What Cooper Knows

POV: Imogen

The staffroom at lunch smelled of microwaved leftovers and ground coffee, and Imogen had claimed the corner chair nearest to the window because she had spent four hours being looked at and needed at least eighteen minutes of not being looked at directly.

Cooper found her anyway.

He set a coffee beside her without asking and dropped into the chair across from hers, still in his outdoor gear from morning rounds, a dark jacket and boots that suited him without appearing to try. He had a way of settling into her space that managed to be comfortable without being presumptuous, and she had stopped trying to work out how he did it.

"Chloe thinks my children are special," Imogen said.

"They are special."

"She meant it differently."

"What did you say?"

"All children are special, and that's rather the point of them."

He smiled. "Diplomatic."

"I've had five years of practice." She looked out the window at the school oval. "She's not wrong. She's just noticing things I'd rather she didn't."

"How long do you think you can keep managing it alone?"

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're about to ask a question I'm not going to answer, and I'd like to enjoy my coffee first."

He gave her a full thirty seconds. Generous, for him. Then: "There's something else."

His voice had shifted. Not concern. Caution. She looked at him properly.

"We've had another incident on the northern border."

Imogen set her mug down.

"Third this week." He kept his voice low and easy, the tone he used when he'd decided she needed information and didn't want her to panic about it in a public room. "They're not passing through."

She waited.

"They're circling."

The staffroom noise continued around them. A microwave beeped. Two colleagues laughed near the door. The ordinary world, completely indifferent to what had just landed in Imogen's chest.

"Circling what?" she asked.

"The territory keeps narrowing." He held her gaze. "Toward the school."

Her wolf stirred hard against her ribs. She pressed her palm flat against the table without thinking about it, grounding herself.

"Darcy's got teams on it," Cooper said. "But it's the fourth week running, and nobody's worked out yet what they're tracking."

She already had a theory. She had been trying not to have it since the moment he said circling.

She opened her mouth.

The staffroom door opened first.

Vice Principal Tahlia Osei appeared in the doorway, forty years old, composed with the practiced calm of a woman who had managed enough crises to know that composure was the first thing you reached for. She was looking directly at Imogen, and her expression was doing its best to be neutral.

It wasn't quite making it.

"Imogen." Even. Careful. "There's been an incident in the kindergarten yard."

Imogen was on her feet before Tahlia finished the sentence. She heard Cooper follow. She didn't wait.

The path to the kindergarten yard took ninety seconds at a walk. She covered it in forty-five, the staffroom, corridor, and double doors blurring past her as they did when her wolf took the wheel.

She came around the corner and stopped.

For one impossible second, relief hit her. He was on his feet. Alive, whole, and present.

Then she saw his eyes.

Declan stood in the center of the yard the way his father stood in every photograph she had ever forced herself to stop looking at. Feet planted. Shoulders back. Certain.

On the ground in front of him, crying with the wide-eyed shock of a boy who had been genuinely startled rather than seriously hurt, sat a boy twice his size. Tyson. She recognized him from three weeks of dinner complaints.

Behind Declan, pressed against the fence with her arms folded, stood Hayley. Her expression gave nothing away. It never did when she was frightened.

Declan's amber eyes were flickering. Gold bleeding in from the edges, slow and unmistakable. His hands hung at his sides, and at the tips of his fingers, barely visible in the bright afternoon light, small claws caught the sun.

Around the yard, in a loose, fascinated semicircle, stood at least fifteen parents.

Every single one of them had a phone out.