Chapter Four — The Boy Who Kept Showing Up

He was at the bakery when she arrived.

Tyra saw him the moment she turned onto Piet's street. Troy was leaning against the counter with a roll in one hand, talking to Piet like they were old friends, that dark hair falling across his forehead, those gold eyes catching the morning light and throwing it straight back.

She turned around immediately.

She was not running.

She was making a strategic decision about her morning.

She bought her stock from Marta using the back entrance, arranged her basket quickly and set up near the fountain instead of her usual spot. Different location. Fresh start. Completely Troy free morning.

She sold three bunches in twenty minutes.

She was reaching for a fourth when a cup of tea appeared on the edge of her stall.

She stared at it.

"It is getting cold," Troy said from beside her.

She closed her eyes briefly. "How."

"Piet's back entrance," he said pleasantly. "Same one you used."

She turned to look at him. He was standing close enough that she could see the small details that distance usually swallowed. The sharp line of his jaw. The way his gold eyes held the morning light. The shadow under them that made him look like someone who did not sleep enough.

"You followed me through the back entrance," she said.

"I was already there," he said.

"That is the same thing."

"It really is not."

She picked up the tea. It was strong. No honey. Slightly too hot. Exactly right. She pointed at him. "How do you know how I take my tea."

"Lucky guess," he said.

"That is not a lucky guess Troy. That is surveillance."

"You say surveillance." He looked at her roses. "I say paying attention."

"To things I never told you."

"You tell me things without knowing you are telling me," he said quietly.

She stared at him.

He looked back completely unbothered, hands in his coat pockets, that slim frame leaning against her stall like he had been there for years.

"That is either very sweet or very alarming," she said.

"Probably both," he agreed.

She turned back to her flowers before her face could do something she would regret.

He stayed.

He always stayed.

That was the thing about Troy that Tyra was finding increasingly impossible to manage. He did not hover. He did not crowd her. He simply existed nearby with that infuriating calm, watching the crowd, occasionally saying something useful, then going quiet again like he had a perfectly calibrated sense of exactly how much of himself was too much.

After an hour she had had enough.

"Are you guarding me?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"Then what are you doing."

"Enjoying the morning."

"Troy."

"Tyra."

She turned to face him fully. He turned to face her fully. They looked at each other and neither of them blinked and the air between them did something she had absolutely no framework for.

"Yesterday," she said carefully. "Those two men. They knew I was alone. They knew I had no family. No one checking on me." She paused. "How did they know that."

Something moved through his jaw. Fast and controlled.

"Grimwall has loose tongues," he said.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the shape of one."

"Troy I am serious."

"I know you are." His voice dropped lower. "I am always serious when you are serious."

She searched his face. Those gold eyes steady and direct and full of something layered and complicated that she could not get to the bottom of no matter how hard she looked.

"The coin," she said. She pulled it from her pocket and held it between them. "I showed it to the blacksmith on Fenn Street yesterday. He went pale when he saw it. Would not touch it. Told me to put it away." She watched Troy's face carefully. "Why would a coin make a blacksmith go pale."

Troy looked at the coin.

"Put it away Tyra," he said quietly.

"Why."

"Because I am asking you to."

"That is not—"

"A reason. I know." He exhaled once. Looked at her with something raw moving just underneath the surface of his careful expression. "Some things in this world are dangerous not because of what they are but because of what they tell people about you. That coin tells people something about you that you are not ready to know yourself yet."

The market noise continued around them.

Tyra felt something cold move through her despite the morning warmth.

"What does it tell people about me?" she whispered.

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Put it away," he said softly. "Please."

She closed her fingers around the coin slowly.

Two stalls away Troy exhaled.

His wolf had been pressing against his ribs since the moment she pulled that coin out. Restless and urgent and making it very difficult to think clearly.

The coin was pack currency. Old pack. Older than Alpha Drak's line. It should not exist in Grimwall. It should not exist in any human market in any human town. The fact that it had come to her, found its way into her hands of all the hands in this city, was not coincidence.

Nothing about Tyra was coincidence.

His phone buzzed.

He did not need to look at it.

Alpha Drak had been sending the same message in different words for three days.

He looked at Tyra arranging her roses with those careful brown fingers, her messy curls falling forward over her face, her light brown eyes focused and quiet.

Two days.

He had two days before Drak stopped waiting for a report and sent someone else.

Someone who would not spend three months finding reasons to wait.

He picked up his phone.

Typed back slowly.

"I need more time."

Three dots appeared immediately.

"You have until tomorrow night."

Troy stared at those four words for a long moment.

Tomorrow night.

He pocketed the phone and looked back at Tyra.

She was smiling at a small child who had stopped to look at her flowers, crouching down to the child's level, her whole face open and warm and completely unguarded.

His wolf went absolutely silent inside him.

The worst kind of silent.

The kind that meant it had already made a decision that his human side was going to have to live with.

She was packing up at dusk when she felt it.

That pressure at the back of her neck.

Not the warm familiar weight of the wolf's attention. Something else. Something colder and less certain and pointed in a way that made every hair on her arms stand up.

She looked up slowly.

Across the thinning market crowd a figure stood completely still near the old gate. Hooded. Face hidden. Looking directly at her stall with a fixed deliberate attention that turned her stomach cold.

She had never seen him before.

But the way he was looking at her.

Like he already knew her.

Like he had been looking for her for a very long time and had finally found what he was searching for.

She looked left.

Troy was gone.

She looked back at the gate.

The hooded figure had not moved.

He raised one gloved hand slowly.

And pointed directly at her.