Chapter 7

ZAMIR

She smells like green things.

Not perfume. It's like flowers and earth but not a specific scent… it's faintly warm, the kind of thing you catch once and then your nose goes looking for it again without asking permission.

‘Interesting,’ my wolf says, from wherever he sits when he's paying attention.

"Eyes on the road," I say, under my breath.

‘I am not the one driving.’

Audrey is in the passenger seat with the green dress folded across her lap and her gaze on the coastal road, and she has not attempted conversation once since we got in the car, which is — unusual.

Every other woman tried to start some kind of conversation. She is sitting next to me, completely unbothered.

‘She's not performing,’ my wolf observes.

She's not. That is the thing. She is simply sitting there, looking out the window with those grey-green eyes, one hand resting open on her knee like she hasn't got a care in the world, which — given that she spent the afternoon in a holding room after knocking someone unconscious and then trimming their hair — suggests either exceptional composure or a very calibrated sense of what actually deserves her energy.

I haven't decided which yet.

‘Both,’ my wolf says. ‘Clearly both. Keep up.’

"You're not going to say anything?" I find myself asking.

She glances at me. "About what?"

"The drive. The packhouse. The general situation."

She looks back at the road. "I've seen the packhouse. The drive is fine. The general situation is what it is." A pause. "Should I be saying something?"

"Most people do."

"I'm not most people," she says, without any particular emphasis. Just a statement of fact, the way you'd say the sky is grey.

My wolf makes a sound that is dangerously close to approval, and I focus on the road.

Mrs. Pelham is at the door when we pull up, as always, in the same dark grey cardigan and sensible shoes, with the same white coil of hair and the dark eyes that take inventory of everything that crosses this threshold.

She looks at Audrey, then at me.

Her expression doesn't change, but something behind it does — a small, specific shift that I have learned, over eleven years, to read as ‘interesting’.

"Ms. Calloway," she says. "Dinner is kept warm. You must be hungry."

"Starving," Audrey says, without hesitation. "Thank you, Mrs. Pelham. Really. Again, please call me Audrey… Ms Calloway is my sister."

Mrs. Pelham blinks. One single blink of mild surprise, there and gone.

"The dining room is set," she says.

"Perfect." Audrey is already moving through the door. "I've been in a concrete box for two hours. I need a proper table."

She goes inside, while I stand on the step.

My wolf watches her go with the attentiveness of someone at a tennis match. ‘When's the last time one of them asked Mrs Pelham to use their name?’

"Never," I say.

Mrs. Pelham looks at me. "Sir?"

"Nothing," I say. "I'll eat in the study."

♦♦♦

I pull up the report the moment I sit down.

Hunter cell movement pattern. Six incidents across three months. Breach coordinates from this afternoon's Strathfield attack, cross-referenced with Kellan Road. The intelligence source is consistent — pack infrastructure, internal scheduling, coordinator movements. Cross-territory access. 

I underline three names and circle two dates and I am about to move to the next page when my hand, completely without my instruction, opens the security panel on the left monitor.

Packhouse CCTV. Standard grid — perimeter, entrance points, internal corridors. I tell myself I am checking the perimeter feed, but my fingers click on the kitchen.

Audrey is at the dining table, which is adjacent to the kitchen and caught on the same wide-angle feed, and she has a plate in front of her that Mrs. Pelham has clearly filled properly, and she is eating with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who is genuinely hungry and considers that a completely acceptable thing to be.

No performance. No picking. No rearranging food into smaller portions and calling it a meal.

She lifts a forkful, and even on a CCTV feed, even in the slightly washed-out grey of the security camera, I can see the moment it lands — her eyes close briefly, her shoulders drop half an inch, and her chin tilts down in the specific way of someone experiencing something that is genuinely, straightforwardly good.

Then she makes a  warm and low and completely involuntary sound that something in my chest responds to before I can tell it not to.

‘Oh,’ my wolf says, with great interest.

"Shut up," I say.

She reaches for the serving dish, and takes seconds without looking around first, without the small, self-conscious check of someone making sure they haven't been observed, without the particular performance of a woman who has decided that appetite is something to be managed rather than felt. She simply reaches over, spoons more potatoes onto her plate, and goes back to eating with the same focused, unbothered attention.

‘She,’ my wolf says, with the slow emphasis of someone making a point they intend to land properly, ‘is nothing like the others.’

He is not wrong.

Lady Reeve had eaten four asparagus spears on her first evening and looked at the rest of the table like it had personally offended her. The Harmon girl had asked Mrs. Pelham if there was a nutritional breakdown available. Mira—

I close that one down.

On the screen, Audrey tips her head back slightly and says something to Mrs. Pelham, who has appeared at the kitchen doorway. Mrs. Pelham — who has never smiled at any of the other women — puts a hand briefly on the doorframe and beams at her.

A knock at my study door.

I close the security panel in one motion and open the report to a random page and pick up my pen and say, "Come in." 

Mrs. Pelham enters.

"Your dinner," she says, setting the plate on the desk.

"Thank you."

She doesn't leave. I look up.

"She ate well," Mrs. Pelham says, as if reporting weather.

"Good."

"She complimented the lamb." A pause. "Specifically. She described it as the best thing she'd eaten in three months and asked what the herb was."

"Rosemary," I say.

"Thyme," Mrs. Pelham says. "I told her thyme. She said she should have known. She said her mother used to use it." Another pause. "She said it like it was a good memory."

I look at my plate.

"She's different, sir," Mrs. Pelham says.

"You don't know her," I say. "She's been here two hours."

"I knew Lady Reeve in thirty seconds," she says. "I knew the Harmon girl in less." She folds her hands. "Two hours is more than sufficient."

"Goodnight, Mrs. Pelham," I say.

“Good night, Alpha.” She leaves me to eat, which I do while working.

I read the same paragraph of the Strathfield report four times and get different information out of it each time, which is not how my brain usually operates, and I close the file and open it again and read the paragraph a fifth time and get the same result.

‘You could just admit it,’ my wolf huffs.

"Admit what?"

‘That you can't concentrate.’

"I'm concentrating."

‘You've read that paragraph five times.’

"It's a complex paragraph."

‘It's a list of coordinates.’

I close the file, and lean back in the chair and look at the ceiling and I think, with the portion of my brain that is still operating professionally, about the hunter cell and the intelligence leak and the three underlined names.

My wolf thinks about rosemary.

Thyme, I correct.

‘Same thing.’

"It is genuinely not the same thing."

‘She knew it should have been thyme. She knows how to cook.’

"That is not relevant information."

‘It is extremely relevant information. Do you know how to cook?’

"I run a region."

‘You run a region and you eat half your dinner and you've read a list of coordinates five times. She finished her plate and took seconds and had a conversation with Mrs. Pelham that made her smile.’ A pause. ‘Who's doing better tonight?’

I stand up. “I’m going to bed.”

♦♦♦

The packhouse at midnight has a specific quality of quiet — the sea underneath everything, the wind against the east windows, the building settling into itself the way old stone buildings do.

I’m staring at the ceiling with my wolf doing the canine equivalent of humming to himself, which is somehow worse than when he's actively talking when I hear her voice.

Warm. Unguarded. Completely unlike anything from the holding room or the car.

I am out of bed before I decide to be.

In the corridor, the strip of light under her door is the only thing visible. I stop outside it.

"It was a lot," she says, inside. "Even by my standards."

A pause. No response.

‘She's on the phone,’ my wolf says.

Obviously, I think. Who else would she be—

"The house is on a cliff." Her voice again, softer. "You would have liked it."

Another pause. Nothing comes back.

"I don't know what he's like yet," she says. A pause. "He's not what I expected."

‘That's about you,’ my wolf observes helpfully.

"I know it's about me," I say, under my breath. “Shut up, let me concentrate.”

"I'm okay." Quieter now. The warmth in her voice shifts into something that costs her more to say. "Today was a lot. But I'm still standing." A pause. "I always land on my feet."

Then: "I love you too, and I miss you so much."

‘Who is she talking to like that under our roof?!’

I don't wait to give him an answer as I barge through the door into her bedroom.

“Who the fuck are you—”

The rest of my question is drowned under a blinding hot crack that connects with my left eye and the world goes briefly, comprehensively white.

Stars.

White-edged, spinning, absolute stars, blooming across my vision like a firework that has made a very poor decision about timing.

Through the stars, I am aware of several things simultaneously: the room, the shelf above the desk, the grey ceramic urn sitting on it wrapped in a cashmere scarf, Audrey standing beside the bed with her arm still extended from the throw, a hairbrush on the floor, and a phone on the nightstand that is dark-screened and face-up and has clearly not been touched.