Chapter 4 – Better at Hiding

(Angelique)

Gold.

His eyes have gone gold.

Wolf-gold, the color the eye turns when the animal comes up to the surface to look out.

The exact thing I've spent years making sure mine never do where a human can see.

So either Parker isn't human.

Or I've finally lost it.

"Quiet," he says, before I can get a word out.

He flicks a glance toward the pass, toward Linda and her human ears, and drops his voice under the hum of the fridges.

"Don't say it out loud."

For years this man has been handing me shifts and cash advances, and not once did I smell it on him.

Not once.

"How," I manage. "How did I never-"

"Because I'm better at it than you."

No pride in it. Just tired fact.

"I've had a lot longer to practice and I don’t have anyone else to take care of."

My brain is refusing to hold more than one disaster at a time, so it sets Rene down for a second and picks this up instead.

Parker.

A wolf.

The safest person in my whole shrunk-down life, and he's the same kind of animal as the one who just put his hand around my throat.

As me.

"Get me out," I say.

It comes out as a beg and I don't care.

"Parker, please. You know what they are. You can... you have a truck, you have to know roads, you can get me and Zack somewhere-"

"No."

Just that. Flat as a closed door.

"You don't understand, he's going to-"

"I understand exactly what he's going to do. I heard some of what he said."

Something flickers under the gold.

"Angelique. He's an Alpha. He's put a claim on you in front of three of his Betas. There’s no road long enough. If I move on you openly, against a claim like that, I'm a dead man, and that's the good outcome."

He leans in.

"The bad one is that they start asking who I am, and why a nobody who runs a roadhouse would die for a waitress. And then they look at you. And then they look at your boy."

The floor tilts.

He's right.

God, he's right, and I hate it with everything I have left.

"So that's it," I whisper. "You're just-"

"I'm not just anything."

His hand closes over mine.

Warm and steady.

He presses something into my palm and folds my fingers around it before I can look.

"Don't drop that. Don't let anyone find it. It's a number. Call it when you've got a clear minute and a phone nobody's watching, and say Acheson."

My neighbor's name.

Of course he'd remember the one human in my life who'd lie for me.

"You say that, and I'll know it's really you, and not someone holding a knife to your kid to make you talk."

I close my hand so hard my nails bite into the skin.

"I can't come for you today," he says.

"Maybe not for a long time. You're going to have to survive there on your own for a while, and you're going to have to be smarter than you've ever been in your life.”

The look he gives me is pleading.

“Keep your head down. Keep the boy hidden."

His jaw works.

"Whatever you do, do not let that pack find out whose son he really is."

I go very cold.

I never told Parker who Zack's father was.

I open my mouth and he's already shaking his head, already standing, the gold draining out of his eyes like a tide going back to brown.

The careful nothing-man sliding back over him like a coat.

"How do you know that name?" I ask. "Beck. You knew it. The second I said it, you-"

"Time's burning, Angelique."

"Parker."

"You've got a son to get to." He pulls me up by the elbow, gentle and final. "Go."

And the worst part, the part that tells me how scared I should really be, is that he won't look at me when he says it.

The drive home is eleven minutes and the bond fights me for every one of them.

It's a physical thing, the pull.

A hook behind my breastbone, dragging back toward wherever Rene went.

The first year was hell.

It got easier eventually, but one touch woke it all the way up, and now it wants what my wolf wants.

To crawl back to the man who promised to make a pet of me.

He's going to ruin us, I tell her.

He's ours, she says, like that settles it.

I take the back road on instinct, the one with no cameras, and laugh at myself for it.

No cameras.

As if cameras were ever the thing that could find me.

Zack's waiting for me in Mrs. Acheson’s trailer, sweaty and four and full of trust.

I've got a number tucked into the tiny front pocket of my jeans, and an hour that's already half gone.

The entirety of my plan amounts to keep him alive and keep him secret.

So far that’s worked on nothing but herbs and luck, but now it has to work inside the one place on earth everyone is built to sniff out exactly what he is.

I pull into the dirt parking lot and every thought in my head goes out like a snuffed match.

Because there's a black SUV parked in front of my trailer.

And leaning against my door, arms crossed, in no hurry at all, like he's got all the time in the world and I'm the one who's late, is Rene.