Beth's relief was visible, reminding me why I'd started helping with more than just mechanical repairs. Numbers made sense in ways that people didn't, patterns that could be understood and corrected without requiring emotional intelligence I'd never quite developed.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “I don't know what we'd do without you.”
The words should have felt good, should have filled some empty space inside my chest with the warm glow of being needed. Instead, they just reminded me how strange my life had become, how far I'd drifted from whatever path I was supposed to be walking.
Here I was, the guy people called when their engines wouldn't start or their books wouldn't balance. Useful, reliable, dependable Evan, who could fix anything except the fundamental brokenness that had been living in his bones since watching the only person who mattered walk away without looking back.
I was halfway through explaining the invoice correction when the air in the room shifted, pressure changing in a way that made my wolf prick up his ears and take notice. It was subtle, but I'd learned to pay attention to the signals my animal instincts picked up.
Someone new had entered the Lodge. Someone who carried a scent that hit me like a physical blow—pine and rain and something indefinably warm that I'd been trying to forget for longer than I cared to admit. My hands stilled on the paperwork,pen suspended mid-word as my brain caught up to what my nose had already figured out.
Nate.
Fuck. After all this time, I could still pick his scent out of a crowded room like my wolf had it memorized down to the molecular level. Which, knowing pack bonds and the way supernatural senses worked, he probably did.
I looked up from the invoices and felt the world narrow down to a single point of focus.
Nate stood in the doorway like a ghost made flesh, camera bag slung over his shoulder and an expression on his face that suggested he was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. But where eighteen-year-old Nate had been all sharp edges and restless energy, twenty-four-year-old Nate looked... worn down. Polished smooth by whatever the last few years had put him through.
He was still beautiful. Still the person who made my chest tight just by existing in the same room. But there was something different in the way he held himself, a wariness that hadn't been there when we were kids playing at being adults.
The Lodge continued its normal rhythm around us—conversations and laughter and the clink of silverware against plates—but it all felt muffled and distant, like background noise in a movie where the sound had been turned down. Because Nate was here, in my space, smelling like home and heartbreak and all the dreams I'd buried so deep I'd almost convinced myself they were dead.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moved. The Lodge continued its normal rhythm around us, conversations and laughter and the clink of silverware against plates, but it all felt muffled and distant, like background noise in a movie where the sound had been turned down.
Six years. Six fucking years since I'd watched him disappear into a future that didn't include me, since I'd learned to live with the hollow ache of missing someone who'd probably forgotten I existed the moment his bus pulled out of town.
And here he was, standing in my space like he'd never left, like time was just a minor inconvenience that could be ignored if you tried hard enough.
I straightened slowly, muscle memory making me taller, broader, more imposing than the boy he'd left behind. Sure, shifter genetics had given me a head start—we all grew bigger, stronger, built for hunting and fighting and the kind of physical demands that came with our supernatural nature. But I'd still put in the work. Years of hauling lumber at the mill, helping Gideon wrestle engines twice my size, pack training that pushed even supernatural endurance to its limits. The combination had sculpted my frame into something that commanded respect whether I wanted it or not, all broad shoulders and corded muscle that spoke of honest labor and inherited power in equal measure.
But recognition went both ways, and underneath the adult veneer, I could still see traces of the eighteen-year-old who'd laughed at my jokes and made silence feel like conversation. The boy who'd taken pictures of everything and made me believe that maybe I was worth documenting. Time had carved lines around his eyes and added weight to his shoulders, but those blue-green eyes still held the same restless intelligence that had first caught my attention in Mrs. Patterson's English class all those years ago.
Some things, apparently, not even six years and a thousand miles could change.
“So,” Nate said, and his voice cracked slightly before steadying. “Still glaring people into submission, huh?”
I almost smiled despite the chaos rioting in my chest. Almost. But smiling would have been admitting something I wasn't ready to acknowledge, would have given away too much of the careful control I'd spent six years building.
Instead, I huffed out what might have been amusement if you were feeling generous, the closest thing to laughter I'd managed since the last time we'd stood in the same room together.
The sound seemed to ease something in his posture, like he'd been braced for rejection and was relieved to find something that resembled warmth instead.
“Need something fixed, Harrington?”
Gideon's voice cut through the moment like a blade, and I turned to find him watching from the doorway to the back room, eyes sharp. There was something predatory in his attention, like he was cataloging every micro-expression and filing it away for future reference.
Nate blinked, thrown off balance by the interruption. “No, I just... wanted to look around. See what had changed.”
“Not much,” Gideon said, but his gaze never left Nate's face. “Hollow Pines doesn't change easy.”
The conversation felt loaded with subtext I couldn't quite decipher, undercurrents that had nothing to do with mechanical repairs or idle curiosity. But before I could examine it too closely, the Lodge's afternoon crowd demanded attention, and I forced myself to turn back to the invoices that still needed sorting.
Except I couldn't concentrate. Couldn't focus on numbers and receipts when every instinct I had was hyperaware of Nate's presence across the room, the way he moved between tables like he was relearning the geography of a place that had once been home.
He stopped to chat with Beth, accepting coffee and what looked like an interrogation disguised as friendly conversation. Icaught fragments of their exchange, enough to understand that he was being carefully vague about his reasons for returning.
But I could see the strain underneath the performance, the way his smile never quite reached his eyes. Whatever had brought him back to Hollow Pines, it wasn't victory.
