10. Silas
Chapter ten
Silas
Ihaven’t slept properly since Thursday.
There’s a word for what the wolf is doing. I know the word. I’ve watched it happen to other men—the way it takes hold, the way it doesn’t let go. I’m not using it yet. Using it makes it real, and real things require decisions I’m not ready to make.
The wolf is still running on what happened in that shop—her mouth, her hands flat against my chest, the exact moment I felt her stop thinking and felt myself one heartbeat away from doing the same.
I wanted to lock that door from the inside and not leave until morning.
I wanted things that have nothing to do with patience or timing or any of the careful arguments I’ve been making to myself for two weeks about taking this slowly.
The wolf does not believe in slowly. The wolf believes in claiming what it has decided is its, and Thursday night it took everything I had to put that down gently instead of letting it do what it actually wanted to do—which was lift her onto that counter and not stop until one of us remembered we were standing in a shop with a window facing the street.
I didn’t do that.
I am, this morning, considering it a personal triumph that I didn’t do that.
It doesn’t feel like a triumph. It feels like a fight I’m going to have to keep having, every single time, for as long as this goes on—fighting an instinct that does not care about her readiness or her terms or anything except the fact that she is exactly what it has been waiting for. It is done waiting.
It’s not just want. I know what want feels like—clean, manageable, a feeling you can put down when it’s inconvenient. This is different. When she’s not in the room, I feel her absence like a pressure change. Low and persistent. A frequency I can’t locate and can’t tune out.
She’s been a block away and I’ve known it before I saw her. Her heartbeat registers differently than other heartbeats. I know her body temperature from across a room.
The wolf doesn’t decide to track these things. It simply does. I’ve been telling myself this is attraction. It isn’t.
The Coulter Cleaners on Ninth Street sits exactly where the line runs—the line Larkin doesn’t admit to.
There’s no marker for it. No painted curb, no sign, no official designation on any map Larkin has bothered to produce. But everyone who works in this part of town reads it the same as you read weather; from the accumulated weight of a dozen small indicators, none of them conclusive on their own.
On the pack side, the buildings carry the reinforcement that came with wolves moving into the district over the last twenty years.
Thicker glass in the street-level windows.
Reinforced door frames, subtle but there if you know what you’re looking at.
Scent markers laid into the concrete that no human would consciously notice, but ones that every wolf reads without thinking.
Across the intersection, it loosens. Older brick.
Sidewalks giving where roots push up from underneath.
Shops that belong to families established long before any pack started buying into this district and who have made it clear they have no intention of leaving now.
The pack respects that. That kind of rootedness is something wolves understand better than most.
The cleaners sits right between those two worlds.
My father Elias chose it that way, the same as he makes most decisions—with the forward-looking patience of someone always thinking three moves past the current one.
A business on the line is a business that belongs to both sides of it.
Goodwill without requiring anyone to acknowledge that goodwill is being generated.
A reason to be present without advertising the presence.
Being wolves in this city means navigating that calculation every day. The world knows we exist—that stopped being a question before I was born. The question now is what knowing gets humans and what it costs us, and the answer depends entirely on who’s asking.
Human systems have a way of reaching for what wolves offer: the strength, the reliability, the loyalty that runs deeper than ordinary contracts, while ensuring we stay in the positions that make us useful rather than the ones that give us standing.
The Coulters have been navigating that math for three generations.
I push the door of the cleaners open and step inside.
The bell chimes once overhead. Heat hits me immediately, thick with steam and the smell of moist fabric.
Detergent runs under everything, sharp and chemical-clean, layered with the accumulated scent of everything that passes through: cotton pressed and warm, old wool holding onto damp it never fully released, perfume clinging too long to silk, motor oil buried deep in a mechanic’s jacket waiting to be stripped out.
A constant layered flood of information. Most of it I tune out. The rest drops where it needs to.
I didn’t plan to be here this morning.
That’s the honest accounting of it. The route I drove didn’t require this stop.
The dispatch board was clear, the morning routes running clean.
Marta had already handled the press two issue before I got the message.
There was no operational reason to pull the truck over on Ninth and walk through this door.
If Logan asked me directly, I would tell him it was a spot check, which would be accurate, true enough to hold up, not complete enough to invite follow-up questions.
The restlessness has been there since Sunday night.
It’s been hanging here since Hannigan’s trivia night.
Since standing in the crowd and watching Norah look at me after the flier confession with those steady, direct eyes.
The banter that was just that, but also not banter.
And me walking away before I could do anything useful with it.
The feeling followed me out of the bar and into Monday morning, low and persistent, like a frequency I can’t locate the source of and can’t tune out.
Apparently what I do with it is drive to Ninth Street and call it a spot check.
Fine.
“Morning, boss.” The shop manager, Otto, is behind the counter, halfway through tagging a rack of shirts, pencil behind his ear, hands moving without hesitation. He glances up, surprised but not concerned.
“Morning,” I say, stepping further in. “Didn’t plan to be out this way.”
“You didn’t say you were coming,” he agrees, his version of asking why I’m here without asking why I’m here.
“Press two cleared before the rush?” I ask.
“Marta had it before seven. Ran clean since.”
I nod and move past the counter toward the pressing room, because if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be useful, and being useful gives the restlessness somewhere to go that isn’t circling.
The pressing room air is thicker, steam curling around the machines, catching in the tall window light, the smell of heated fabric intensifying. Marta is at the main press, guiding a sleeve into position without thinking about it.
“New valve on four still whistling?” I ask.
“When the pressure climbs,” she says. “Better than last week.”
“I’ll get someone back on it.”
She nods and goes back to the sleeve. That’s all the conversation Marta generally requires. I do a circuit of the room, checking the steam pressure gauges, running my eye over the conveyor feed, confirming the afternoon’s commercial run is staged and ready. Everything is where it should be.
I step back toward the front.
And that’s when it hits me.
Not sight. Not sound.
Scent.
It threads through everything else before I can process it, cleaner than the detergent, warmer than the steam, wrong for this room and this building and this Monday morning, causing my head to lift.
Norah.
The recognition arrives fast and certain and completely without ambiguity.
My body has already turned toward the front of the shop before I’ve consciously caught up, and I make myself slow down and walk normally because Otto is six feet away and I don’t need to explain the attention I’m bringing to a Monday morning spot check.
She’s outside.
Visible through the front window, still on the sidewalk, mid-conversation with someone beside her, not looking at the storefront yet. The light catches in her hair the same way it did in the back room of The Last Chapter and at Hannigan’s. I stare anyway.
Her outfit is understated. I feel my cock stiffening anyway. Female wolves dress provocatively when in public. It’s a known fact. Thigh-high boots, tight clothes—half the time they’re mistaken for hookers from a distance. I’ve never spontaneously reacted this way to a female wolf’s look.
With Norah, though, I’m as turned on as a thirteen-year-old hiding under the bed with his dad’s Penthouse magazine.
Her short skirt has exactly the right amount of flip to it, like she’s going to catch a set of tennis at the club.
Her Grecian-style sandals weave up her toned calves, and I find myself thinking about sliding them off. I swallow. Hard.
She’s not alone.
The woman beside her is taller, darker, paying attention to everything around her without appearing to. She says something, and Norah laughs, and even through the glass I feel it more than I hear it, open and unguarded, the authentic kind that makes people stop and stare.
Then Norah glances at the shop front. I watch her eyes read the sign.
She pushes the door open. She sees me the moment she steps inside.
The change in her expression is quick and contained, not surprise exactly, more a recalibration of a situation that changed without warning. She manages it in about half a second.
“Didn’t expect to see you here,” she says, stopping a few feet from the counter, her tote settling against her hip.
“Could say the same. Do you have clothes to drop off?”
“Yep. You handle this one too?”
I nod.
Her mouth curves. “ You seem like a guy who likes to handle things.”
“Not everything,” I say.
“Give it time.”