“Demo work. My specialty.” He cracked his knuckles. “Sienna! Get in here. We're destroying things for emotional catharsis.”
She appeared from the back hallway, eyes bright with the kind of enthusiasm that came from being young and wanting desperately to be useful. “Really?”
“Really.” Jonah threw an arm around her shoulders. “First rule of renovation: sometimes you have to tear something down before you can build it back up. Isn't that right, Michael?”
I looked at the kitchen. At the cabinets Anna had picked out before she died. At the countertops she'd spent weeks researching, the backsplash she'd shown me in magazine clippings with notes written in her careful handwriting.
Tear it down. Build it back up.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “That's exactly right.”
We worked until the light started to fade. Jonah and Sienna ripping out cabinets with supernatural strength while I directed traffic and tried not to think about all the plans that had died with those walls.
It helped. Having them there. Having the noise and the company and the easy rhythm of work being done by people who wanted to help.
21
WHAT THE MOON DEMANDS
MICHAEL
Daniel had been gone long enough for the silence to start feeling personal. Texts still came—meetings running long, politics are complicated, I’ll call when I can—but the phone never rang. At night I stared at the ceiling and translated every word into something sharper: complicated meant dangerous, politics meant betrayal, allies meant wolves with their teeth out.
The house felt wrong without him.
Not just empty. Wrong. Like the walls themselves missed his presence, like the pack bonds that ran through this territory had gone thin and brittle without their Alpha to reinforce them. I caught myself reaching for my phone every few minutes, just to check. Just to make sure the last message was still there, proof that he was alive and thinking of me even if he couldn't say the words I needed to hear.
Miss you, the latest text said. Sent at 2 AM, when he should have been sleeping.This is taking longer than I hoped.
I'd typedcome homethree times and deleted it every time. Because that was selfish. Because the pack needed alliances more than I needed comfort. Because Daniel was doing what Alphas did, sacrificing personal happiness for pack survival, and I had no right to make that harder.
But fuck, I wanted him here.
The knock on the door startled me out of my spiral. Sharp. Impatient. The kind of knock that expected to be answered immediately.
I opened it to find Alaric standing on my porch, arms crossed, expression set in its usual mask of barely tolerant arrogance.
“Harrington.” He looked me up and down like he was cataloging my weaknesses. “Get your boots. We're walking the eastern perimeter.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“It's afternoon. And I don't do morning pleasantries.” His jaw tightened. “Evan's assigned pairs for patrol duty. You drew me. Lucky you.”
“I could go alone.”
“No, you couldn't.” Something flickered in his eyes. Not quite concern, but close. “Daniel's orders before he left. No one walks the boundaries solo. Not with the wards failing.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him I didn't need a babysitter, didn't need someone watching my every move like I was a child playing at being pack. But the exhaustion was catching up with me, three nights of bad sleep and worse dreams, and fighting felt like more effort than it was worth.
“Give me five minutes.”
“You get three.”
Alaric movedlike he belonged here. Silent. Fluid. Every step deliberate and certain in a way that made my human clumsiness feel even more obvious. His nostrils flared constantly, reading scents I couldn't detect, tracking threats I couldn't see.
“You're thinking too loud,” he said without turning. “I can practically hear you worrying.”
“How can you tell?”
