22. Silas
Chapter twenty-two
Silas
The text comes after I finish helping a driver unload the afternoon deliveries.
Meet me in my office.
Four words. No explanation, no urgency implied, no indication of what this is about. It doesn’t need any of those things. When Elias sends a text like this, the weight is in the sender, not the content.
I take my gloves off, throw them on a bench, and step back onto the warehouse floor. Racks of freshly pressed garments move along the suspended rails overhead toward the sorting tables, where two younger wolves work, folding shirts into neat stacks.
I hand my clipboard to the floor manager and head for the metal staircase along the back wall.
The steps rattle lightly under my boots as I climb.
From the second-floor landing, the entire operation spreads out below me: conveyor rails across the warehouse floor and employees moving around them with the practiced efficiency of a system refined over decades. Every part of it is purposeful and predictable.
My father likes this view.
His office door stands half-open when I reach the top of the stairs. Inside, Elias stands near the window that overlooks the back lot, his hands clasped loosely behind his back, his posture straight in the way of a man who stopped thinking about how he carries himself a long time ago.
He doesn’t turn when I step inside.
I push the door shut and cross the room, stopping a few feet from the desk. He stays at the window for a moment, looking out over the yard below, and I wait because waiting is what this situation requires.
I wait for the inevitable. An inquisition on Norah and what the status is with her. But he surprises me.
His tone is even. Measured. The tone of a man laying out facts he’s already examined from every angle before deciding to present them.
“There was an incident downtown last night,” he says.
“A retail store in the human district. High-end outdoor equipment. Windows smashed. Fifty thousand dollars of merchandise stolen.” He pauses. “Security cameras recorded most of it.”
I say nothing. I hadn’t heard about it. I’d come straight home from Norah’s last night and hadn’t looked at my phone again.
“Three of them,” he says. “The media is saying they were all recently shifted.”
Young wolves. Anyone who has spent enough time in this world recognizes the pattern. The early months after a first full shift are volatile. Instinct outruns discipline, and the sudden strength of a fully realized wolf body convinces some young males that consequences happen to other people.
He turns from the window and moves back toward the desk with the even pace of someone walking through a conversation that’s already finished.
“Was anyone hurt?” I ask.
“No.”
He sits, resting his hands lightly on the polished surface. “That is the only reason the situation remains manageable.”
I cross my arms loosely. “This is the second incident,” I say.
“Yes.”
“The first one the packs managed to contain.”
“Barely,” he says. “And the circumstances were different. This one has footage. It is already circulating.” He says it without inflection, placing the facts accurately in the room rather than dramatizing or minimizing them.
“I’ve already spoken to the two other pack leaders.
I trust them on this. On business, different story.
They assure me these were not their young wolves.
I believe them. However, the store owner has spoken to the press.
Human commentators are using the word aggression.
City officials are using the word concern. ”
“If we know this wasn’t pack-related, then we need to stand up and say so.” I can feel the hair on my arms rising, the inevitable sense of injustice I feel in situations like this. “This isn’t how our young pack members are acting now. They’re staying clean when it comes to humans.
Elias looks at me steadily. “Yes,” he says. “You’re correct. We haven’t seen issues like this in a very long time.”
The agreement arrives without satisfaction.
Because the point he is making is that it doesn’t matter.
Whether these incidents were organic or engineered by people with a reason to want wolves visible and volatile in the public eye, the political consequence is identical.
Perception rarely concerns itself with cause.
“The council will expect cooperation from the packs while the situation is addressed,” he continues.
“Inspections will increase. Businesses in this district will receive visits from city representatives.” He folds his hands together.
“We are entering a period where everything visible will be interpreted. Everything public will be weighed.”
I know this rhythm. It has played out before, in various forms, throughout my entire adult life.
One incident, real or manufactured, and suddenly every wolf in the city is required to prove that he can behave, that he is the safe and manageable kind.
That the version of wolves the human world finds tolerable is the version currently present and accounted for.
“There is another matter,” Elias says.
I don’t move.
He leans back slightly in his chair. “You were seen again with the human woman.”
The words arrive with the same even tone he used for the vandalism report. That evenness is its own kind of statement.
“With the human woman,” I repeat.
He doesn’t say her name.
The omission hits immediately, and I feel the slap of it before I can decide what to do with it. He’s erased Norah to a category, the same thing humans have been doing to wolves for decades.
“Yes,” I say.
“You and I already discussed this situation earlier in the week.”
“We did.”
“I told you my concerns.”
“I remember.”
He studies me for a moment with the patient, measuring attention he brings to problems he’s not yet finished assessing.
“And yet yesterday you were seen walking with her down a city street. And last week you were rowing a boat across a public lake with her.”
His voice remains completely even. That evenness somehow makes it sharper.
“We had a picnic,” I say.
“I’m aware.”
Outside the window, a truck backs slowly through the yard, the beep, beep, beep of its backup signal reminding me of a metronome. It drifts faintly through the glass, small and ordinary and indifferent to what is happening in this room.
“You appear to have misunderstood the intent of our previous conversation,” Elias says.
I uncross my arms and move closer to the desk.
“No,” I say. “I understood it.”
He watches me. “I don’t believe you did.”
I hold his gaze and say nothing, because arguing is pointless now. He lets the silence continue. This is one of his tools Logan inherited. After a suitable moment has elapsed, he continues.
“The situation in town has changed,” he says. “Public sentiment toward wolves is becoming volatile. The last thing this pack needs is unnecessary attention drawn to one of its visible members.”
“That vandalism had nothing to do with me. Or ‘the human.’” I say it sarcastically, my gaze unwavering.
“No,” he says. “It didn’t. But perception rarely concerns itself with accuracy, and you’re not a private citizen engaging in private behavior. You’re a Coulter. Your actions are read as signals, whether or not you intend them that way.”
“I’m not signaling anything.”
“You were seen publicly courting a human woman.”
“Courting,” I say.
“What would you call it?”
“She’s a friend. We like each other’s company. That she’s human is irrelevant.”
Elias tilts his head slightly, a small movement that signals a change in approach. He’s assessed the direct route and is choosing a different angle.
“Your naivete is astounding. That, or you’re playing me for a fool. I understand the appeal. Human women present novelty. Curiosity is natural. Attraction happens.”
I hold my breath for a few heartbeats.
“These experiments run their course,” he continues, calm enough to make it clear he considers the matter settled. “The wolf finds its equal. It always does.”
The word sits like a hand flat on a table.
Experiments. Equal.
Anger moves through me, but that’s not all of it. Underneath is an older fury: the fury of being seen as deficient by someone certain he is superior.
He is looking at me. The middle son. The one who ran too hard and too fast with the younger pack members at eighteen, howling at the moon, mildly terrorizing humans because we could.
The one who used his intelligence as a weapon and his charm as a shield, and his playboy reputation as an argument against being taken seriously.
The one who has never been able to make his father see him as anything other than the version of himself he was at eighteen.
Experiments.
The sinking feeling arrives. He thinks what has been building for over a month now with Norah—the bookshop, the trivia night, the lake, her hand over mine last night—is the same category as everything his eighteen-year-old son did years ago. He’s filed me away in that image and never revisited it.
On one level, I feel only sadness. He doesn’t know what this is.
My father uses the word attachment. Not the other word.
I don’t know if that’s strategy or if he genuinely hasn’t seen it yet — if his certainty about what this is has blinded him to what it actually is.
Logan’s face tells me nothing. Nobody in this room is going to say it first. But it’s here, in this office, the thing none of us is naming, and my father gave an order that was already too late before he gave it.
What he doesn’t know is what a bond with me could cost Norah.
A human woman doesn’t automatically gain the pack’s protection.
She has no rank or formal standing. The pack wouldn’t act against her directly, but other wolves in Larkin could see her as a weakness, a pressure point, a way to get to me or my family.
She wouldn’t even know what to watch for.
My father is giving an order about the wrong problem.