Chapter 5

POV: NORA ASH

Thirty-one days.

That was how long it took for Creston to start feeling like mine.

Not home ,I was careful with that word now, just the same way you were careful with a bruise. Mae's diner smelled different at 5 AM than at 5 PM ,it was quieter, older, like the building was resting. The sound the sticky window made when you yanked it open, always on the third try and with your whole arm.

I knew the regulars by name. Freddie, who came in at 7 am sharp every morning and ordered black coffee and said "same as yesterday" even though Mae never wrote it down and never forgot. Old Pat, who ate dinner alone every Tuesday and always left a five-dollar tip on a four-dollar order and never made eye contact. The college girl, Bria, who studied at the corner table on Thursdays and always ordered something with extra cheese and always looked like she had not slept.

I liked them…everyone of them. I liked that they came in and ate and left, and that for the forty minutes they sat in the diner they were just people in a warm place with a cup of something hot, and nothing about any of them required me to be more than the girl who brought the food.

My wolf was growing.And that was the strange part…..the part I had not told Mae yet, though I suspected she already knew, because Mae seemed to know most things before you told her.

Every morning I woke up feeling more full. Like something that had been empty my whole life was being poured into slowly, carefully, like whoever was filling it did not want to spill. My senses had sharpened over three weeks to the point where I had to consciously dial them back in the diner ,the smell of twenty plates of food at once could knock me sideways if I was not careful. I could hear conversations through two closed doors. I could scent a lie on someone's breath like perfume.

I had no idea what it meant. I only knew it had started the night I crossed into Black Ridge.

The night I met him.

I had not contacted Cole Vance. I did not have his number, and I had not asked Mae for it. Some part of me understood, without being told, that what had happened in that cabin ,the coffee, the forty dollars, the name on a truck window ,had been a one-time kindness and nothing more. Men like Cole Vance did not carry wounded strays home twice.

So I was not prepared, on a cold Thursday afternoon, when he walked through the diner door.

I knew it was him before I turned around. Cedar and iron and that electric thing. My body registered it the way a compass registered north….it was immediate, involuntary and a certain feeling.

I turned from the counter. He was standing just inside the door, hands in his coat pockets, scanning the room. His eyes found me in under two seconds.

He did not look surprised to see me. Of course he did not. He had sent me here.

I walked over before Mae could, because something in me ,the new, fuller, stranger something ,needed to be the one who moved first.

"Cole," I said.

"Nora." He said my name like it was a door handle he had put down carefully. "Mae told me you had settled in."

"She did?"

"She mentioned it. In passing." He paused. "She says you are a quick learner."

Coming from Mae, that was the closest thing to a love letter that existed.

"You came to see Mae?" I asked.

"I come every month," he said. "She was my father's Beta's mate. Before." He stopped. Whatever before meant, he did not plan to finish it.

"Sit down," I said. "I will get you coffee."

Something in his face shifted ,that same barely-there registration I had seen in the cabin. It was as though he was cataloguing information and did not quite know what shelf to put it on.

He sat.I got him coffee and a slice of the peach pie Mae had made that morning, which I put on the plate without asking because I had decided he looked like someone who had not eaten anything sweet in a very long time. I was right ,he glanced at the pie, then at me, then ate the whole slice without comment.

We talked for an hour.

Not about anything important…..but,about Creston, about the diner's Friday rush, about whether Mae's blueberry muffins were better than her peach pie (I said peach; he said he did not have a preference but he ate three muffins last time). It was not the kind of conversation I would have expected to have with an isolated Alpha who had held Black Ridge together since he was nineteen. It was easy and steady like talking beside a fire.

Then he stood up to leave.

"Cole," I said, before he reached the door.

He turned.

I reached into my apron pocket and took out forty dollars ,two weeks of carefully set-aside tips. I held it out.

His eyes moved from the money to my face.

"I told you I would pay it back," I said.

There was a long pause. He took the money not reluctantly but like he understood something about it that had nothing to do with the amount.

He left without another word.

Mae appeared at my elbow so quickly she might have materialized out of the kitchen fumes.

"I have been running this diner for twelve yearss…..," she said quietly, watching the door close behind him. "He has never stayed more than twenty minutes."

I looked down at the counter. At the empty coffee mug and the plate where the pie had been.

"He probably just wanted pie," I said.

Mae made a sound that was either a laugh or the beginning of one that she changed her mind about halfway through.

Two hours later, when the diner's rush had thinned to a slow trickle of last orders, my phone buzzed on the counter where I had left it.

It was not Damon this time…..but an unknown number.

I picked it up. And there it was,One message, three words:

"Stay safe, Nora."

I stood at the counter of Mae's diner holding my phone with both hands. The cook was scraping the grill in the kitchen. Freddie's regular stool sat empty in the way it always did after 8 PM. The sticky window above the back booth was fogged with the warmth of all the people who had been here tonight and gone home.

I saved the number.

I did not examine why I saved it under his full name, not just the initial.

Cole Vance.

And then, because the diner was almost empty and Mae was in the back and no one could see me, I let myself smile.

It was the first real smile in thirty-one days.

It also happened to be the exact moment that the front door of the diner opened and Damon Cole walked in.