6. Chapter 6 #3
I knew it before I fully saw them. Maybe because wolves occupied space differently than every other species I’d met in this city.
Even dressed in expensive clothes and lounging on velvet beneath amber lamps, they did not dissolve into the decor.
They made the furniture look temporary. There was an ease to them I felt in my own body, like a remembered stretch after a cramped night’s sleep.
Three men. Two women. Half-finished drinks on the low, lacquered table before them.
One boot hooked under a bench. One woman leaning into the shoulder of the man beside her without thinking about it.
A broad hand draped over the back of the curved seat behind the entire group as if the gesture alone could gather them closer.
Trust had its own posture. They wore it like skin.
I knew the man at the center of them was the alpha before anybody said a word.
He did not need height for that, though he had plenty.
He did not need volume. He did not need the others to arrange themselves around him in obvious deference.
Authority sat on him the way weather sat on a mountain—native, unargued with, impossible to mistake.
He wore a dark suit cut close enough to prove money had been spent on it and then forgotten, because the man himself mattered more than the cloth.
Olive skin. Big shoulders. Hair black as fresh ink, cropped close at the sides and left longer on top in a rough, controlled mess that looked as though his fingers found purchase there often.
His jaw looked less inherited than carved on purpose—strong and angular—beautiful, although you’d not want to cross him.
He was dangerous; there was no question.
His attention lifted before Sloan spoke, landing on us both with a calm steadiness that did not feel like scrutiny so much as assessment already half completed.
I nearly stopped.
Not because he seemed threatening. Because he glanced at me in a way that hit me too fast.
Before Sloan could open her mouth, one of the women—honey-brown skin, glossy dark hair over one bare shoulder, silver hoops glinting in the light—slid sideways on the curved velvet bench and patted the space she’d vacated.
“Come sit.”
That was all. No interrogation. No, why are you here? Just room made.
I stared one foolish second too long before my legs remembered how sofas worked.
Sloan dropped into the spot nearest the edge, effectively folding me into the circle whether I had the nerve for it or not.
Someone—one of the men, broad-chested and smiling under a close-cut beard—reached across the table and handed me a drink menu without asking whether I wanted one.
Another of the women, pale gold eyes and a wickedly observant mouth, leaned across and studied me with open interest.
“Where you from?” she asked.
“Texas.”
The answer left before caution could stop it.
And just like that, the whole table opened.
“West Texas or pretty Texas?” the bearded man asked.
“You watch your mouth, sir. All of Texas is pretty,” I said.
That got laughs from three of them at once.
When one of them asked where exactly in Texas, I heard myself say Dairyville and then, after the expected blink, explaining where it sat relative to anything somebody outside the state might have heard of.
They asked about open roads. About storms. About whether the stars looked different out there with no city burning holes in the dark.
They asked with the easy appetite of people actually wanting to know, not just making polite noise while waiting their turn to speak.
My shoulders dropped a half-inch.
Then another.
It happened so quietly I only noticed because my chest started hurting less.
Wolf company did that. Good wolf company, anyway. Not magic. Not a cure. But the body recognized its own kind and stopped standing guard at quite so many gates. Nobody here was measuring my pedigree. Nobody was looking at my clothes and seeing lack. Nobody seemed to need me translated.
The alpha had spoken hardly at all.
He listened.
Not passively. Not like a man checked out of the room.
Like a man collecting textures while letting everyone else set the pace.
Once or twice his mouth moved at something somebody said.
Once he reached for his drink, amber liquor catching the light in heavy crystal.
Once one of the men tossed him a comment, and he answered with a look that made the whole table grin like they were in on a joke too old to need retelling.
And all the while I was aware of him in that low, animal way wolves sometimes were with alphas. Not afraid. Not submissive. Just aware of the central gravity in the room.
When he finally spoke, he did not raise his voice.
He didn’t need to.
“You’re Bronc’s sister.”
The words cut clean through the conversation.
Every voice at the table stopped. Not startled exactly. More like a record finding its proper groove.
I turned toward him.
His dark eyes were already on me, steady and certain and not unkind in the least. He had probably known it the whole time.
Maybe by scent. Maybe by manner. Maybe because packs and reputations traveled farther than regular gossip when they were built on real weight.
Bronc’s name had a shape to it in the supernatural world now.
Not everybody feared it, but plenty respected it, and the smart ones did both a little.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
One corner of his mouth moved. “Thought so.”
The woman beside me looked between us. “Well, hell.”
“You know my brother?” I asked.
The alpha leaned back slightly, one arm stretching across the top of the bench behind the people nearest him in a gesture so relaxed it only emphasized how much space he could command without effort.
“I know of him,” he said. “Hard not to.”
A few soft sounds of agreement moved around the table.
“He’s got a reputation,” the bearded man added.
I snorted. “That feels ominous.”
“It’s respectful,” the scar-mouthed one said.
“Mostly,” Sloan muttered.
That earned her a look from her brother that was so dry I laughed again despite myself.
There it was then. Sage. No formal announcement needed. It fit him too naturally to require introduction.
He looked back at me. “Bronc built something solid. People notice that. People with sense respect it.”
Warmth touched my chest so abruptly it almost hurt.
Not because I needed praise by association. I didn’t. But because hearing somebody speak my brother’s name with honest respect in a room, this far from home made something in me straighten. The world got so damn big sometimes that a girl forgot the reach of the things she came from.
“Well,” I said, with a little shrug I hoped passed for casual, “he’d probably tell you I’m his worst PR risk.”
“I doubt that,” Sage said.
The answer came easy and unhurried, and because of that it landed harder than flattery would have.
One of the women leaned in, grin sharpening. “So if we ask for pack stories, are we getting the official version or the sister version?”
“The sister version costs extra.”
“Worth it,” the bearded man said immediately.
The table laughed, and just like that the pause broke open into warmth again, not thinner for the recognition but fuller somehow.
They had me placed now. Not just as a random upset wolf Sloan had dragged upstairs, but as somebody connected to a name they knew.
Instead of making the space feel more formal, it did the opposite. The welcome settled deeper.
Sage lifted his glass slightly toward me. “Any sister of Bronc Baucaum’s is welcome at my table.”
No ceremony. No speech. Just a sentence laid down like solid ground.
I met his eyes and believed him.
“Thank you,” I said, and heard the roughness in my own voice too late to hide it.
He inclined his head once, accepting the gratitude without making a thing of it.
At some point, without fanfare, Sage shifted on the curved bench.
His leg pressed lightly against mine.
It was nothing. Barely there. The ordinary contact of a crowded booth and people sitting close. Warm through fabric. Solid. Real.
And not the same.
Not like Nikolay, whose nearness always felt like standing too close to a live wire and pretending it wasn’t humming.
This was not hunger sharpened into misery.
Not possession. Not rejection wearing manners.
It was simply the body-knowledge of pack proximity.
You are not alone here. We know where you are.
We know where we are. Sit down and breathe.
I thought, briefly and against my will, of where Nikolay might be right then.
Maybe back in that corridor. Maybe already returned to the floor.
Maybe with the French vampire. Maybe in his office, brooding over whatever grand internal tragedy he’d decided made cruelty acceptable.
The thought still found the hollow place behind my sternum.
It still hurt. I was not healed by bourbon and wolves in a velvet booth. I was not that easy a creature.
But the hollow was smaller now.
Not gone.
Just no longer the only thing inside me.