She sighed and bent to pick up the offending conditioner, completely unbothered by her nudity or by the fact that I had just destroyed a perfectly good door. She examined the bottle asif checking for damage, then set it back on the shower shelf with exaggerated care.
“Fix the door, please,” she said, turning to look at me with an expression that was equal parts exasperation and reluctant affection. “And maybe drink some herbal tea. You’re vibrating.”
I looked down at my hands. They were, in fact, shaking slightly. My whole body was shaking slightly, still coming down from the surge of protective rage.
“I’ll... yeah. I’ll go downstairs with Noah.”
“Good idea.” She waved a hand at me. “Go. Breathe. Maybe punch a pillow or something. Get it out of your system.”
I retreated with as much dignity as I could muster, which was approximately zero dignity. The sound of her resuming her shower followed me down the stairs.
My brother was waiting for me in the living room, his face split by the biggest grin I had ever seen on him.
“I heard everything,” Noah said, practically vibrating with glee. “You kicked down the door because she dropped a bottle of conditioner?”
“It sounded threatening.”
“It’s conditioner, Knox. Pantene Pro V is not known for its assassination capabilities.”
“The bottle could have been thrown by an intruder.”
“An intruder who breaks into your house to throw toiletries at your wife?”
“It could happen.”
“It could not happen.” He was laughing now, openly, his shoulders shaking with the force of it. “I bet she looked at you like you had lost your entire mind. Which you have, by the way. Lost your entire mind.”
I threw a pillow at his head. He caught it easily and tossed it back at me.
“Did you at least apologize before you ran away?” he asked.
“I didn’t run away. I strategically retreated.”
“You absolutely ran away. You ran away from your naked wife because you were embarrassed about murdering her bathroom door.”
“I’m going to murder you if you don’t shut up.”
“Worth it.”
We were in the middle of arguing about whether my response had been “appropriate caution” or “clinically unhinged behavior requiring professional intervention” when a shout came from outside.
“Alpha! There’s a package! A courier just delivered it!”
Noah and I looked at each other. The laughter died instantly. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
We ran outside together.
A cluster of guards surrounded a plain cardboard box sitting on the ground near the front gate. It looked completely innocuous. Brown cardboard. Standard size. No markings except for a label.
A few feet away, a human teenager straddled a rusty bicycle that had seen better days, maybe better decades. He was wearing oversized headphones around his neck and chewing gum with aggressive nervousness. His eyes were huge, darting between the six growling wolves in human form who had surrounded him. If he thought having wolves as guards was odd as fuck, he didn’t mention it.
“It’s clean,” one of the guards reported, stepping back from the box. “Scanned it twice. No explosives, no poison, no magical signatures. It’s just a box.”
I moved closer and read the label.
The Happy Family.
No address. No return sender. Just those three words, written in neat black marker.
