37. Silas
Chapter thirty-seven
Silas
The chair is rigid plastic, and the fluorescent lights are burning my eyes. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattles past at intervals, the thunk, thunk of janky wheels on the linoleum keeping my mind from wandering too far from this garish waiting area.
I’m aware of the blood on my sleeve.
It has dried in uneven patches, darker where the fabric absorbed it, stiff along the seam where my arm bends. Someone asks me if I am injured, and I tell them no without fully hearing the question. I’m keeping the bloody jacket in my peripheral awareness without looking at it directly.
Norah is in surgery.
The doctor says it carefully, with the precision of someone who has learned to give information without giving hope or taking it away. The injury is substantial. They have a team with her. They’re doing everything they can. Four hours, most likely.
I say thank you, and she leaves, and the doors close. I’ve been sitting here since then with my forearms on my thighs and my hands loosely clasped.
I can still feel the moment she shoved me.
Not as a memory with a beginning and an end.
More like fragments that keep arriving out of sequence.
The force of her hands flat against my back.
The sound that followed. And before all of that—the half-second where I was still reading the situation, and she’d already decided what she was going to do.
I didn’t see her face. I felt what she did, instead.
I don’t follow it further than that. I can’t, and still stay in this chair, and staying in this chair is the only thing required of me right now.
The automatic doors at the far end of the waiting area open and close, admitting a brief wash of cooler air. Footsteps cross the tile, and I know who it is before he comes into view.
Of course it’s Logan. He would have felt the pack change the moment the wolf came fully forward in that parking lot—that’s how it works between us, how it has always worked, the frequency that runs between brothers who grew up in the same territory. He didn’t need a phone call.
Logan stops a few feet away.
For a moment neither of us speaks. He looks at me—the dried blood, the rigid posture, the stillness—and his expression tightens. There’s no panic. No shock. He already knows what he’s looking at, and he’s deciding what to do with it.
“The police gave Greer a heads-up. What happened?”
The question is placed between us with room for me to answer honestly.
I know the answer. Saying it out loud is different—it makes it a fact instead of a memory still replaying inside my chest.
“There was a man in the bar,” I say. “He started trouble with her. I handled it. Staff backed it. He left.”
Logan moves slightly. “And then.”
“He was waiting outside.”
The words drop, flat and final, stripped of anything that would make this into a story rather than a sequence of facts.
“He had a gun.”
Logan’s breath comes in slowly, controlled, but deeper than usual. “And Norah?”
“She’s in surgery,” I say.
He nods. Once. The nod he gives when he’s absorbing bad news and already moving toward the next decision.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
I watch him—the methodical processing, the steady look for the next step—and I think about all the times in my life where watching Logan figure out what to do next has been the most reliable thing in any room.
It’s still reliable.
It’s also not enough for what I need to say next.
“She pushed me out of the way.”
The words come out differently than everything that came before them. Unguarded in a way that bypasses whatever I’ve been using to hold the rest of this in place.
Logan’s eyes sharpen.
I don’t look at him. I look at my hands.
“She saw it before I did. Or she moved before I did. I don’t know which one.” I pause, the facts of it arranging and rearranging without resolving. “He had a gun, and she saw it coming and she pushed me, and she…”
I stop because finishing the sentence requires going somewhere I can’t go right now.
“I was blocking her, and she pushed me out of the way of the bullet. She exposed herself.”
Lower this time. Not for Logan, but because it needs to be said out loud to be real.
Logan is quiet beside me. I feel the meaning of what Logan doesn’t say as clearly as if he’d spoken it.
Over a month ago, he told me to stay away from her.
Three weeks ago, he asked me what would happen if staying here stopped being an option.
Two weeks ago, he said to be careful. He has said nothing tonight except okay and what happened and my name.
He doesn’t say I told you so.
That is Logan’s version of an answer, and I receive it as one.
I’ve been in situations that required fast decisions my entire life.
Pack territory, business negotiations, the pressure of a room where everyone is deciding how far things are going to go.
I know what fast looks like. I know the difference between instinct and training and the kind of choice that bypasses both entirely and comes from somewhere else.
Norah didn’t hesitate. She understood the risk and moved anyway.
I think about her in the truck after the lake, turning back toward me, knowing exactly what she was doing. I think about the alley behind her shop. I think about her duffel bag pulled toward her before she’d finished deciding, because she understood that thinking too hard was its own kind of trap.
She has always moved toward things. I didn’t know, until I was in a gravel parking lot at the edge of nowhere, what that looked like when it counted most.
I’ve spent weeks telling myself I was protecting her by not telling her what she was to me. That withholding was a form of care. That she needed to come to this on her own terms, without the weight of a bond she didn’t ask for and didn’t know she was carrying.
She didn’t have that same issue. Naming it makes it real. Real things require decisions. I wasn’t ready for the decision that naming it would force.
I think of the myriad ways Norah decided.
A text to her sister that said I’m good, talk soon, when she watched me throttle two men on a public street, my wolf apparent, and then immediately assured me she didn’t care.
She’s decided every time she asked a question and listened to the answer she didn’t like and still didn’t leave.
I’ve been the careful one. The one who reads the room, assesses the situation, and calculates the cost before acting. It has always felt like strength. It reads differently now. The armor of a man who hasn’t trusted anything enough to move toward it without knowing first that it would hold.
There are things I haven’t told her. Things she deserves to know that I’m going to tell her when she’s out of surgery and conscious and capable of hearing them.
The full truth of what she is to me. What the word fated means.
What it means that she didn’t know it and chose anyway—that she made the choice without the information, making the choice more hers than it would have been if I’d told her at the beginning.
I don’t know yet whether she’ll see it that way.
But I’m going to tell her. All of it. Whatever comes after that is hers to decide.
After a while Logan exhales slowly, his gaze dropping briefly to my sleeve before returning to my face.
“I called Dad,” he says.
I don’t move.
The sentence tightens the room. I look at the tile between my feet. Then I lift my head.
“Did I ask you to?”
Logan meets my gaze without flinching. “No,” he says. “You didn’t.”
I nod once.
“He needed to know,” Logan says. “This isn’t something I could…”
“I’ve got it,” I say.
“Silas…”
“I said I’ve got it.”
Still measured. But harder than usual underneath. The worn-down feeling of a man who knows exactly what is coming and has been preparing for it since the moment Logan sat down.
Neither of us speaks.
I’ve been avoiding the words for weeks. Time to use them both.
She’s my fate. She has been since that first afternoon.
Elias is in a car somewhere, being driven here. I sit in the plastic chair and wait, the resentment a stone in my chest, because I already know exactly what’s about to walk through those doors.
He’ll make this into a problem to solve—with edges and solutions and next steps.
And I’m going to have to look at my father and say the second word, the word that matters. Mate. It won’t change anything he’s already decided. But it’s true, and she’s in surgery, and if there was ever a moment to stop calling it anything else, it’s now.