I smiled faintly. “He likes you.”
“He likes stepping on me,” Wolf muttered.
“Same thing,” I teased, and for a moment, the fear loosened its grip.
I gathered the cat carrier, a bag of food, and a handful of toys. Wolf lifted both my duffel and the carrier with one hand, as if they weighed nothing.
“Ready?” he asked.
I looked around my home—quiet, warm, familiar.
The place where I’d felt safe until now.
“Yes,” I said, even though a part of me trembled.
Wolf opened the door first, stepping onto the porch with lethal calm. He scanned the street, then nodded.
“Clear.”
I followed him down the walkway, Muffin meowing indignantly from his carrier.
Halfway to the tavern, we passed Saint and Havoc installing another camera on a streetlamp. Trigger painted “WELCOME TO EAGLE RIVER” on the tavern’s front door—except he’d misspelledwelcome,and Havoc knocked him upside the head.
Trigger gasped when he saw the carrier. “IS THE BEAST COMING TO LIVE WITH US?!”
Wolf growled, “Don’t call her cat a beast.”
Havoc squinted. “That’s a cat?”
Saint elbowed him. “Stop. You’ll hurt its feelings. He’s a Maine Coon cat so he’s larger than other cats.”
Wolf ignored all of them, guiding me up the wooden stairs at the side of the building.
At the landing, he pushed open the heavy door.
“Welcome to the Roost,” he said.
The Upstairs Apartment
It wasn’t just an apartment.
It was practically a small hotel floor—renovated with wide hallways, exposed brick walls, warm lighting, and old oak doors repurposed into room entrances. It was beautiful. Seven bedrooms in total.
Each door had a small carved plaque:
WOLF — TRIGGER — SAINT — HAVOC — BLAZE— BEAST — ACE
“This used to be a hotel in the seventies,” Wolf explained. “Fell apart for twenty years. We rebuilt it to live together. Easier for ops. Easier for friendship.”
He said the last word softly, like it mattered more than he wanted to admit.
He guided me to the end of the hall, where a wide archway opened into a massive shared living space—brick walls, leather couches, long windows overlooking the street.
And the kitchen—
“Oh wow,” I whispered. “This is beautiful.”
Trigger popped out of the pantry like he’d been waiting to spring. “RIGHT?! I picked the backsplash!”
