Chapter 7

Two weeks into working at Dorothy's shop, I'd learned the rhythm of the place well enough to move through it without thinking — where the register stuck if you didn't lift the drawer just right, which regulars wanted small talk and which wanted to be left alone with their books, the exact hour of the afternoon when Dorothy disappeared into the back for tea and left me to run the front alone.

I liked it more than I expected to. There was something steadying about small, repeatable tasks after months of chaos. Ring up a sale. Shelve a return. Answer a question about where to find the romance section, which I did now with a straight face despite everything.

"You're glowing today," Dorothy said, coming out from the back with two mugs, setting one in front of me on the counter even though I'd told her three times she didn't need to keep making me tea.

"I'm always glowing. It's called being seven weeks pregnant and slightly nauseous most mornings."

"No, this is different glowing." She studied me over the rim of her glasses. "This is the glowing that comes from a person finally sleeping through the night."

She wasn't wrong. I had slept, actually slept, the past few nights — no nightmares about signing papers, no waking up reaching for a bond that wasn't there anymore. "Maybe," I admitted.

"Good." She patted my hand once, brisk and businesslike, the way she did most things. "You've earned it."

The bell over the door rang, and I turned to greet whoever had walked in, the automatic smile already forming — and froze halfway through it.

It wasn't Ethan. I want to be clear about that, because my heart didn't know the difference for a full three seconds, slamming so hard against my ribs I thought Dorothy might hear it from across the counter. It was a man built like him, dark-haired, broad through the shoulders, wearing the kind of expensive, understated coat that pack-adjacent wolves favored. Not him. Just close enough to knock the air clean out of my lungs.

"Afternoon," the man said, nodding toward the counter, already scanning the shelves for whatever he'd come in for.

"Afternoon," I managed, and busied myself with straightening a stack of receipts that didn't need straightening, giving my hands something to do while my pulse settled back to something reasonable.

Dorothy watched me from the corner of her eye but didn't comment, not until the man had wandered off toward the history section. "You know him?"

"No." I let out a breath. "For a second I thought — never mind. It's nothing."

"Didn't look like nothing." She said it gently, no pressure behind it, just an opening if I wanted to take it.

I didn't, not that day. I shook my head and went back to work, and the moment passed the way most moments did lately — folded up and tucked away where I didn't have to look at it too closely.

---

Three blocks away, in an office on the top floor of a building the pack used for business that couldn't be conducted on pack land, Ethan sat across from a supplier he had no patience for, only half listening to numbers he could recite in his sleep.

His mind kept drifting, the way it had been drifting for weeks now, toward a city he had no reason to think about and a woman he'd told himself a hundred times he needed to stop thinking about.

"Alpha." The supplier's voice cut through, testing. "Does the second quarter figure work for you, or—"

"It's fine." Ethan didn't look up from the papers in front of him. "Send the contract over. I'll have Marcus review it."

The meeting wrapped faster than usual, Ethan's clipped answers making it clear he wasn't in the mood to draw things out, and by the time the supplier left, Marcus was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching him the way he'd taken to watching him lately.

"You've been distracted all week," Marcus said.

"I've been busy."

"You've been distracted." Marcus pushed off the doorframe and stepped inside, lowering his voice even though the office was empty. "The pack's noticing, Ethan. Camille's noticing."

"There's nothing to notice."

"Then why do you keep asking me to run errands in the city." Marcus's eyes narrowed slightly. "Three times this month. Small ones. Nothing that actually needs doing."

Ethan didn't answer right away, because he didn't have a good answer, not one he was willing to say out loud even to Marcus, who'd been loyal to him through worse than this.

"I just need air sometimes," Ethan said finally. "The pack house feels smaller than it used to."

Marcus studied him a long moment, and something in his expression said he didn't buy it, not fully, but he let it go. "Camille wants you back for dinner. She's been asking where you disappear to."

"Tell her I'll be there."

Marcus turned to leave, then paused at the door. "For what it's worth," he said, not quite looking at Ethan when he said it, "the city's a big place. You're not going to run into her by accident, if that's what you're circling around asking me."

Ethan's jaw tightened. "I wasn't asking anything."

"No," Marcus said, already walking away. "You never are."

Ethan sat alone in the office long after Marcus's footsteps faded down the hall, staring out the window at the street below, at storefronts and strangers moving in and out of shops he'd never once set foot in — one of them, though he had no way of knowing it, close enough that if he'd simply walked three blocks west and pushed open a door with a bell over it, he would have found exactly what he swore he wasn't looking for.