18. Silas
Chapter eighteen
Silas
Istay parked outside her rowhouse longer than I should. Engine running, both hands on the wheel, making no move to leave.
She’s been inside for more than a minute. That’s sufficient time to go.
I stay anyway.
The scent of her is still on my hands. The sounds she made are still in my chest. I sit with both of those things. My mind is spinning.
Regrets? Not exactly. Only the knowledge that I’ve now moved to a point that is past what my father had in mind when he said I’m telling you to be careful.
What pisses me off most is that the conversation never would have occurred if the woman was a wolf.
What I see as a double standard, though, my father sees as rules of the Coulter Pack.
I slam my hand into the steering wheel hard enough that the vibration travels up my arm.
Norah and I are both adults. When she turned toward me in the truck, we both knew what we were doing.
I met her with the same clarity. What happened wasn’t urgency or instinct outrunning reason.
It was a choice. For both of us. Eyes open.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
I’ve wanted women before. I know what that feels like, and I know how it works its way out. This isn’t going to work its way out. The sound she made, her hands gripping my arms, the way she looked at me afterward: none of it is fading. If anything, I want her more now than I did five minutes ago.
I don’t want to be careful. I want her in bed. Three weeks of this and I’m done pretending otherwise. The wolf wants her naked underneath me where I can hear every sound she makes. It wants me to take my time with her until neither of us has any patience left.
The wolf doesn’t care about timing or readiness or whether this is the night she’s decided it should be. It decided weeks ago, somewhere in a back room with mismatched mugs. Every controlled choice I’ve made since then has been mine, not its.
I am genuinely concerned about what happens the next time she puts her hands on me like that.
I grit my teeth, my resolve weakening. I look at her front door one more time, then put the truck in gear.
I haven’t let myself think it clearly until right now, alone, no one watching. She is my mate. And she doesn’t know yet.
Larkin changes as I move south and east. The storefronts broaden and become more practical, fewer decorative windows and more loading doors, used car dealerships and gated metal fabricators.
The air changes when I roll the window down.
It’s thinner, but full of engine heat, brick, and the faint layered scent of wolves moving through their own territory without having to adjust themselves for anyone else.
That part always felt like coming home.
The thought sits differently tonight than it usually does.
Not wrong. Only weighted with the enormity of my father’s expectations and Logan’s admonitions.
All that against the juxtaposition of Norah across from me in a rowboat, her shoulders turning pink, eyes flashing with laughter with the poetry book in her lap, her hair loose around her face, the brim of her hat making me work harder to read her eyes.
I turn into the side lot behind the warehouse and cut the engine and sit for a moment listening to the truck cooling down.
The back entrance stands propped open, and through it I hear the dull thud of stacked linens being moved somewhere inside, the low rhythm of voices from the work floor, and the steady mechanical percussion of the place running at this hour.
Normal sounds. As far from a calm, glistening lake as I can get.
I sit there and think about the drive back through Larkin with her beside me saying I almost didn’t come today like admitting it required vulnerability she hated showing.
I drag a hand over my mouth and get out of the truck.
Logan is at the side entrance to the warehouse when I come around the front of the truck.
He’s got one shoulder against the brick wall, hands loose at his sides, looking out across the lot.
It reads as incidental. It isn’t. I feel the familiar low-grade tightening that comes with being called out before I’ve decided what I want to reveal.
Logan has always done this—positioned himself where he can observe without appearing to, absorbing information before the conversation starts.
My father trained him for it. Or he was born to it, and my father recognized a tool when he saw one.
He glances toward me as I cross the lot.
“You took your time,” he says.
“I was out.”
His eyes move over me once, quick and thorough. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look my entire life. Half the time I think he genuinely doesn’t know he does it. The other half I think he knows exactly what he’s doing and has never bothered to stop.
“I can smell the lake. And something else.”
I close the truck door behind me. “You can smell half the city.”
“That’s true,” he says, without argument. “Doesn’t make it less informative.”
There’s the thing about Logan. He doesn’t argue when he doesn’t need to.
He holds the ground he’s on and lets you come to him, lets you do all the work of closing the distance, because he learned from our father that patience is its own kind of authority.
Elias picked well. The first-born wolf who never needed to raise his voice because the room already knew he was the one who mattered.
The evening air moves between us. Somewhere beyond the back fence a siren passes on a distant road and fades. I cross the lot and stop a few feet from him. “So, what’s your point, Logan?”
“I’m making conversation.”
“You’re out here waiting for me.”
“I was getting air.”
“Oh, big brother. You suck at lying.”
He almost smiles. “Henry saw you at the lake.”
I see Henry’s grin, followed by Norah’s laughter and the easy open way she says I like him on the drive back, like seeing my brother in a parking lot next to a lake was a perfectly ordinary extension of the afternoon.
Henry, who inherited none of my father’s gravity and all of his instincts, who moves through the world without the weight that Logan and I carry differently and badly.
I love my youngest brother the way you love the version of yourself that got out early.
“He needs to get a job. Oh wait, he has a job. What he needs to do is get a life.”
“You know Henry,” Logan says. “He’d rather spend his time irritating his brothers.”
I stick my hands in my pockets to keep them from clenching. I know Logan. He came out here for a reason, and he’s going to say it, and I might as well cut to the chase.
“How was it?” he asks.
The question is more careful than it sounds.
He’s not asking about the lake. He’s asking whether I’ve gone far enough that the conversation about consequences has become unavoidable, whether the afternoon was the kind of thing a man shakes off in a week or the kind that doesn’t shake.
Logan asking how was it is Logan deciding how worried to be.
“Fine,” I say.
His mouth quirks slightly. “That’s not much to go on.”
I look past him toward the warehouse entrance, where two younger wolves are wheeling a loaded rack through the propped-open door without paying obvious attention to us, but aware of us all the same.
The pack always knows. That’s not paranoia; it’s how it works—information moves through a pack the way current moves through water, invisibly and everywhere at once.
Half these men already know I took Norah to a lake this afternoon. The other half will know by morning.
“It was a good afternoon,” I say.
That hits differently than fine had. Logan absorbs it without reaction, which is its own reaction.
“And now?” he says.
The question holds more than it should.
The pack is still alert. My father’s office is still in my recent memory.
And the entire pack, whether openly or not, has adjusted around the fact that I have been seen with a human woman repeatedly and have now taken her to a lake on a Tuesday afternoon like a man who has forgotten what world he belongs to.
What I haven’t forgotten, what I think about every time Logan does the look, and my father gives the order, is that nobody asked me.
Not when they decided Logan was the heir.
Not when they built the structure of this family around his strengths and handed me the parts that didn’t fit his profile.
Not when they decided what my role was and what it wasn’t and what the middle son was good for and what he wasn’t.
The structure was decided without my input, and I’ve been living inside it since before I was old enough to understand I didn’t have a choice about it.
“And now what?” I say.
Logan lets that pass.
“Do you know what worries me?”
I try to keep the anger out of my voice. It’s an old anger, and therefore harder to locate than a fresh one. “Probably several things.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He looks out across the lot for a moment, toward the line of trucks parked along the far fence, toward the perimeter of territory that has defined the shape of my adult life.
His territory, officially. The operation he runs.
The pack he leads. The future that was assigned to him before either of us was old enough to have opinions about it.
It’s a future he accepted without visible conflict because Logan has never wanted anything our father didn’t want for him.
Then he looks back.
“What worries me is not that the pack notices,” he says. “That was inevitable. What worries me is that you don’t seem to understand what happens next.”
The resignation in his voice catches under my ribs. “Enough.”
“No,” Logan says, softly and without heat. “You understand the part that feels good right now.”