Chapter 4

POV: NORA ASH

Creston smelled like rain and burned motor oil and something sweet underneath it all ,sugar, maybe, from the bakery that sat on the corner across from the bus terminal.

I stepped off the bus with forty dollars, no shoes, and a dead phone I had charged for twelve minutes at the Harlow bus station off a stranger's portable charger. The woman who lent it to me had looked at my feet and pressed a granola bar into my hand without being asked. I almost cried.

Fifth and Crane was seven blocks from the terminal. I counted them, as I kept walking carefully over the wet pavement, keeping to the edges of the sidewalk where the concrete was least cold. People moved around me in thick coats and noise. Nobody looked at my bare feet. This was Creston. People had seen stranger things.

The diner sat on the corner between a laundromat and a bookshop that looked like it had not opened since before I was born. The sign above the door read MAE'S in red letters, the paint slightly chipped at the M. The windows were fogged from inside. Through the glass I could see the orange glow of warm light and the shapes of people sitting at counters.

I pushed the door open.

The smell hit me first: bacon fat and black coffee and something underneath both of those things ,something that was pack, but not any pack I knew. It was a different scent signature entirely …something looser and kinder.

The woman behind the counter looked up the moment I walked in. She was short and broad, maybe fifty years old, with close-cropped grey hair and forearms that said she had been carrying plates since before I was alive. Her eyes moved over me once …..it was quick, thorough, the kind of assessment that only another wolf could do in under two seconds.

She said nothing for a moment.

Then: "Cole sent you."

It was not a question. I smelled like his cabin ,cedar and iron and the ghost of his fire ,and she had clearly scented it the moment the door opened.

"Yes," I said.

Mae came around the counter. She was already pulling her apron strings loose from the back. She handed it to the young man at the grill, pointed at me, and said, "Seat her in the back and get her the special." Then she looked at me directly: "Come on, then."

I followed her through a narrow doorway into a small back room that served as both a break room and storage space. She pointed at a chair and I sat. She filled a glass with water from a tap in the corner, set it in front of me, then crossed her arms and leaned against the counter.

"How long have you known Cole?" she asked.

"Since last night," I said.

Her eyebrows moved, barely. "He does not send people here."

"I gathered that."

She looked at my feet……at the gauze, now grey with road grime. At Cole's oversized grey shirt hanging off one shoulder…then she looked at my hands which were wrapped around the water glass like I needed something solid to hold onto.

She let out a breath through her nose. "Silver Creek?"

"Yes."

"Running from something?"

"Running toward something," I said. "I just have not figured out what yet."

Mae was quiet for a moment. Then the corner of her mouth moved not in a smile, but a close.

"I have a room above the diner," she said. "It is small and the rent is covered if you work five shifts a week."

I stared at her.

"You do not know anything about me," I said.

"I know Cole trusted you enough to send you here." She pushed off the counter. "And Cole trusts nobody. So that is enough for me." She picked up the apron from the chair where she had draped it. "Eat first. Then you can tell me what you know how to do and we will figure out the rest."

She left me in the back room.

Two minutes later the young man from the grill appeared with a plate: over easy eggs, two strips of bacon, and a diagonally cut toast. He set it down without a word and disappeared.

I ate every bite. Then ,I started that same evening.

Mae put me on the dinner shift ,5 PM to close ,starting the next day after she had taken me upstairs to the small room, and handed me a key on a plain ring.

"The bathroom is across the hall," she said. "The towels are in the closet." She paused at the door. "And there are clothes in the box under the bed ,the girls who stayed before you left them …take what fits."

"How many girls have stayed here?" I asked.

"Enough." She looked at me steadily. "This is not a shelter. You are not broken. You are just between one thing and the next. You understand the difference?"

I thought about that.

"Yes," I said. And I meant it.

She nodded and left.

I sat on the edge of the narrow bed for a while, in that small room above the diner, listening to the sounds of Creston coming up through the floor. The clatter of plates….the hiss of the grill…..the voices layered over each other in the easy, overlapping way of a busy place that was used to being full.

I pressed my hand flat over the center of my chest, where that thing was still there. It was still moving,quiet but present,burning so low you almost could not see it.

The cracked phone on the mattress beside me lit up.

It was Damon again.

This time the text said: "Nora, your father is worried. Alpha Greer wants you back at the pack. If you don't come home by tomorrow morning they are going to send a search party."

I read it twice….the same way I had read his message at the bus stop.

Alpha Greer was seventy years old and had not sent anyone to search for anything in fifteen years. He let the pack sort its own problems and called it leadership. He did not send search parties for girls who left but he might send one for a girl who had crossed into Black Ridge territory.

My fingers hovered over the phone's screen.Then I put the phone face-down again, lay back on the narrow bed, and stared at the ceiling.I needed to call my father to tell him I was alive and somewhere safe. I would do that but first I needed to breathe.

Somewhere beneath me, a plate hit a counter with a soft, satisfying clack. There was laughter from the diner below and the smell of coffee drifting up through the old floorboards.

I closed my eyes.

I did not know,as I was lying there, that back in Black Ridge, Cole Vance was standing in his study at that exact moment, staring at his phone.

I did not know that he had typed my name into a search field and then stopped. He pressed his thumb to the glass and held it there.

I did not know that his wolf ,the one that had never stirred for anyone ,was pacing.

And I did not know that my own wolf, the one everyone said I would never have, had woken up completely.

But I felt it.

In the dark of that small room above Mae's diner, I felt it move inside me like a tide turning.

And it smelled like cedar and lightning.