6

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

Tea ran over his knuckles and dripped onto the marble floor. Kaelen stared at the broken mug as if he had only just noticed it, then set the two halves carefully on the table and wiped his hand with a napkin, one finger at a time.

"Sorry," he said.

"For the mug?"

"For the language I'm about to use." His jaw flexed. "Vance's father has been trying to take a bite out of my border for six years. His son rejects a girl on her birthday, and I'm supposed to be surprised?"

"How do you know it was my birthday?"

"You smell like candle wax and lemon." He glanced at me, and something in his eyes softened by a fraction. "Someone baked you a cake. Or you baked one yourself."

My laugh came out as a hiccup. "I baked it for him."

"Then he's a bigger idiot than I assumed."

That should not have made me smile. It did, a small wet ridiculous smile that I tried to hide behind my hair. Kaelen noticed anyway. His gaze lingered a moment too long on my mouth before he looked away, and I felt the back of my neck go warm.

He brought me a towel and a dry sweater from somewhere, something huge and soft and gray that fell to the middle of my thighs. He turned his back, politely, while I changed in a corner by the bookshelf, and I spent the whole time holding my breath, listening to the small sounds of him not looking. When I came out, he was standing at the window with his hands in his pockets, a black silhouette against the glittering city.

"Why are you helping me?" I asked. "You don't know me. Your pack and mine hate each other. Your Beta said it would be an incident."

"Gideon is paid to be negative." He did not turn around. "Eclipse does not leave bleeding wolves on the roadside. And I..." He stopped. I watched his shoulders rise and fall under the dark fabric. "I don't know. My wolf wouldn't let me drive past."

"Wren has been strange too," I admitted. I curled my feet under me and hugged the sleeves of his sweater over my hands. "She's been quiet ever since I saw your car. Not sad quiet. A different kind."

"Wren."

"My wolf."

"Wren," he repeated, softly, as if he were testing the weight of the word. At last he turned, and crossed the room slowly, as though I were a deer he did not want to startle, and stopped about an arm's length away. This close I could see the little lines at the corners of his eyes, the faint shadows beneath them. The face of a man who did not sleep much, and had stopped noticing.

"She's purring," he said.

"What?"

"I can feel it. From here. Your wolf is purring." His voice was strange, almost wondering. "Wolves don't purr for strangers. I've never felt it from anyone in my life."

My face burned. Wren was, in fact, curled up warm and humming in my chest like a cat in a sunbeam, entirely unrepentant.

"Traitor," I muttered.

"Does she do that often?"

"Never. She's a very dignified wolf."

"I'm sure she is." The corner of his mouth lifted. It was a tiny movement, but it changed his entire face, took ten years of hardness off it, and for a moment I glimpsed something boyish and startled underneath. "She likes me."

"She doesn't know you."

"Neither do you."

"True." I looked up at him. "But you cracked a mug for me. That's more than most people have done."

"It was a very expensive mug."

"I'll pay you back."

"With what?"

"I don't know yet." I tried to sound haughty and failed, and we were both smiling now, in the same stupid helpless way, like two people sharing a secret in a library.

I turned toward the window, partly to hide my face and partly because I could not stop staring at it. The city spread out beneath us in grids of amber and white, endless and alive, with ribbons of red taillights crawling along the bridges. I had never seen so many lights in one place. In Silverwood, a night sky was something you owned. Here it was only an afterthought above a bigger sky of windows.

"Do you sleep up here?" I asked.

"Occasionally."

"That's not an answer."

"It's an honest one." He came to stand beside me, near enough that I could feel the warmth of him through the borrowed sweater. "It's easier to watch a territory from above. I like to see what's coming."

"And what's coming tonight?"

He considered this. "A girl in my sweater who thinks she's already cost me too much."

"I do think that."

"Then you're wrong," he said, without any heat at all, as if he were correcting a figure on a spreadsheet. "I've lost more on a bad Tuesday."

I snorted. It was very unladylike. He looked pleased, which was ridiculous, and then startled at being pleased, which was somehow worse.

Then his hand rose, hesitated in the air between us, and brushed one damp strand of hair off my cheek.

I had been touched all my life by people who wanted something. The elders who pinched my arm to check I was eating, the pups who tugged my braids for a laugh, a boy who held my hand behind the food stores and said don't tell anyone. I did not know what to do with a hand that wanted nothing. It lingered at the edge of my jaw, warm and very light, and I leaned into it before I knew I was doing it.

"Sage," he said. It was barely more than a breath.

Behind us the lights in the penthouse flickered. Every one of them, all at once, as if the building had drawn in a breath and was holding it.