15. Silas #2
The vibration of the warehouse presses up through the floor, steady, reliable.
“You told him,” I say.
“No,” Logan says.
I believe him immediately, irritating me more than the alternative would have.
“You didn’t have to,” I say bitterly. “He has his little spies all over the city.”
He pushes off the wall and starts for the stairs.
I follow, because standing still feels worse than moving, and we descend without speaking, the smell of solvent and hot fabric thickening as we get closer to the floor.
A forklift beeps somewhere below. Someone calls across the dock for a pallet jack.
The ordinary noise of an ordinary weekday.
None of it touches what’s sitting under my ribs.
Halfway down the landing, Logan speaks. “You should stay away from her.”
No force in it. That makes it worse.
I stop. He comes down the last two steps and turns, and we’re nearly eye level with the railing between us.
“Since when do you give advice about my personal life?”
“Since it stopped being personal.” His gaze goes briefly toward the office above us, then back. “Father didn’t call you up there because he had nothing better to do.”
“He’s getting ahead of himself.”
Logan doesn’t answer that. He rests his forearms on the railing and looks out over the floor below—the entire operation turning on its own reliable axis.
Pack territory. Order. Structure.
The exact opposite of what has been happening in my head since Norah stepped onto the dock with her shoulders squared and her chin up like she’d been visiting wolves her whole life.
Logan raises his eyebrows at me. “Is he?”
He turns slightly, leaning back against the rail. “You’ve been seen with her more than once. In town, at the bar, and now here.” A pause. “The pack isn’t small, Silas.”
“Apparently.”
“And she came onto the dock today.”
“She came to see me.”
“She came into pack territory. Uninvited. Alone. To do what? Come to some kind of resolution with you? Tell me why your conversation couldn’t have waited for you to go to town. Tell me why you haven’t warned her of the dangers, both to us and to her.”
His logical execution wears me down. I exhale. “She doesn’t know it as danger.”
“Exactly. And that is the point Father was trying to make with you.”
“She came here because she saw my wolf. And she wanted to let me know that it didn’t bother her.”
“And you told him?”
I nod glumly.
“That’s the part that worries Father,” he says. “Not that you met someone. Not even that she’s human. But that she saw what you are and walked toward it instead of away from it. Most humans don’t do that. When they do, they’re usually invested.”
“Or it means she’s not like most humans.”
“Yes,” he says. “That’s what I said.”
We stop near the end of the conveyor line, the machinery running its steady course beside us. I look at him, and he looks back, and I think about our mother, about being eight years old, about how this building has always been partly a structure built around a loss that nobody talks about directly.
“You think I can walk away from her,” I say.
“I think you can handle it.”
“Same thing to you and Father.”
“You kissed her.”
The words arrive without preamble and hit harder than they should.
“You’re guessing.”
“No.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I didn’t need to be.” He says it with the infuriating calm of someone who has already done the math and arrived at the answer before the question was finished. “I know what you look like when something has gotten past your defenses.”
I drag my hand over the back of my neck.
“You make me sound like I have no choice, no control. It doesn’t have to mean what you’re making it mean.”
“It means what it means,” he says. “Wolves don’t experiment with this. You know that. When the wolf locks onto someone, it isn’t casual. Distance and self-discipline don’t make it go away.” He pauses. “It changes things.”
“You are an Elias mini-me. You sound just like him.”
“Because he’s right.” He says it without apology. “And you know he’s right, which is why you’re standing here arguing with me instead of just telling me I’m wrong.”
I shake my head in disgust. The warehouse moves around us as I look at my older brother. So purposeful, almost to the point of righteousness.
He looks back, taking in my narrowed eyes and stony expression.
“Be careful.” Same two words my father used. Same two words Norah has, no doubt, heard from her friends and her sister. It seems that everyone within a reasonable radius has arrived at the same conclusion independently.
And I’m not ready to examine that.
Logan steps past me, heading toward the dock.
“Logan.”
He stops.
“If you didn’t tell him,” I say, “and he already knew—who did?”
He glances back—closer to resignation than anything else.
“You were right the first time. He does have his little spies. He always has.”
He keeps walking while the full weight of what started three weeks ago is in my chest. Even after a conversation with the patriarch and the prince, it’s not leaving.
My mother died in a car accident two miles from our house, on a road she’d driven a thousand times. The police came to the door in the late afternoon. My father left with them and came back alone. He met Logan and me at the door and said the words.
She was gone. No room to prepare. That’s the cruelty of it—not that it could have been prevented. That it was sudden, and sudden things leave no room for anything except the fact of them.
My father has never said directly that the speed of it broke his ability to trust that anything he loved would stay; the sheer indifference of how the world took her without drama or warning or any of the signals that would have let him prepare.
But I was eight years old, and some things you understand before you have language for them.
And standing here now in the building he built around that loss, with Logan’s words still in the air and my father’s admonition pressing on my chest, I see that every warning I’ve been given this morning is coming from the same place.
Not from policy.
Not from pack politics.
But from a man who watched his wife drink herself to death over a life that made her miserable. Who has been carrying that for almost twenty-five years. Who is trying, in the only way he knows how, to make sure his sons don’t end up in the same place.
I stand with that for a moment.
Then I go back to work.