CHAPTER 3

HE FOUND HER

The bookshop was called Paige & Prose.It was the kind of place that had no business existing in a city like this — tucked between a laundromat and a phone repair shop on a street that couldn't decide if it was charming or forgotten. The sign above the door was hand-painted. The windows were always slightly fogged. Inside it smelled like old paper and cinnamon and something warm that Rain had never been able to name but had always associated with safety.She had worked here for two years.She loved it more than almost anything.She was on her knees behind the front counter Tuesday morning, reorganizing the bottom shelf of new arrivals, when the bell above the door chimed."I'll be right with you," she called without looking up, tucking a paperback into its slot.Nobody answered.She registered the silence a half second before she registered everything else—the way the air in the shop shifted and the way the warm, familiar smell of the place was suddenly undercut with something else entirely. Something dark and clean and dangerous, like a storm front rolling in off the mountains. Her hands stilled on the spine of the book she was holding.She knew, before she stood up, who was there.She stood up anyway.Damien Wolfe was standing in the middle of her bookshop like he'd been built for somewhere much larger and was simply tolerating this one. He was in a charcoal suit today—no tie, top button open—and he looked so aggressively out of place among the paperbacks and handwritten shelf labels and the small ceramic cat on the counter that Rain almost wanted to laugh.Almost.He was looking at her with those grey eyes, and there was nothing remotely funny about that."You," she said. Brilliant. Very articulate."Me," he agreed.She straightened fully, setting the book down on the counter between them like it was something to hide behind. Her heart was doing the same thing it had done three nights ago—running too fast, too loud, completely without her permission."How did you find me?" she asked.He didn't answer that. Instead, his gaze moved around the shop slowly, taking inventory—the shelves, the reading nook in the corner with its two mismatched armchairs, and the string lights someone had wound around the staircase banister years ago and never taken down. His expression didn't change, but something in it shifted almost imperceptibly, like a door opening a single inch."You work here," he said. It wasn't a question."Three days a week." She didn't know why she answered. "You didn't answer mine."His eyes came back to her. "I know a lot of things about this city.""That's not an answer.""No," he agreed. "It isn't."Rain studied him across the counter. In the daylight — in the warm yellow light of Paige & Prose with its cluttered shelves and its ceramic cat and its complete ordinariness — he was somehow even more overwhelming than he'd been in the dark. At least in the dark she'd been able to tell herself she hadn't seen him clearly. That she'd imagined the intensity of him.She hadn't imagined anything."What do you want?" she asked.Something moved through his expression. Fast and complicated and gone before she could read it."Coffee," he said. "I was told there's a place two doors down."Rain blinked. "You came into my bookshop to tell me you're getting coffee next door.""I came into your bookshop," he said quietly, "because I wanted to see if you were alright. After the other night."The simplicity of it disarmed her completely. She hadn't expected that. From the way he held himself — the stillness of him, the controlled, careful way he occupied space — she had expected something more strategic. Something with sharper edges.Not that."I'm fine," she said, softer than she intended.He nodded once. Like that was what he needed to hear. He looked down at the counter between them—at the book she'd set there, its cover face up. A novel. A love story, embarrassingly enough, with two figures silhouetted against a red sky. She watched something that might have been amusement cross his face for exactly one second."Do you have a name?" she asked before she could stop herself. "You never told me."He looked up at her. Those grey eyes were steady and unreadable and so intensely focused on her face that she felt it like something physical."Damien," he said.Just the one word. Like a last name was something she'd have to earn."Damien," she repeated.And just like the other night when he'd said her name—she watched something shift in him when she said his. Something that pulled tight across his jaw and made his eyes go briefly, dangerously dark before he controlled it."I should go," he said."Okay," Rain said.He didn't move for three full seconds.Then he turned and walked to the door, and she watched him go the same way she had three nights ago — completely unable to look anywhere else. His hand was on the door handle when he stopped."Rain."Her name in his mouth. Again. That same weight to it she couldn't explain."Be careful walking home tonight," he said, without turning around. "Take the main roads."He pushed the door open and walked out into the grey morning, and the bell above the door chimed softly behind him.Rain stood behind her counter in her favorite place in the world and felt, for reasons she absolutely could not explain, like something had just fundamentally shifted.Like the life she'd had yesterday was a slightly different shape than the one she had now.She looked down at the book on the counter. The love story with its red sky and its two silhouettes.She turned it face down.Outside on the pavement, Damien stood still for a moment with his eyes closed.His wolf was pressing against the inside of his chest like something caged, straining toward the warmth on the other side of that door with a desperation he had spent all night trying to reason with and completely failing.She'd said his name.Just his name. One word. In that soft, unsuspecting voice.And he had nearly come undone in a bookshop.He breathed in slowly. Let it out. Rebuilt every wall, every control, every layer of discipline that had taken him thirteen years to construct.Then he took out his phone and called Cole."She works at a place called Paige and Prose," he said when Cole picked up. "I want two men on that street. Plainclothes. Rotating shifts.""Damien—" Cole's voice was careful. "Is that protecting her or—""Both," Damien said. "Just do it."He hung up.He stood on the pavement outside a tiny bookshop that smelled like cinnamon and old paper and told himself, very firmly, that this was strategy. That keeping her close was about Marcus Calloway and the war that was coming and nothing else.He told himself that for the entire forty-minute drive back to Wolfe Tower.He almost believed it.