Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NELL
Addie's apartment smelled like Mei Ling's cooking.
The scents hit me in the hallway, rich and warm and coming apart into their components the way a chord came apart into individual notes when a jazz musician broke it down.
Ginger first, sharp and bright. Then garlic underneath it, softer like it had been cooking long enough to lose its bite and become something sweeter; a dark licorice note that meant something had been braising for hours.
"Your place smells like star anise."
Addie looked at me. Then, at the kitchen. Then back at me. "Mei Ling dropped off food last night. How did you…" She cocked her head and gazed at me like she was seeing me anew.
I shrugged, moving past her to take up one of the bar seats. "I've always had a good sense of smell. It runs in the family. What did she make?"
"Red-braised short ribs. With five spice."
"That's what the star anise is part of."
I looked around the spacious apartment. Half of it was Addie's careful, curated aesthetic. The other half was the aggressive masculinity of a man who had apparently never owned a throw pillow before and was learning to coexist with them.
"He tried to throw out the velvet one," Addie said, handing me a glass of wine and tucking her feet under herself on the couch. "The teal one with the fringe. I found it in the hallway outside the recycling room."
"He put it in recycling?"
"He didn't know what else to do with it. He's never owned a decorative pillow before. I put it back on the couch. He hasn't touched it since. We've reached a détente."
"A throw pillow détente. The foundation of every strong marriage."
"Don't laugh. We also had a significant negotiation about the thread count of the sheets."
"Who won?"
"I did. Obviously."
Addie reached forward and pulled the lid off one of the containers. I helped myself to the short ribs and ate them with my fingers. Outside, the city did its nighttime thing beyond Addie's floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent and glittering.
This was what we had always done. Cheap wine in Brooklyn had become expensive wine on the Upper East Side.
Mei Ling's leftovers had replaced the Thai takeout we used to split.
There were wolves in the hallway instead of the neighbor's aggressive Labrador.
The essential thing was unchanged: two women, talking about everything, held together by the gravity of a friendship that had survived enough that it no longer needed to prove itself.
I missed this more than I had admitted to myself.
"Tell me something I don't know," I said.
Addie considered this with the gravity it deserved. "Vidar is a complete freak between the sheets."
I inhaled wine. "Addie—"
"You asked for something you didn't know." She was entirely unrepentant. "I'm just saying. The man applies himself. Thoroughly." A pause. "Multiple times."
I was happy for my friend. At least her possessive wolf husband was good in bed.
My gaze went to the bite mark on her neck.
I had thought it was domestic abuse the first time I saw it.
I'm still not entirely convinced Addie isn't being held hostage by Vidar Blackwood.
It also might be jealousy because his older brother had released me from captivity and was staying away from me.
"The mark," I said, nodding at her neck.
Her hand went to it reflexively. "What about it?"
"It's a wolf thing? Like in the books. He marked you as his when you got married."
"It's like a wedding ring, but more. A ring comes off. This is in my skin. And mine in his. Every wolf who sees it knows what it means and who put it there. It's a declaration that doesn't have a take-back clause. Wolves don't get divorced."
"Did it hurt?"
The smile that crossed her face was slow and private, and answered the question considerably more thoroughly than her words did. "It hurt in the best way possible."
I looked at the mark for another moment. There was something about the shape of it — the curve, the impression — that was pulling at something in the back of my mind.
"It kind of looks like my birthmark." I reached up and gathered my locs, lifting them off the back of my neck.
Addie leaned forward, her wine glass tilting slightly in her hand as she studied the back of my neck. I felt her go still. "You said that's a birthmark?"
"I've had it since I was born, I think."
Addie’s gaze narrowed, her head cocked to the side. Before she could say anything more, the door opened. Vidar Blackwood darkened the doorway. His eyes went immediately to Addie, passing over me as if I wasn't there.
Magnus came in behind him. He was in dark trousers and a gray shirt, no jacket.
Which was the most casual I had ever seen him.
Which was deeply unfair, given the current state of my attempts not to think about him.
He looked at Addie first — the instinctive sweep of a man checking on his family — and then at me.
Our gazes held. I felt as if I was his captive again. It felt good.
"I didn't realize you had company," Vidar said, brushing his lips against his wife's temple.
"Nell isn't company. She's family." Addie left her husband's embrace and crossed to Magnus, going up on her toes to hug him with the easy affection of a sister-in-law who had decided he was hers. "What are you doing here? I thought you had a pack meeting tonight."
"It ran short." Magnus hugged her back briefly, his eyes moving over her shoulder to me. "I'll leave you to your evening."
"Actually…" I reached for my wine glass, finished what was in it, and stood up. "Addie and I were wrapping up. I need a ride home."
I gave Addie a look. Normally, she would've returned that look with a wry smile and hopped into the cockpit as my wing woman. Now, she pursed her lips and looked between me and Magnus. Was she about to cockblock me?
"Can I bum a ride, Magnus?"
Magnus looked at his brother. Then at me. "Of course."
I gathered my coat and my bag with one hand. I side-hugged Addie with the other.
"Text me when you're home," she murmured against my hair.
I said a terse goodnight to Vidar, who returned my farewell with the same cold affection. Eventually, we'd have to come to an understanding. I didn't want to think about that while I was thinking about seducing his older brother.
Magnus held the door. I walked through it. The elevator was waiting. We stepped in together. The doors closed. We dropped floor by floor in silence.
I turned toward him. And inhaled. Cedar and heat and expensive tobacco. It settled into my lungs and made my shoulders relax for the first time in days.
"Did you just sniff me?"
"I did." No apology. No qualification. "I went out last night to pick up a guy for some spicy sleep."
The elevator gears growled.
"But he smelled wrong."
Magnus was very still. "Wrong, how?" It wasn't quite a question. But he still expected an answer.
"He didn't smell like you."
Magnus' jaw tightened by one degree. His frown looked to me as if he found this enormously satisfying.
I pushed off the wall. Stepped toward him.
Closed the gap between us until I was close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze.
I turned my face into the curve of his jaw, my nose at the line of his jugular, and inhaled slowly, the way I had wanted to since the moment the elevator doors closed.
Cedar. Heat. "Hmmm," I sighed against his throat.
Magnus hit the emergency stop. The elevator shuddered to a halt between floors.
His hands found my face before the shudder stopped; both of them cupping my jaw with a sureness that had no hesitation in it. I was inside his cage again. I felt at home.
His hands moved from my face into my hair. My locs slid between his fingers. He palmed my nape, tilting my head back to change the angle. Then he was kissing me.