Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Warrick
Three days. Three days in this building and I’d had my hands on every doorknob, every fixture, every tool. The shelter didn’t smell like a shelter anymore. It smelled like me, and bleach, and cats and dogs, and food, in that order, and the me part of it was spreading.
I hadn’t decided to do it. My tiger had; he was marking this territory as ours.
Scott thought I was running surveillance on Lucy in case Coleman showed, and we could track him back to an address. That was technically true. I just hadn’t mentioned I was doing it from up close.
The faucet in the utility room smelled like mildew and old pennies, and the cat who’d claimed the room as her personal kingdom, Pirate Jenny, had started drinking from it instead of her water bowl.
I fixed it in twenty minutes. Washer was shot, threads stripped on the valve stem.
I replaced both with parts from the hardware store, tightened the packing nut, and ran the tap until Pirate Jenny lost interest in watching me and went back to terrorizing the mop.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” Lucy said from the doorway.
I tightened the last connection. “The faucet was leaking.”
“I meant all of it. The faucet, the dog food, the sagging shelf in the cat room. You’ve fixed more things in three days than our actual landlord has fixed in three years.”
“Your landlord should be fired.”
“He’s also our mayor.”
“Yeah? Well, he should be fired from that, too.”
She almost laughed; her mouth started to curve before she caught it and turned it into something smaller, more controlled.
Who the fuck had taught her to do that? Rationing her own joy like it was a resource she’d run out of if she spent too much at once. The tiger made a sound in my chest I’d never heard before. Something lower and flatter than a roar.
When?
I knew what he was asking.
Soon. We’ll get him soon.
He chuffed, then instead of thinking about the violence we would enact on Coleman, he was back here, in a room that smelled like Lucy.
He went back to running a low, continuous purr that he’d been making since I’d walked in this morning.
It was the kind of sound that would have been humiliating if anyone could hear it.
Mate is happy. We are staying.
We’re fixing a faucet.
We are staying, and she is watching us fix things, and this is good.
I couldn’t argue with him. It was good. Working in her space, hearing her voice carry down the hallway, catching her scent every time she passed the doorway.
The tiger wanted more; he always wanted more.
He wanted me to close the distance, put my hands on her, mark her so every living thing within a mile knew she was taken. But this was enough. For now.
I set the wrench back in the toolbox as Dani appeared behind Lucy with a clipboard and a look that meant business.
“If you’ve finished that, the kennel door in run four squeaks. Bernard won’t go in for bedtime because he’s afraid of the noise, and we have to bribe him with cheese every night. It’s costing us a fortune in cheddar.”
“I’ll look at it.”
“Also, the light in the supply closet flickers.”
“I’ll look at that too.”
“And Brian backed the shelter van into the fence post. The gate doesn’t close properly now.”
Lucy stood in the doorway, one shoulder braced against the frame. “You’re giving him another to-do list.”
“I’m delegating. It’s a management skill. Margaret would be proud.” Dani tapped her clipboard. “He said he plans on being around a lot. I’m putting him to work. That’s how shelters function. Everyone works, or everyone suffers. It’s basically communism but with more cat hair.”
“It’s really not.”
“It’s a little bit.”
I wiped my hands and picked up the toolbox. “Where’s run four?”
Closing time was six o’clock. By five-thirty, the light outside was going amber, and the shelter had settled into its end-of-day rhythm—animals fed, kennels cleaned, last walkthrough done.
Dani left at five-forty-five because she had a date she’d been talking about all afternoon with increasing volume and decreasing coherence.
Brian had left at five, after breaking the mop bucket for the second time in a single day, which I hadn’t known was possible and which Dani had called “genuinely impressive in its destructiveness.”
That left Lucy alone in the building. Locking up, doing the final checks, and turning off the lights.
I was in my SUV in the lot, engine off, watching the front entrance. Coleman’s sedan wasn’t here. I’d checked the surrounding streets and side roads within a quarter mile. No Mercedes. No rentals. Nothing that pinged.
The front door opened. Lucy came out, bag over one shoulder, keys in her hand. She locked the door, turned, started across the lot.
“Lucy.”
The voice came from the side of the building.
A man stepped around the corner, casual blue shirt, hands in his jeans pockets, like he’d been out for an evening walk and just happened to end up here.
Andrew Coleman. In person. He was taller than I’d expected from the photos.
Six feet, maybe six-one, styled dark hair, straight nose, and a classic square jaw.
I was out of the truck before his mouth closed on the second syllable of her name.
I watched Lucy’s body go rigid—a full-body flinch she caught and corrected in less than a second, pulling herself straight, turning to face him. “Andrew. What are you doing here?”
“I was in the area. I’ve been thinking about you. Wanted to see how you were doing.”
Forty feet between them and me. I kept my pace even. Not running—running would spook him, change the dynamic, turn this into a confrontation before I was close enough to control it.
Kill him.
I could cross the distance, put him on the ground, end it. I could do it in seconds; I was faster than anything on this planet. But I couldn’t kill him in front of Lucy.
Sure you can. Break his neck, rip his throat out, or open him up from navel to neck.
I mean, I don’t want to freak her out. She’s standing right there. It’s in full view of the street; I can count eleven people who can see him talking to her. If Coleman dies in this parking lot, she’s the ex-girlfriend with a motive. Every cop in the county looks at her first.
Silence. Furious, seething silence.
He dies. I promise you, he dies. But not here. Not where she has to carry the weight of it.
Coleman inched toward her. Hands still in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, that easy smile.
Everything about his body language was open, casual, friendly.
And every single piece of it was a lie. I could smell it from here, even at thirty feet and closing, under the cologne, under the fabric softener, under all the layers of grooming, there was a scent I recognized.
The flat, metallic edge of a predator who’d cornered something and was enjoying the moment before the strike.
“You look amazing, by the way.” He stopped a few feet from her. “The shelter suits you. You’ve always been good with animals.”
Twenty feet.
Lucy’s scent had changed, the jasmine dimming under a sharp spike of cortisol, her heart rate climbing. But her face showed none of it.
Good girl.
“You can’t be here, Andrew.”
“I just want to talk. Five minutes.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Luce—”
“Don’t call me that.”
Ten feet.
He raised his hands, palms out. “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean to upset you.” His voice dropped and softened, like they were sharing something private.
“I know things ended badly between us. That was my fault. I’ve been working on myself.
Therapy, the whole thing. I just … I miss you. I miss us.”
I bet he did.
“Hey, Lucy.” I strode toward them, angling my path so I came up between Lucy and Coleman.
I put my hand on the small of her back. Possessive enough for Coleman to read, light enough that Lucy could step away if she wanted to.
She didn’t step away. She leaned into it.
My tiger roared inside my chest, triumphant.
“Ready to go? Sullivan’s gets pissy if we’re late for the reservation.”
We didn’t have a reservation. I’d never been to Sullivan’s, and I’d only ever driven past it once.
Lucy looked up at me, and I watched her catch the play in real time—a flicker behind her eyes, fast as a card turning over, and then she was in it.
“I was just saying bye to Andrew.” She turned back to Coleman with a smile that could have passed a polygraph. “Andrew, this is Warrick. My boyfriend.”
Boyfriend. My tiger practically levitated.
Coleman’s eyes moved over me. I let him look. Let him take in my height, build, the way my hand sat on Lucy’s back like it belonged there. I watched him run the calculation—threat assessment, strategic adjustment, the quick reshuffling of a plan that hadn’t accounted for this variable.
A jealous ex meets the new boyfriend, you get a cortisol spike—hot, acrid, reactive. Jealousy has a chemical signature that stinks like burnt copper, and a man throwing off that scent makes mistakes, gets sloppy, gets predictable. That’s a version you can work with.
But Coleman’s heart rate dropped. Three, four beats per minute slower than when he’d been talking to Lucy.
His scent shifted under his cologne, not the sharp flare of jealousy but something denser, slower, cold.
He wanted her back. That part was real. But I’ve worked enough cases to know what it means when someone’s pulse goes down under pressure instead of up.
Soldiers do it. Hunters do it. Accountants do not.
“Warrick.” Coleman extended his hand.
I looked at it. Then back at his face. I didn’t take it.
Coleman retracted his hand smoothly. “Good to meet you. I was just telling Lucy how great the shelter’s looking. She’s done such amazing things here.”
“We should get going,” Lucy said. “Sullivan’s hold the table for fifteen minutes, and then they give it to the next walk-in.”
Bullshit. It was all bullshit.