Chapter 22 The Shark And The Swimmer
The Shark And The Swimmer
~FINN~
I've always been a slow walker.
Not because I'm lazy—I've had that argument with Rowan enough times to have developed a complete rebuttal—but because speed assumes you've already decided what's worth your attention and everything else is just distance to be covered.
I don't operate that way. The world is interesting.
People are interesting. The particular way a small town arranges itself on a Monday afternoon, when the storm from last night has washed everything clean and the light coming off wet stone is doing something architectural that nobody planned for, is interesting.
I hold Mila's hand.
This started approximately forty minutes ago when the third Alpha in ten minutes tried to compliment her as we moved through the market section of this town, and my brain made a decision that my mouth had already endorsed and my hand implemented before the rest of me caught up.
I simply—took it. Her hand, warm and small in mine, and the Alpha in question recalculated his evening plans immediately. I have zero regrets.
Rowan is ahead of us, which is his natural position in any geographical situation.
He moves with the contained efficiency of someone whose relationship to space is entirely functional—point A, point B, least obstructed route between them.
The town's main commercial strip is laid out in a sensible grid, clean stone buildings with painted shopfronts that have the particular character of places that know they're pretty and have decided to lean into it without overdoing it.
Window boxes with early spring plantings.
A clock tower that is presumably decorative at this point.
Cobblestones that are charming until you're wearing the wrong shoes, which none of us are.
Declan is on the phone behind us, dealing with whatever the security situation is—some technical breach in one of his outer operations that requires his particular brand of focused problem-solving, which he applies to infrastructure crises the same way he applies to everything else: calmly, thoroughly, and without commentary unless commentary serves a function.
And Mila.
I watch her from the side of my vision, which is where I've been running most of my observations since we left the dress shop.
She moves the way she does everything—with a baseline efficiency that occasionally gets interrupted by something genuinely interesting, at which point she slows without deciding to, drawn toward it with the instinctive pull of a person who has trained herself to move fast and never quite suppressed the part that wants to stop and look.
A jeweler's window catches her eye for three seconds before she reassembles the pace.
A bakery exhaust hits the street—warm butter and something with cardamom—and her chin lifts slightly, nostrils catching it before she consciously registers the input.
A tabby cat on a windowsill gets a full five seconds of attention and a barely audible "oh" that she doesn't intend to be audible at all.
She's enchanting.
I've been in enough rooms with enough Omegas to know how I usually operate: the social ease that most people read as flirtation, the conversational warmth that I've been told registers as interest even when it's just my genuine default.
I understand the reputation. It's not inaccurate.
I'm a man who finds people interesting and has never been good at concealing it, which creates a specific impression that most Omegas clock within the first twenty minutes and file under: charming, not serious, probably trouble.
I worry Mila has filed me there too.
The thing is, the reputation isn't the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I haven't encountered an Omega in a long time who made me want to be the serious option.
And I'm standing on a cobblestone street in a small town I didn't know existed thirty-six hours ago, holding a hand that belongs to a woman who named her scent suppressor's failure with a sneezing fit and a resigned acceptance——who told three strangers she'd just met that she was expecting punishment before dessert—who has spent fourteen months being competent and exhausted and quietly building a dream she hasn't told anyone, and I find myself thinking about what it would be like to be the person she tells things to.
That's new.
She stops.
The shop in front of us has a display in the window that I'll admit I might have subconsciously navigated toward—phone models propped on stands, a few laptop packages, the LED signage of a technology retailer that has positioned itself as the practical alternative to the city chains.
Smaller footprint, curated stock, the kind of place that exists because the nearest Apple store is forty minutes away and some things can't wait.
She's looking at the display with the specific expression of someone running calculations about whether they're allowed to want something.
"Do you want to go in?"
She turns, and the expression pivots immediately toward the version she keeps ready when she's about to decline something on principle. "We have the registry appointment—"
"Not for another hour and a half."
"We could be—"
"Mila." I squeeze her hand once. "We have time. Whatever you want to do with it."
"Whatever I want," she repeats, with the specific quality of someone encountering a phrase that doesn't have a familiar reference point.
"You and me and this town and ninety minutes.
The other two—" I glance ahead where Rowan has stopped to read a plaque on the wall of something that's apparently worth pausing for, and behind where Declan is still working through the phone situation with the focused expression of a man executing a detailed mental flowchart.
"—are doing their thing. So. What do you want to do? "
She looks at the shop window again.
"Rowan's a fast one," I tell her, because she deserves the context.
"Already been through this town a few times for business.
He's an online cart-and-checkout man—he identifies what he needs, acquires it, moves on.
Declan doesn't really register clothing as a category unless it stops functioning.
He owns approximately six white shirts and five pairs of the same dark trousers and considers this a solved problem. "
She giggles.
I like the sound of it. More than is professionally advisable for someone in a provisional twenty-day arrangement.
"What about underwear?" she says, which is a callback to the dress shop that I respect enormously.
"That's a journey you're going to have to discover on your own, Lucky Girl. What I can tell you is that I personally do not have holes in mine, which I understand is a higher bar than it sounds right now."
"Well," she says, "now I have a full set of new ones, so I suppose you're all going to have to do your own discovering first."
I feel the blood reach my face before I've finished processing the sentence.
She says it so easily—so casually, with the small lift at the corner of her mouth that I'm learning is the warning sign that something is about to land—and the effect is immediate and thorough. I clear my throat.
"Don't tempt me with a good time," I say, and lean in, close enough that she'll catch the bourbon-and-orange of my scent at the proximity, and let my lips brush the edge of her earlobe as I say quietly: "I'm not like those two. I'm a shark who knows how to catch what he's after."
She doesn't startle.
The side glance she gives me from this angle is—something. The corner of her lips. The specific, controlled amusement of a woman who has assessed the move and is deciding on her response with more thought than the casualness of it projects.
"Then I'd best get swimming," she says, barely above a murmur, "or I'll get caught."
She winks.
I whistle low before I can stop it.
My heart is doing something at an elevated rate and my lower half has opinions about this conversation that I am firmly redirecting toward a technology retail store because we are in public and there are objectives to accomplish. I squeeze her hand.
"Let's go inside, Lucky."
She smiles—the real one, not the service smile I've seen her deploy when she's being professionally warm—and we go in.
The shop has the specific smell of electronics retail: plastic casings and screen cleaner and the faint ozone smell of devices running and being demo'd, layered over the older building's stone-and-wood base that the fitout hasn't fully replaced.
Clean lines, well-lit, organized with the precision of a small operation that can't afford to lose anything in stock management.
The assistant behind the counter—young, Beta, the particular alertness of someone working Monday afternoon and choosing to be engaged rather than going through the motions—looks up.
"Just browsing," I say, "but interested in what you have on phones. Any deals worth looking at?"
"New arrivals just came in last week." He comes around to the display wall. "And we have a few phone-laptop combinations that run considerably better value than buying them separately, if you're looking for a setup rather than just a device."
Mila is already somewhere.
I find her two stands down the display wall, and the expression on her face tells me before I've seen what she's looking at.
Eyes wide, genuinely—the specific brightness that isn't performed enthusiasm but actual, caught-off-guard delight, the expression of someone who has found the exact thing before they finished looking for it.
I come to stand beside her.