figure out which one to be more scared of.
I close my eyes. I don’t sleep. I’ve wasted enough time in this small town doing nothing when I should be fighting to clear my name.
* * *
In the morning, I leave Doris Harrow’s with a mission. I must find Amber’s accomplice. If I can do that, perhaps I can find enough evidence to submit anonymously to the police. It’s my best shot at ending this nightmare.
I find the private investigator by accident. This is, in retrospect, exactly how you’d expect to find a private investigator in Sweetwater Valley. Not through a directory or a recommendation or any of the logical channels, but by nearly walking into her sandwich board.
The sandwich board is pale blue, hand-painted in neat cursive letters, and reads:
MARGARET FINCH Discreet Inquiries & Curious Matters Est. 1987 Walk-Ins Welcome (Please knock. Mind the cat hair.)
I stand on the cobblestones and process what I’m seeing. Discreet Inquiries and Curious Matters. In Sweetwater Valley. Of course.
I knock.
“Come in, it’s open,” says a voice from somewhere inside, and I open the door.
The office needs a moment for me to take it all in.