Chapter 2: Who Is He?

The car was gone when I opened the shop at four.

I stood in the doorway longer than I needed to, looking at the empty space where it had been. The pavement was wet from overnight rain. Everything looked exactly like it always did, and I had spent five years learning to distrust exactly that feeling.

I went inside. I put the kettle on. I conditioned the roses.

I told myself that silver eyes in the dark meant nothing. That a wolf stirring after five years of silence was just adrenaline. That I was a florist on Clement Street and that was what was real.

I almost believed it.

In my old pack, we had a saying: the wolf knows before the person does. I had spent five years telling myself I didn't have that anymore. But this morning, every time I walked past the front window, I felt it — that low, animal awareness, like a sound just below hearing.

Something was coming.

* * *

He walked in at half past nine.

I knew it was him before the door had fully opened. Not because I saw his face. Because the air in the shop changed.

He was tall in the way that changed a room's proportions. Broad across the shoulders, the kind of build that came from actual use rather than maintenance. Dark jacket, slightly damp from the rain, a scar along the left side of his jaw — thin and old, the kind that came from something fast and sharp.

He stood in the centre of my shop and looked at me. Not at the flowers. At me. Like he had walked in knowing exactly what he was going to find.

He had silver eyes.

My wolf went absolutely still inside me, the way a prey animal goes still when something much larger has just noticed it exists.

I kept both hands on the worktable.

* * *

I had read about the mate pull, back when I still believed it was something I would ever feel. They said it felt like recognition. Like something slotting into place.

They never said it would feel like a warning.

Standing behind my worktable with my hands flat on the surface, I felt it — that old, supposedly sacred thing — and every instinct I had trained over five years said the same thing at once: danger, exit, move.

I did none of those things.

I picked up the order ledger. I smiled the customer smile.

Good morning. Can I help you?

* * *

He didn't browse. He stood in the centre of the room and the silence stretched between us like something being tested for weight.

Most people fill a silence. They start talking, look away, pick up a flower and pretend to examine it. Normal things. Human things.

He didn't move.

Then he said, in a voice that was lower than I expected and considerably steadier: You're not easy to find.

Most people call ahead. I do have a website.

Something shifted in his expression — not quite a reaction, more like the absence of one, where a reaction should have been. Like he had expected something different and was recalibrating.

I don't need flowers, he said.

Then you're in the wrong shop.

He smelled like rain and pine and something underneath that my human senses couldn't quite catch but my wolf could. She wasn't still anymore. She was pacing somewhere deep inside me, and that was more alarming than anything he'd said.

He smelled like power. Old power. The kind that came with rank.

Alpha, something in me said. No. Higher.

You're not easy to find, he said again, quieter this time.

Good, I said.

And I meant it.

Something flickered across his face at that — there and gone so fast I couldn't name it. Not quite amusement. Not quite respect. Something that sat between the two and didn't have a word yet.

He looked at me for one more moment, the way you look at something you have been searching for long enough that finding it doesn't feel quite real yet.

Then he turned and walked out.

* * *

The door swung shut behind him.

I stood in the exact centre of my shop and did not move.

One breath. Two. I counted them the way I had learned to count things when my hands wanted to shake — steadily, deliberately, giving my body something to do while the rest of me caught up.

Then I crossed to the front door and turned both locks.

I stood with my back against it and pressed my hand flat against my sternum.

My heartbeat was thundering in a way it hadn't for five years. In a way I recognised, from a life I had left behind, as the sound a wolf makes when she has just found something she has been searching for her entire existence and doesn't know what to do about it.

Not danger, something said quietly. Something that sounded, for the first time in five years, like her.

Not danger. Him.

He would be back. I already knew it. And the part of me I had spent five years trying to bury already knew something else: this time, I wasn't sure I wanted him to leave.