27. Silas
Chapter twenty-seven
Silas
She called me at nine-fifteen, after the pack altercation at the warehouse, and after the wine-fest cum browbeating by my father. The first words out of her mouth were I need to tell you something, but first you need to know that I’m fine.
I knew she wasn’t before she finished the sentence. Not because she was lying, Norah doesn’t lie, it’s one thing I’ve been noticing without meaning to, but because she was being careful with her words.
I asked her what happened, and she said she’d had a weird night and was home and not to worry, and only after I said her name again did she eventually tell me.
Gradually and reluctantly, she told me. Two guys in the alley behind the shop. Positioned between her and her car. She handled it, she said. She was fine.
But I could tell she was scared. While she didn’t say so, I could hear it in the slight breathiness of her voice. It made my heart want to jump out of my chest.
By the time she finishes, I’m already in the truck with the engine running, my wolf right at the surface, running calculations I’m not entirely endorsing. I envision two teenagers in an alley, the gap between Norah and her car that they open like a courtesy and expect her to be grateful for.
The wolf is offering me several outcomes, some of which involve ripping their heads clean off, some of which involve scaring them badly enough that they never walk down another alley again.
I’m genuinely undecided which would be more satisfying.
The first is final. The second they’d carry. I’m leaning toward the second one.
The thought of her in that dim alley, standing her ground, makes me cold with anger. Tonight I’m going to her house and confirming with my own eyes that she’s exactly as fine as she says she is. Everything else can wait.
I park two blocks away because I need the walk to get myself under control. By the time I reach her rowhouse, I can knock instead of putting my fist through a wall. It’s a low bar, but I’ll take it.
I knock once. Then again, spaced enough that she’ll know it’s me.
A pause on the other side. The lock turns.
She looks exactly the same.
That’s the first thing I notice. There’s no visible tension in her shoulders, no unevenness in her breathing, no sign that anything has happened. If I didn’t know better, I could convince myself of that. She’s fine. That’s what I needed to see.
“It’s late. You didn’t have to come,” she says, stepping back to let me in.
“I know,” I say.
“I told you I was fine.”
“You did.”
She looks at me. “And you came anyway.”
“Yes.”
She closes the door and we move into the kitchen. She leans against the counter with her arms folded, not defensive, only bracing herself. Her house is warm and lived-in, an exact reflection of Norah. After the warehouse and my family, I welcome the contrast.
“Walk me through it,” I say.
“Two guys,” she says. “Late teens, maybe early twenties. One of them had a bruise under his eye. I may have pointed at it.”
I look at her.
“I didn’t stick my finger out and say hey, what the hell did you do to get that shiner,” she says, clearly exasperated with herself. “I referenced it. He understood.”
“You needled someone who punches people.”
“I made an observation,” she says. “Which he understood. It was effective. They’re cretins, young thugs. Probably too stupid to know when they’re being insulted.”
I let a slow breath out through my nose. My wolf is still close to the surface, watching.
“So, they intimidated a woman in a dark alley.”
“Yes, to make sure I understood what I’m doing,” she says.
She has my attention at that. “They told you to stay away from me?”
“Well, they never came out and said what exactly it was they took offense at. They suck at communicating.”
“But it was clear they thought you were doing something you shouldn’t be.”
“Apparently, I have questionable taste in the company I keep.”
She says it lightly. Her eyes give her away—still working through whatever happened in that alley, even if the rest of her is acting like it didn’t.
“Did they say my name?” I ask.
“They didn’t use it.”
No. They wouldn’t.
“They shouldn’t have come near you,” I say, and I mean it in both the plain sense, and the other sense, the one that lives underneath every reasonable thing I’ve said since I walked through her door. She hears the plain version. The other one I keep to myself, where it belongs.
“That may be true, but it’s not enough of an explanation for me,” she says.
“It’s the part that matters right now.”
“It matters to you,” she says. “It doesn’t tell me anything useful.”
She’s right. I watch her for a moment longer, confirming what I already know.
She’s steady. Alert. Untouched on the surface.
Not underneath. She crossed that line tonight.
That she’s standing in her kitchen making dry observations about eye contact doesn’t mean the crossing didn’t cost her anything.
She asks it straight, the way she asks everything. “Why would they care? Why can’t people mind their own business?”
“It’s not about you,” I say.
She waits.
“When a human woman chooses a wolf, it’s not a personal decision to the people watching.
It’s a statement. About what she thinks wolves are worth.
About what she thinks human men are worth.
” I pause. “There are men in this city who have decided that wolves are beneath them. Who need that to be true. And the women who love those men have built their lives around that being true. When you walk down the street with me, you’re not only making a choice about yourself. ”
“I’m making a statement about them,” she says.
“Whether you intend to or not.”
She’s quiet for a moment, turning it over. She doesn’t react immediately, only works through the thing, taking it apart and looking at the pieces.
“And the guys in that alley,” she says.
“Probably not wolf-haters at their core,” I say. “Probably men who’ve watched what happens to people who get too close, seen it end badly, and decided the lesson is to stay away. Then you come along and refuse to be scared or ashamed. That threatens the choice they made.”
“Because if I’m not scared,” she says slowly, “and it doesn’t have to be the way they decided it has to be, ”
“Then they made the wrong call,” I say. “And nobody wants to have made the wrong call.”
I watch her absorb the fact that two men stood in an alley and treated her choice as a judgment on their lives. She didn’t ask for that.
“So, it was never really about wolves,” she says.
“It’s never really about wolves,” I say. “It’s about what choosing a wolf says about the world everyone else has agreed to live in. You didn’t agree. That’s the problem.”
“I didn’t know I was dissenting,” she says. “I thought I was just living my life.”
That gets me. I don’t let it show completely, but she sees it anyway—the small thing that moves through my expression before I get it back under control.
“The guy with the bruise,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“He knew he’d made the wrong call.”
“Probably,” I say. “He made a different choice than you did. And I think that’s what he couldn’t forgive.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”
“It gets sadder,” I say. “Because he’s not wrong that it costs something. He’s wrong that the cost can’t be worth it.”
“Is that what you think?” she says. “That it’s worth the cost?”
I hold her gaze.
“I’m sitting in your house at ten o’clock on a weeknight,” I say. “What do you think?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. I asked the question. I’m still sitting here. That’s the answer.
My hand moves from her wrist to her palm. My other hand finds her waist. She doesn’t resist it, doesn’t question it, just meets me honestly.
“Don’t tell me later you didn’t know what this was,” I say.
“I won’t,” she says. Nothing uncertain in it.
I kiss her—taking it for what it has been for longer than either of us has said out loud.
She doesn’t hesitate. Her hands find the front of my jacket and she pulls me closer, and I let her, and the wolf goes quiet in a way it hasn’t gone quiet in weeks—the deep quiet of a wolf that has found what it was looking for and has no intention of letting go.
We walk into the bedroom, because there’s no hurry here. I undress her slowly, my hands following the path of what I’m uncovering, unhurried, attentive, giving each moment the weight it deserves.
When I look at her, her breath is slightly uneven, and her hands are over her head, trusting, enjoying. Her eyes find mine with the expression of someone confirming what she already knows but still needs to feel: that I want her.
After the alley, after tonight, after everything this city has been doing to make the space between us feel like a liability—she’s still here. Her hands on my arms now, loose—neither holding on nor letting go.
I think about the two men in that alley and what they wanted from her. She gave them nothing. She walked past them at her own pace, got in her car, and later called me because she had already decided they would not control what happened next.
There’s a cold thing sitting in my chest right now that the wolf has been keeping since the call ended.
I know what I’m going to do with the cold thing.
For right now, there’s this. Norah here, the house quiet, the city outside, the complete absence of anywhere I would rather be.
That’s the thing I keep arriving at when I try to think clearly about any of this.
Not the complications, not my father’s voice, or Logan’s warnings, or the city tightening around us. Just her hands, this room, this hour.
Paxton.
I’ve been turning that over since my cousin Declan said it at his wedding—offhand, over whiskey, not even directed at me—and it hit the way things hit when they’re answering a question you didn’t know you were asking.
Three hundred miles from my father and his order. Three hundred miles from a city building laws around what I am and calling it accountability. Three hundred miles from a company and pack structure that will keep running without me because Logan has always been the one it was built around.
Three hundred miles toward a pack that made a different choice and a town that doesn’t know us yet. We would get to decide what we are to each other before anyone else did.
I look at her in the low light of this house that is entirely hers—the shelves and the plants and the mismatched everything that she built out of stubbornness and a genuine belief that the life she wanted was worth building.
She built it here. If she wanted to, she could build it somewhere else.
The whole architecture of a life run on her own terms—none of that is attached to this city.
It’s attached to her.
Three hundred miles is nothing.