15. Silas
Chapter fifteen
Silas
My father’s office sits in the far corner of the second floor, above the warehouse floor and loading bays. By the time the noise from the business reaches it, most of the sharp edges are gone.
The presses are already running by the time I take the stairs.
Steam releases in steady bursts below me, metal plates locking and lifting in their rhythm, and one of the delivery vans has backed into the dock hard enough to rattle the freight door.
The vibration carries up through the structure and into the soles of my boots, fading before I reach the landing.
Today I notice all of it.
Standing outside his office now, there will be no reprieve.
Greer doesn’t deliver messages for operational matters.
There will be no discussion on the Myers contract, the status on the new delivery van we’ve ordered, or the quote I received for new copper pipe in the steam room.
My father doesn’t send someone to collect you from the floor for contracts or accounts.
He comes down himself for that and moves through the building present and obvious.
That he sent Greer this morning means he wants the desk between us.
That he did it while Norah was here means he wanted me to think about it on the way up.
I’ve thought about it.
The door stands half-open. I knock once on the frame and step inside.
He’s behind his massive mahogany desk, papers laid out in neat stacks, a pen resting across a ledger he’s working on.
The room hasn’t changed in the twenty-five years I’ve been old enough to notice it: old books along one wall, newer filing cabinets beside them, the large map behind him marked with pins showing every Coulter location in the city.
The floor to ceiling window to his right looks out over the dock and the parking lot, morning light coming in flat and even.
He looks up when I enter and gestures to the chair across from him.
“Close the door.”
I do it. The latch catches with a final click.
He doesn’t speak right away. He stays where he is for a moment, looking out over the yard below, taking its measure rather than just looking.
Then he turns, folds his hands loosely on the desk, and studies me with the patience of a man who has already decided what he’s going to say and is in no hurry about when he says it.
He learned that patience a long time ago.
Logan learned it from him.
It never took with me.
“What’s this about?” I ask. There’s no point beating about the bush, and I’d rather be proactive with the old man than sit here and wait for the inquisition.
He doesn’t answer the question directly.
“Who is the human woman?”
The words drop between us, and for a moment my mind flinches at the mention of Norah landing in this room where shady business deals are made, the dodgy business of running two accounting books is barely spoken of, and his young, untested males are given marching orders to patrol pack boundaries and terrorize other packs that cross without permission.
I don’t speak. The perverse side of me doesn’t want to make this easy on him.
“Silas.”
I lean back slightly in the chair. In my most guileless fashion, I say, “What human woman?”
He gives me the look that makes the deflection feel exactly as pointless as it is.
“The one you have been seen with repeatedly in town.”
It comes out without accusation, without heat, which is the thing about my father—he doesn’t need volume. He’s never needed it. The flatness of his delivery is the signature of a man who has already done the work of being angry and arrived somewhere past it.
My first instinct is irritation. “Logan told you.”
“No.”
The answer comes immediately and without qualification.
That stops me faster than a raised voice would have. I look at him more carefully, measuring what he knows against what he’s choosing to reveal, and find the uncomfortable experience of being further behind in a conversation than I realized.
“If Logan didn’t tell you,” I say, “then who did?”
He picks up the pen, turns it once between his fingers, then sets it back down in exactly the same position.
“You have been seen in town with the same woman on multiple occasions,” he says. “The bookstore. The bar. The hardware store on Clement, yesterday, here. And I don’t employ Logan to spy for me.”
Just all your other henchmen who do your bidding. I think it without saying it. The irritation goes cold.
Because I let myself believe this would stay small. That this was contained to the spaces it happened in.
Clearly, I was wrong about that.
He lets the silence run before asking the next question.
“What’s her name?”
There’s no reason not to answer that. “Norah.”
He nods once.
“And how long has this been going on?”
The phrasing tightens my jaw. “Nothing is going on.”
His expression doesn’t change.
I exhale slowly and try again. “I’ve seen her a few times. That’s all.”
“At the bookstore.”
“Yes.”
“At the bar.”
“Yes.”
“And she came here today.”
I don’t answer immediately.
He notices. He always notices.
“She came to see you,” he says.
“Yes.”
He leans back slightly, studying me with the same attention he brings to problems he’s deciding how to handle.
“Does she know what you are?”
“She knew before I said a word. It’s not a secret.”
“How much does she understand about what that means here?”
“She’s asking the right questions. I’m answering them.”
“And what was so important that she had to venture into pack territory by herself?”
I swallow. If there’s one thing the old man is, it’s relentless. A dog with a bone, he’ll worry me to death until I give him what he wants. I resign myself.
“How close?”
“She saw something she wasn’t meant to see.”
“Meaning.”
“She saw my wolf when it was too close to the surface.”
That changes the room in a way I feel more than see. I have his attention now, a stillness coming over him that is different from the calm he’s been maintaining since I sat down.
“And she understood what she saw?”
“Yes.”
“She’s said nothing to anyone?”
“Not that I know of.”
He looks at his hands on the desk. Then he stands and moves to the window. He stands rather than sits—this has moved from a conversation he was conducting to a reprimand.
“You have been careless,” he says.
The words are low, declarative, with a finality that sits in my gut like a stone.
“I haven’t brought her into pack business,” I say.
“You brought yourself into hers.” He doesn’t turn from the window. “Repeatedly. Visibly. In ways that have already been noted by people in this pack and other packs whose job it is to watch us.” He pauses. “And then she walked onto this dock.”
“That was her choice.”
“That she made it so is the part that concerns me.”
I don’t answer that. I can’t. What I want to tell him is that Norah is her own person, not ruled by biases and prejudices.
A woman with a backbone who makes her own decisions, values honesty, and loves passionately.
But I can’t. Because he’ll laugh at the fact that I’ve only known her for three weeks, and I’m professing what amounts to love.
He’s still looking out over the dock.
“When I was younger than you, one of my cousins became involved with a human woman from the north side of Larkin.”
His voice is different now—the timbre of a man moving into territory he rarely enters, where the words are chosen more carefully because the ground beneath them is less stable.
“It began as a conversation. A walk. Time spent in each other’s company. None of it seemed serious until it was.”
I sit perfectly still, waiting for the typhoon to strike.
“By the time he understood how serious it had become, neither of them controlled what came next.”
He pauses, visibly collecting himself.
It’s here I start thinking about my mother, Grace.
About being an eight-year-old boy and my confusion when she died.
How everything changed, and how my father was in the months after, moving through these same rooms—rawer, less contained, a man who had not yet decided what to do with an overwhelming grief.
He’s not talking about his cousin. Not entirely.
I don’t say so.
“It ended badly,” he continues. “Not because either of them was careless, or because they meant harm. More because wolves and humans can never fully understand each other. When it breaks, it breaks in ways that don’t heal cleanly.”
The window light falls across his shoulders, and for a moment he looks older than he usually does. Carrying more weight than he usually shows.
He looks directly at me.
“I’m not asking because I enjoy involving myself in your personal life.” The formality of his words is its own telling—this is him keeping the distance, putting the structure back.
“I’m asking because wolves and humans do not step into each other’s world lightly. The consequences move in both directions, and they move further than you can see from where you’re standing.”
“She already stepped into mine,” I say. “Today. She made that choice herself.”
“And that should concern you more than it seems to. You’re more defensive than a man usually is about a woman who means nothing to him.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of an answer.
“She matters to you.” He says it softly. The flatness of a man stating a fact he’s already confirmed. “Whether or not you have admitted that to yourself.”
I push to my feet.
“So, what is it you’re saying?”
In that moment, I see a fracture in his resolve. Not softness exactly.
“I’m telling you to be careful. If this continues, it will not remain a private matter. Not for you. Not for her.” He pauses. “And not for this family.”
I nod once and turn for the door.
“Silas.”
I stop.
“If you’re going to place your heart somewhere complicated, do not make the mistake of thinking the rest of us will not be affected by it.”
I leave before I answer.
Logan is in the hallway, leaning against the wall with his arms folded in a posture deliberately arranged to look relaxed. He straightens when I step out, his gaze moving over my face in a quick, thorough assessment.