20. Chapter 20 #2
“There you are,” Sloan said, as if she had been mildly inconvenienced by my temporary disappearance into the woods. “I’ve been waiting.”
I barely had time to laugh before she was steering me away with the bright, unstoppable force of somebody who considered resistance an abstract concept. I looked back once over my shoulder.
Sage had stopped just inside the hall. One of the house staff approached him with the sort of discreet efficiency rich people seemed to breed into the wallpaper, and he inclined his head toward me and Sloan in easy dismissal, as if he had no objection to being robbed of my company the second we returned.
That should have relieved me.
Instead, after the cabin and the cocoa and his hands on my shoulders and that strange, soft heaviness still living under my skin, his immediate composure felt less like generosity and more like another form of control.
Not cling. Just that smooth confidence of a man certain he could have me back whenever he got ready.
Sloan kept hold of my sleeve and pulled me deeper into the house before I could stand there dissecting that like it might save me.
She tugged me down the east corridor.
“I’m stealing you,” she informed me.
“So I gathered.”
“You looked like you needed stealing.”
That made me look at her properly.
She was smiling, but not carelessly. There was an alert kindness in it, the kind some women had when they noticed more than they commented on.
Not prying. Just ready. I thought about breakfast. Of the way everyone in this place had managed to make room without making a spectacle of me.
It was a practiced social grace, and I could not decide whether that made it safer or more dangerous.
“I look that rough?” I asked.
“You look like you’ve been on a horse half the day and in your head the other half,” she said cheerfully. “Come on.”
She led me into a room I had not seen before, tucked off the corridor behind a pair of half-open French doors.
Sunroom, I realized at once, though early fall had muted the usual meaning of the word.
Afternoon light pooled across the floor in pale sheets, softened by the glass and the season until it seemed more thoughtful than bright.
The air here smelled different, too. Less kitchen, more leaves and warmed fabric, and the faint mineral scent old windows sometimes carried when the sun touched them.
“Oh,” I said before I could help it.
Sloan beamed, as though she had personally invented the room. “Right?”
She dropped onto the wide settee and patted the cushion beside her. I sat, and the cushions gave way under me, cradling my body in a firm cloud.
“Well, this room is quite a surprise,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve mostly seen the public parts of the house. This is where people come when they don’t want everybody all over them.”
“That may be the best sales pitch I’ve ever heard.”
“I know my audience.”
I laughed and leaned back a little. Through the windows, the early fall grounds spread pale and still beyond the glass. Branches with leaves starting to turn scratched faintly at the sky.
Within minutes—genuinely within minutes, as if the walls themselves had alerted the kitchen—someone appeared with a tray bearing two oversized mugs and set them on the low table before disappearing again with silent competence.
I stared.
Sloan reached for hers with no sign that this bordered on sorcery. “What?”
I picked up my mug and looked into it. Rich hot cocoa. Tiny marshmallows floating on top.
I looked back at her. “What is it with the food around here?”
She laughed so hard she nearly sloshed the drink over the rim. “We’re wolves, silly. Our metabolism runs hot. There’s always something to eat.”
“That sounds made up.”
“It sounds accurate.” She blew on her cocoa and took a sip. “You burn enough energy shifting, healing, running, fighting, existing in a constant state of dramatic emotion—food becomes a logistical necessity.”
“That might be the most wolf explanation of anything I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true.” She settled deeper into the cushions. “Nobody in this house is ever more than fifteen feet from carbs.”
I thought of home. Her description was accurate. But our carbs manifested in chicken-fried steaks, fried potatoes, and all the baked goods Aspen could churn out.
I raised the mug and took a drink.
The taste was the same. Or near enough to make my pulse kick once.
Heat slid down my throat and spread outward again with that same impossible efficiency, as though warmth had fingers and knew exactly where I was most hollow.
My shoulders loosened. The ache in my thighs from the ride eased another degree.
Even my thoughts seemed to lose some of their hard, sharp corners and drift into a slower arrangement.
That made two cups in one day.
Maybe these wolves just knew how to make cocoa properly.
Maybe I was overtired, underfed, and susceptible to hospitality.
Maybe the odd, low sense of well-being unfurling through me was exactly what it felt like to be included instead of tolerated.
I did not know. I only knew it spread through my chest and down my limbs and reached my wolf in a way I did not have language for. Not excitement. Not lust. Not safety exactly either. Something adjacent to belonging, perhaps.
Sloan watched me over the rim of her mug and grinned. “Told you.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. That face said enough.”
“I was not making a face.”
“You absolutely were.”
I shook my head and drank again, because there were worse things in life than being caught enjoying yourself by a woman who looked pleased about it.
Then Sloan straightened so abruptly I nearly spilled cocoa down my sweater.
“Oh!”
I blinked at her. “What?”
“They found your phone. It was in the couch cushions.”
She reached behind one of the pillows and held it out like a magician finishing a trick. My phone. Blessedly, stupidly familiar.
I took it at once. “Where—”
“In the big sitting room, I think. Somebody checked after Sage sent word.” She wiggled her fingers in a vague gesture that seemed to encompass both house staff and the general machinery of pack life. “Battery’s almost dead, though.”
She was not kidding. The screen came on dim and weak, the little battery symbol hovering near empty like a threat.
Still, relief moved through me fast enough to make me grip it tighter. It was ridiculous how naked I had felt without it. Not because I expected anyone in Texas to need me urgently every hour of the day, but because a phone was a tether now. To home. To options. To myself.
I unlocked it and went straight to the notification bar.
Nothing.
No missed calls. No texts. No “where are you,” no “you good,” no “made it home?” My thumb hovered there a beat too long before I made myself swipe the screen away like the gesture meant nothing.
A little muscle in my jaw tightened, anyway.
I had not expected a flood of concern. Bronc did not flood. He assessed. My friends had lives. The world had not stopped because I had spent the afternoon in a cabin with a polished wolf who made suspiciously excellent cocoa.
But I had hoped.
Not generally. Specifically.
For one message from Nikolay. One.
Something simple would have done it. A check-in.
A dry little line. Even one of those maddeningly measured questions of his that sounded like diplomacy but hid actual care if you listened closely enough.
After everything between us—after the pastries, the book, the dream still lingering in my blood like a bruise—I had hoped he might have reached out.
He had not.
Sloan said nothing. Which, somehow, was kinder than if she had asked.
Instead, she tucked one leg under herself and said, “So. Since I have you captive—”
“That doesn’t sound ominous at all.”
“—I need you to stay one more night.”
I looked up from the phone. “What?”
“Tomorrow is the Black Harvest Moon festival.”
I frowned. “The what?”
That got me a genuinely delighted stare, as if I had admitted I had never seen the ocean. “You’ve never heard of it?”
“No.”
“Well, that settles it. You have to stay.”
I laughed despite myself. “That was not an explanation.”
“Fine.” She set her mug down and folded her hands around one knee, settling in as though about to tell a ghost story to children who might embarrass her by asking intelligent questions.
“It only happens every fifty years. A second harvest moon coinciding with a total lunar eclipse. Old old tradition. Most packs don’t bother anymore, or they do some watered-down version with bad food and worse music and call it heritage. ”
The room felt a little quieter while she spoke, though maybe that was only my own attention sharpening.
“Tomorrow night?” I asked.
She nodded. “Tomorrow night.”
There was something almost reverent in the brightness of her voice now. Not solemn exactly. More like genuine affection for a thing larger than herself.
“Sage honors all the traditional moon phases,” she said. “Especially because we’re still new compared to some of the old bloodline packs. He takes ritual seriously. History too. It matters to him that the pack knows what it is and where it came from, not just what it’s trying to become.”
I curled my fingers around the mug again and let that settle.
A second harvest moon. Total eclipse. Fifty years.
The phrase itself sounded old enough to have teeth.
“What do y’all do for it?” I asked.
Sloan brightened immediately, back on lighter footing. “Dress up. Eat too much. Drink too much. There’s a formal procession, a blessing, music, dancing, all the dramatic moonlit nonsense wolves pretend they’re too modern for until you hand them an excuse to be ceremonial.”
“That sounds suspiciously fun.”
“It is fun.” She leaned toward me. “And gorgeous. The whole house gets done up. Everyone wears formal clothes. It’s old-world in the best way, and half the people act like they’ve stepped out of another century, which in this pack is honestly not far from true.”