Chapter 18 A Different Choice
Nora POV
Blood on concrete doesn’t wash itself.
I found my clothes where I’d dropped them beside the service bay, balled up on the oil-stained floor next to the air compressor.
Jeans, flannel, boots. They smelled like rain and old fear and the copper tang of someone else’s blood.
I shoved them into a canvas bag without sorting and set it by the bay door for later.
The yard looked worse in daylight. Cold October sun hit the gravel and exposed everything the rain had failed to rinse away.
Dark stains in the service lane where Rafe had gone down.
A tire rack on its side, rubber scattered across twenty feet of ground.
One of the boat cradles had a bent support leg where two wolves had slammed into it at full speed.
Fish crates piled in a heap against the storage shed, their slats crushed and splintered from where Jules had driven someone through them.
I found the rolling mechanic’s stool I’d used on Lyle. It was on its side near the fuel pump, one caster bent. I set it upright and spun the wheels. Three still turned. Good enough.
Work. That was the answer to most things, and it was the answer now. I grabbed the push broom from inside the bay, filled a bucket from the utility sink, and started on the blood.
The blood had dried into porous concrete that had been poured decades before anyone thought about sealing it.
I scrubbed with a stiff brush and hot water until my shoulders burned and the worst of it came up in pink, diluted streaks.
The gravel in the lane was harder. I raked what I could, spread fresh stone from the pile behind the shed, and kept moving.
By the time the sun cleared the tree line, I’d filled two contractor bags with broken crate slats, splintered wood, and shattered plastic from the wreckage.
My hands ached. The borrowed flannel I’d worn to Rafe’s room was soaked through with sweat and dirty water, and I’d rolled the sleeves past my elbows to keep them out of the scrub bucket.
Through the bond, Wade’s steady presence moved somewhere behind me, closer than the house, and I didn’t need to turn around to know he was already working.
He showed up hauling a bent section of dock railing with one hand. His left forearm was wrapped tight, the bandage already showing a pink stain where the bite had seeped overnight. The wound needed rest and time. Wade was giving it neither.
“You should sit down,” I said.
“You first.”
I let it go. We both knew the argument was a formality, the same way we both knew neither of us was going to stop until the yard looked like the yard again and not like a battlefield.
Hank appeared by seven, favoring his bitten hip but carrying a toolbox.
Arvid limped in behind him with a crowbar and started on the crushed tire rack.
Bette unlocked the office, checked the windows twice, and set up at her desk like nothing had happened, except she left the blinds open so she could see the entire lane.
By midmorning Wade had two of his wolves posted along the western road, watching for Copper Point trucks.
Nobody talked about the fight. The damage told the story, and the story was that seven wolves had come into this yard to take me and gone home bleeding.
Jules brought coffee at nine. The cut above his left eye had scabbed over dark, and the bruise along his jaw had deepened to a purple that made him look sallow.
He handed me a mug without comment, then picked up a second push broom and started sweeping alongside me.
We worked in silence for a while, clearing broken plastic and gravel from the bay entrance.
His shoulder brushed mine when we both reached for the same pile of debris, and I didn’t move away.
“Lift’s got damage,” Jules said after a while, nodding toward the hydraulic unit. “The base plate shifted when Rafe and that charcoal wolf hit the cradle next to it. Might have cracked a mount bolt.”
I’d only just put that lift right. The thought of Conrad’s wolves undoing my work made something hot and sharp move through my chest.
“I’ll look at it after I finish the lane,” I said.
“I’ll pull the inspection cover.”
He went. I watched him walk to the lift and get to work. His scent lingered where he’d stood, and my wolf stirred toward it the way she had since he’d fed me that first morning and never pushed.
Rafe appeared around ten.
He came from the pack house slowly, his right arm held close against his ribs, wearing clothes I didn’t recognize.
Someone had found him pants and a shirt that fit poorly, the fabric loose across shoulders that weeks of bond sickness had stripped down.
He looked better than he had yesterday, though he was still gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes.
He moved with care, but his gaze was clear as he crossed the yard toward the service bay.
“I want to help,” he said.
I didn’t look up from the cracked concrete I was scrubbing. “Your arm’s supposed to stay still.”
“I can use my left.”
“Rafe.”
“My father’s men did this. The least I can do is help clean it up.” He paused. “I can write a check for the damage. The tire rack, the cradle, the crates. Whatever it costs.”
I stopped scrubbing and sat back on my heels. Rafe stood in the morning light with his bandaged shoulder, trying to solve the damage with money, and the offer left me wearier than a sleepless night could account for.
“Put your wallet away,” I said. “You want to be useful, there’s a broom inside the bay. Left wall, third hook.”
He looked at me for a beat too long, then went and got the broom.
? ? ?
We worked through the morning. Rafe swept with his left hand, clumsy and slow, pushing broken plastic and gravel into piles that Hank collected with a shovel. He didn’t complain. He didn’t try to talk. For almost two hours he just swept, and I almost forgot he was there.
Almost. The bond made forgetting impossible. His presence sat against my ribs like a fever that never spiked, thin and persistent, separate from Wade’s warmer pull but impossible to ignore. Every time Rafe paused to rest his shoulder, a faint pulse of pain echoed through me.
It was past noon when he found me at the damaged lift.
Jules had pulled the inspection cover and confirmed what he’d suspected: one of the four mount bolts had sheared clean, and the base plate had shifted a quarter inch on its pad.
Not catastrophic, but enough to compromise the lift’s level under load.
I’d need to jack the plate back into position, drill out the broken bolt, and reset the mount before I could trust it with a boat.
I was lying on my back beneath the assembly, examining the sheared bolt stub with a flashlight, when Rafe stopped beside the lift.
“Nora.”
“I’m busy.”
“I know.” He crouched, carefully, keeping his injured arm tucked. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I clicked the flashlight off and slid out from under the lift. Rafe was close. I could see the pulse in his throat, the way his jaw worked before he spoke, his eyes gone softer than I’d seen them since the ceremony.
“I’m not going to ask you to come back to Copper Point,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you the bond means you owe me anything.”
“Good start.”
“What I did at the ceremony was wrong. I mean more than rejecting you. The way I did it, in front of everyone, with Delia already standing there. I could have told you privately. I could have done a hundred things differently. I chose the worst possible version, and you got hurt because I was a coward about it.”
I didn’t answer. His words were better than anything he’d said before, but I waited for what came next.
“I chose Delia,” he continued. “I did that. But the Goddess gave us this bond for a reason, and I’ve been fighting it instead of asking what it’s trying to tell me. I’m asking you to consider whether it can become something different from what we were promised. Something we build from here.”
Through the bond, I sensed that he meant every word. His voice was low and uncertain, without the arrogance of his first arrival or the desperate bargaining of the day before.
It wasn’t enough.
“You want to know what the bond is trying to tell you?” I stood up and wiped my hands on a rag. “It’s telling you that your choices hurt me. You rejected me on the ceremony ground with both packs watching, then took my sister’s hand and left me to carry the damage.”
“I know.”
“You threw yourself between me and that wolf yesterday. That was brave, and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.
But one fight can’t undo the ceremony. That night cost me more than our future.
It destroyed my trust in the people closest to me.
” My voice stayed level, but my hands tightened around the rag.
“What you’re offering isn’t something I want.
I don’t want it now. Maybe I never will. ”
Rafe went still. His hurt reached me faintly through the bond.
“Is it because of him?” he asked. “Karlsson.”
“It’s because of you.”
He opened his mouth to say something else, and that’s when Jules came around the bay with two bottles of water and a socket wrench.
Jules stopped when he saw Rafe crouched near me. He looked between us, assessing, and then handed me one of the waters. He didn’t leave. He leaned against the lift’s support column, his arm nearly touching mine, and looked at Rafe with calm, steady patience.
Rafe’s expression changed.
Possessiveness hardened his eyes, the same look I’d seen when he first arrived and smelled Wade on me.
Jules posed a different kind of threat. He had no Alpha rank or confirmed mate bond, and the Goddess hadn’t assigned him to me.
He was simply a man standing where he wanted to stand, and Rafe couldn’t comprehend why that should threaten him.
“She doesn’t need you hovering,” Rafe said.
“Wasn’t aware I was,” Jules replied.
“A chosen attraction isn’t a fated bond. It’s not the same thing.”
Jules took a drink of water and held his ground beside me.