28. Silas
Chapter twenty-eight
Silas
Ifind them in forty minutes.
That’s what humans don’t fully understand about wolf tracking.
It isn’t mystical or some ancient gift wrapped in folklore.
It’s chemistry. Scent has a signature the way a fingerprint does, and if I’ve been where someone stood and they left enough of themselves behind, I can follow it. These two left plenty.
I catch their scent in the alley outside The Last Chapter, after I speak to her long enough to confirm she is indeed fine. After I let myself breathe again, I note it the way I note everything: file it away, not knowing then when I’ll use it.
I know now.
The truck is warm. The city moves past the windows at eleven on a weeknight: closed restaurants, the last bar crowd on the sidewalks, delivery trucks finding their windows. I’m not driving fast. I don’t need to. My wolf is quiet because it knows exactly what we’re doing.
My phone rings.
It’s Greer. I answer it on the second ring. “Yeah.”
“You left early,” he says.
“Had somewhere to be.”
A pause. Not the uncertain kind. The Greer kind, where he decides how much he wants to say. “Your father was looking for you.”
“He can look.”
Another pause. Longer. “The north corridor situation is resolved,” he says. “Logan handled the follow-up.”
“Good.”
“Nothing else requiring your attention tonight,” he says. “Operationally.”
He puts just enough weight on the last word that both of us know what he’s doing, and neither of us acknowledges it. Greer rarely states more than he has to. Thirty years in this family has made him fluent in what doesn’t get said.
“Quiet night,” I say.
“Is it,” he says.
It’s not a question. He knows I’m in the truck. He was in the kitchen when I got Norah’s call, and he knows I left without telling anyone where I was going. If he suspects why, he’s keeping it.
“How’s the Elmwood equipment?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says. “Rory has it handled.”
“Good.”
City blocks pass, and I take a turn I know, moving east now, into the neighborhood where the scent pointed me before I consciously decided to follow it.
“Silas,” Greer says.
“Yeah.”
A long pause. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped a register, the register he uses when he’s talking to me rather than to the operation. “Some things are better handled quietly.”
“I know that.”
“And some things...” he stops. Starts again. “Some things are necessary. Regardless of the method.”
Outside the window, a group of people spill out of a bar, laughing, indifferent to everything outside their small, warm circle of the evening. I watch them pass.
“I’ll be back before morning,” I say.
“I know,” Greer says. “I’ll let your father know you had an errand.”
He hangs up first.
I put the phone in the cupholder and make the next turn, letting my wolf take over the navigation the way it knows how to, following the thread of scent that sits in my memory since I canvassed the alley.
The drive east takes me through neighborhoods I know from routes, pickups, and an operation that runs all over this city.
I know which blocks have cameras and which don’t, which corners younger pack members patrol, and which streets rival operations avoid.
I’ve spent my whole life learning Larkin one route at a time.
Tonight I’m not thinking about territory.
I’m thinking about an alley.
Two men positioned themselves between her and her car.
The gap they left her—just wide enough to pass through, their gift to her, the one that said we’re giving you this so you understand we could take it away.
She walked through it at her own pace, which is totally stupid and reckless in one sense, but totally something she would do.
It’s been sitting on my chest since she told me about it.
I think about what it takes to be Norah in this city.
It isn’t only the alley. Customers pay more attention when a wolf walks into her shop.
Conversations change when she’s seen with me.
Pack meetings and carefully worded messages about optics and accountability shape a world she doesn’t see directly.
She walked into all of it without asking permission, apologizing, or backing away.
The cold thing that’s been waiting since the call has a shape now. It’s not rage. Rage is hot and loud, and it peaks and passes. This is quieter than that. More durable. It’s the cold patience of my wolf that has identified the men who threatened her as a problem that needs addressing.
I follow the scent east, and there I find the broad one first.
He’s outside a convenience store on Marlowe, leaning against the building with a phone in one hand and a beer in the other.
He’s alone and younger than I expected, late teens or maybe twenty, with the build of someone still growing into his size.
Standing there, he looks more like a kid with nowhere to be than a threat.
The wolf knows him by scent. That’s enough.
He looks up from his phone when I pull to the curb.
It takes him a second, his face doing the work of placing me—the bookshop, the woman he cornered—and I watch him arrive at the conclusion as the color leaves his face.
He looks at the store’s door. Then back at me. He doesn’t move.
I get out of the truck.
I’m not moving fast. I don’t need to. As I cross the sidewalk at a normal pace, I look at him. When I stop about four feet away, I let my wolf come forward the way it’s been waiting since the phone call with Norah, and I watch his face change.
He’s seen wolves before. You don’t live in Larkin without having seen wolves.
But there’s a difference between seeing a wolf and having one look at you like this.
I remind myself that this kid was stupid enough to threaten the woman of a wolf, but smart enough to know that the thing standing four feet away from him has the desire and the capacity to rip his head off.
His drink slips from his hand, falling to the ground with a clunk. Soft foam sprays out over the sidewalk. His mouth hangs slack. He’s mute.
The tall one comes out of the store.
He stops in the doorway with a bag in his hand and takes in the scene—the truck, me, his mute buddy’s face, and I watch the same calculation happen in him, faster though because this one is smarter.
To his credit, he doesn’t run.
That’s interesting. Smarter than I expected.
I look at them both and say nothing. My wolf comes fully forward—not rushed, wholly present, the way it gets once the wolf has decided what comes next and there’s no reason to hurry it.
I feel it in my chest, in the drop of my shoulders, in the way my hands open at my sides.
My vision sharpens. The distance between us, four feet of sidewalk, is nothing.
They know it and I know they know it, and none of us is pretending otherwise.
The broad one makes a sound. Not a word. Just an involuntary, low grunt when animal instinct overrides the part that knows how to be brave.
“She’s mine,” I say.
My voice is quiet. I don’t need to manufacture rage or obsession. I don’t need to. My wolf is working overtime, and my voice is just the part of it they can understand. “You won’t make that mistake again.”
Neither of them speaks.
The tall one lowers the bag to his side. He’s very still—the intelligent stillness of someone calculating odds.
I let it run longer than is comfortable. I’m not uncomfortable—that’s the point, and they’re getting it. Then I take one step forward, not toward either of them, simply forward, and watch them both shrink in stature as they press back against the wall.
I say the second thing.
“You had one chance to walk away from her.” My voice is the same. Quiet. Certain. “If you value your heads, you won’t come back.”
The broad one’s eyes are wet, his face red from holding back the tears.
The tall one says nothing. He holds my gaze for approximately two seconds, which is longer than I expected, and then he looks at the lamppost beside me, which is the closest object he can look at without meeting my eyes.
It’s the smartest move he’s made tonight.
They understand the hierarchy and accept it.
That’s enough.
I step back and turn around. At the same pace I crossed the sidewalk, I walk back to the truck, not looking back.
After I get in, I sit for a moment. The wolf settles with the satisfaction of having gotten what it wanted.
Clean. Final. They’ll carry this for a long time.
Not a bruise, not a hospital visit, nothing that leaves a mark anyone can point to—just the knowledge of what they looked at tonight and the understanding that it knows where to find them.
That’s the part that will last.
I start the engine and pull away from the curb and think about what I just did.
They weren’t touched or threatened. I only had to say eight words, and one of them almost wept and the other one couldn’t look me in the eye, and neither of them will sleep well for a month.
I don’t feel bad about that.
There’s an absence of guilt, an absence of second-guessing. I do things in the operation that have rough edges, which I turn over and examine afterward. This doesn’t have rough edges. It has the clean certainty that what I did was right and necessary and proportionate.
They stood in an alley between Norah and her car and threatened her.
That’s all I need to know.
I think about how Norah handled it—the careful voice on the phone, the way she’d already decided it wasn’t a big deal before she finished living through it.
She doesn’t need to know about tonight.
This isn’t a secret I’m keeping out of shame. It’s a thing that happened that belongs to me and to my wolf and to two idiots outside a convenience store on Marlowe, and it’s finished now. Folding it into whatever Norah and I are building would only add weight where weight isn’t needed.
She handled her part. I handled mine.
I turn onto her street without deciding to.
The rowhouse is dark except for the living room window—the light she always leaves on. The street is quiet. A car passes. Somewhere a window is open, and music comes out of it, soft, warm jazz.
I slow the truck, but I don’t stop.
I don’t need to knock on the door to confirm that she’s fine. I confirmed it when I got in the truck tonight and made sure of it in my way.
As I drive past, I watch the house in the rearview mirror until the street curves and takes it out of sight. Then I face forward.
My wolf is quiet in a way it hasn’t been in weeks.
I said she’s mine on a sidewalk to make a point.
I’ve been saying it to myself, in various forms, since I walked into The Last Chapter and walked out with War and Peace, a book I didn’t need and the beginning of a problem I didn’t want to solve.
What’s different now is that I’ve stopped calling it a problem.
She’s mine and I’m hers, and the city can believe whatever it wants about that. Tonight I made sure two people in it understand the cost of acting on those opinions.
Tomorrow I’ll figure out the rest.