FEED

The thing about being with Kenny in public was that you stopped being a person and became a fixture. Not unimportant, not invisible, but fixed, like good lighting or the right backdrop, something the scene required without being what the scene was about.

I had understood this for a long time. I had told myself it was a fair arrangement.

The pack gathering on Friday night was at Renzo's, a restaurant that operated as a neutral meeting ground for the city's supernatural hierarchy, the kind of place where the food there was excellent and the real transactions happened in the body language of people who never said anything directly. Kenny had asked me to come, which meant he wanted me visible beside him, which meant something political was happening that required the particular signal our presence together sent.

I wore the black dress because it photographed well and commanded attention in a room, and because wearing it felt like putting on armor I had chosen for myself, even if the battle was someone else's.

We arrived, and the room shifted the way it always did around Kenny: that collective recalibration of posture and attention, people straightening slightly, and conversations pausing half a beat before resuming. My own readings spiked immediately in the warm, dense attention of a full room, and I felt myself settle into it gratefully, more gratefully than I wanted to admit after the unsteady week I had been carrying.

Kenny's hand was at the small of my back for exactly the amount of time it took to cross the room to the table. Then it was gone.

The rival alpha's name was Brennan. He ran a smaller pack on the city's north side and had apparently been making territorial statements that Kenny had decided required a public response. I knew this the way I knew most things about pack politics, peripherally, through context and inference, because Kenny rarely explained things to me directly, and I had learned not to ask in ways that revealed how much I didn't know.

Brennan was already seated when we arrived, broad-shouldered and deliberate in the way that alphas performing confidence always were, with two pack members flanking him and an expression that had been arranged into neutrality with visible effort. He looked at Kenny with the careful eyes of someone who had done a calculation and wasn't certain of the result.

Kenny sat down and became the room.

I had seen him do it many times, and it still did something to me, that specific capability of his, the way he could walk into a contested space and simply expand until there was no room for any competing presence. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't act aggressively. He just shifted into a register that was perfectly, completely dominant, and the attention in the room moved toward him like water finding the lowest point.

Brennan's readings dropped visibly. Not a collapse, but a submission that happened when an alpha recognized a superior and the body admitted it before the mind was ready to. His pack members felt it, and their posture changed, and the whole table recalibrated around the fact of Kenny's presence in a way that was almost biological to watch.

Kenny spoke to him evenly about territory and agreements, and the specific obligations that came with operating in this city, and every sentence landed with the precision of something that had been decided before it was said out loud. He wasn't negotiating. He was informative. The distinction was clear to everyone at the table and perfectly humiliating to exactly one person.

I sat beside Kenny and smiled at the right moments and held my wine glass and felt the room's attention move through me, and I thought about how good I was at this, at being present without taking up space, at existing in the frame without disturbing the composition.

Brennan agreed to everything. Of course he did.

When it was over, Brennan and his pack members had left.

Kenny accepted congratulations from the people around him with the ease of someone receiving something they had never doubted was coming. He laughed at something one of the elder pack members said, and the laugh was genuine and warm, and I had not heard that quality in his voice directed at me in longer than I wanted to calculate.

I excused myself to the restroom because I needed two minutes that weren't inside someone else's narrative.

I stood at the sink, ran cold water over my wrists and looked at my own face in the mirror. My readings were strong, the room had been generous, and my glow was even in a way it hadn't been since before the Vassen event. I looked exactly like I was supposed to look.

I thought about feeding Kenny's strength. That was what tonight had been, what I was always doing without it ever being named directly. My visibility, my influence, and the attention I generated and moved through and carried with me, all of it flowed into the system, and the system flowed into him, and his power was partly built on the architecture I maintained. I had always known this. I had always told myself it was mutual.

Standing in the mirror, I tried to identify what it was mutual about and came up with less than I wanted to.

My phone buzzed in my bag. I took it out expecting a notification and found a direct message from an account I didn't recognize, with no profile picture, created recently. The message was four words.

Watch Brennan leave tonight.

I stared at it. Then I went back out into the restaurant and found a position near the window without being obvious about it and watched the street below.

Brennan came out of the side entrance with his two pack members, and they walked half a block before a black car pulled up alongside them slowly. The window came down. I was too high up and too far to see clearly, but I saw Brennan stop walking. I saw the way his posture changed, not the submission of a lesser alpha before a greater one, but something different, something I didn't have a clean word for. Something that looked, even from this distance, like fear without a category.

The window went up. The car moved on. Brennan stood on the pavement for a moment and then kept walking as if nothing had happened.

I stood at the window with the room's warmth steady in my skin and something cold sitting underneath it.

My phone buzzed again from the same account. One word this time.

Soon.

Then the account was gone, deleted, leaving nothing in my messages but the word itself sitting there like a stone dropped into still water.

I put my phone away and went back to Kenny's table and smiled and let the room do what it did to my skin and said nothing about any of it.

He didn't ask where I had been.