Chapter 5: Tiara

I call her from the window seat I found yesterday.

It overlooks the city on the east side and the morning light comes in at an angle that makes everything gold and it is the best seat in the building, which I know after less than one day, and I have already decided it is mine.

She picks up on the second ring.

"You didn't call last night," she says immediately, no hello, just straight to it, which is very Tiara.

"I was dealing with something," I say.

"Something or someone?"

"Something," I say.

A pause. "You sound different."

"I sound the same."

"You sound..." she thinks about it, "...less tired. Which is suspicious because you are always tired."

"I slept well," I say.

Another pause. Longer. I can hear her deciding whether to push it and landing on yes because she always lands on yes, she has never once in her life decided not to push something.

"Where are you?" she asks.

"I'm safe," I say. "That's what matters."

"Vaelis."

"Tiara."

"You always say I'm safe when something is happening," she says. "Normal people say I'm fine or I'm at home or I'm at a coffee shop. You say I'm safe like it's a location."

I smile before I can stop it. "I'm at a coffee shop," I say.

"Such a lousy liar."

"How's the apartment?" I ask. "The heat working?"

She lets me redirect because she is smart enough to know when I need her to. "The heat is fine. Mrs. Alden downstairs brought me soup again. I think she thinks I'm dying."

"You do look fragile," I say.

"I look delicate," she corrects. "There's a difference. Fragile things break. I just look like I might."

I close my eyes for a second.

Twenty two years old and living in a city I picked for her specifically, safe distance from everything that hunts me, with an apartment I pay for under a name that cannot be traced back to either of us, and she makes soup jokes and corrects my word choices and has no idea what I actually am or why her brother has been sending money and changing cities for eight years.

She thinks I travel for work.

She thinks the work is import and export, which I told her when she was fifteen and has never questioned because she trusts me in a way that I do not entirely deserve.

"I miss you," she says. Quieter now. The joke voice gone.

"I know," I say. "I miss you too."

"When are you coming?"

"Soon," I say. "I'm working on something. When it's done, I'll come."

"You always say soon."

"And I always come eventually," I say.

She makes a sound that is not quite satisfied but is accepting it. "Are you eating?"

"Yes," I say.

"Real food or the thing you do where you call coffee and something from a vending machine eating?"

"Real food," I say. "I had pastries last night and eggs this morning."

"Someone made you eggs?"

I open my mouth.

Close it.

"I made eggs," I say.

"You can't cook."

"I can cook eggs."

"You burned eggs in my kitchen in March," she says. "I had to open three windows."

"Those were a different kind of eggs," I say.

She laughs and it is the best sound and I let it sit in my chest for a second before I have to let it go. "Call me tomorrow," she says. "Actual call, not text."

"Actual call," I agree.

"I love you," she says.

"I love you too," I say. "Lock the door."

"I always lock the door."

"Lock it twice."

She hangs up.

I sit with the phone in my lap and the gold morning around me and the particular ache of missing someone you are keeping safe by staying away from them, and I breathe through it the way I always breathe through it, slow and even, and I look at the city and I think about logistics and timelines and five days and a legal claim and all the things that need thinking about.

Then I notice the smell of coffee getting closer.

And then I notice that the smell of coffee is attached to a person because everything about that particular scent signature is becoming very specifically identifiable to me in a way that is entirely my wolf's fault.

I look at the doorway.

Thalrion is there.

He has a second cup of coffee in his hand and he looks at me in the window seat and his expression is very neutral and very even and he holds the cup out without coming fully into the room and says, "Thought you might want a refill."

"Thank you," I say, and I take it when he steps in close enough to hand it to me and our fingers don't quite touch this time and I don't know if I am relieved or disappointed about that and I refuse to investigate which.

He looks at the window seat.

He looks at the bookshelves.

He looks at me sitting in the morning light with two coffees and a phone in my lap and something in his expression does something that is very brief and very private.

"This was my mother's room," he says.

I look around it with different eyes. The desk by the window. The books that have been read. The window seat built wide enough that you could curl up in it with something worth reading and stay for hours.

"She had good taste," I say.

"Yes," he says quietly. "She did."

He doesn't come further into the room.

He stands in the doorway with his own coffee and looks at me in his mother's window seat like I am something he is deciding what to do with, and I look back at him and the bond is warm and open between us and the morning is gold all around us and neither of us says anything for a moment.

It is not uncomfortable.

That's the thing that gets me. It should be uncomfortable. We have known each other for less than fifteen hours. I am a stranger in his apartment sitting in his dead mother's window seat after sleeping in his guest room and he is standing in the doorway looking at me and it is the most comfortable silence I have been in for eight years.

My wolf is completely settled.

I hate how much I don't hate it.

"Meeting in twenty minutes," Thalrion says. "My inner circle. I want you there."

"Okay," I say.

He nods once.

He goes.

I sit in the window seat and drink my coffee and look at the city and think about Tiara three cities away locking her door twice because I asked her to, and I think about Thalrion in the doorway with a second coffee he didn't have to bring, and I think about the specific and terrifying possibility that I have spent eight years running toward something rather than away from it without knowing.

My wolf has known the whole time.

Smug, the both of them.

I finish my coffee and I go.