Mama Paws looks uncertain. "He can be... unpredictable."
"I'm great with animals!"
"You got pecked in the face three minutes ago," I point out.
"That was a misunderstanding. We're cool now. Right, Hendrix?"
"Fuck off!" Hendrix says cheerfully.
Becker takes that as a yes and disappears around the corner with the parrot tucked under his arm like a football.
"Should we stop him?" Wall asks.
"Probably," Mama Paws sighs. "But I'm curious to see what happens."
We split up after that—some stay outside with the roof assessment, others go back inside to inventory supplies.
I'm with theinsideparty because I'm not freezing my balls off a second longer. It's not like I'll be on the roof crew anyway.
We're halfway down the main hallway when the front door opens and a man walks in.
He's wearing a long winter coat, the expensive kind, and an old-fashioned fedora that makes him look like he stepped out of a black-and-white detective movie.
He stops when he sees us. Or more accurately, when he sees the small army of massive men in Wolves merch.
His eyes widen slightly. "Oh," he says. "I didn't realize—there's a lot of people."
"Can we help you?" Papa Paws asks.
The man's already backing toward the door. "No, no. I'll come back. When it's... less crowded."
And then he's gone, door swinging shut behind him.
We continue moving amidst a wall of sound. Barking, meowing, the team's voices overlapping, and somewhere in the distance, Hendrix screaming something unintelligible.
I'm wandering through the kennels, taking everything in, when I nearly collide with Ace coming around a corner.
"Oh, hey," he says, steadying me with a hand on my elbow.
Damn, that's a huge hand. Warm. I'm having thoughts about what those hands could do.
Stop it.
"Hey." I step back, putting some distance between us before I do something stupid like ask him to pin me to the wall and spit in my mouth. "Find anything interesting?"
"Actually, yeah. Come here."
He leads me down a quieter hallway, away from the main chaos, to a small room at the end.
There are only four kennels here. "Seniors," a sign on the wall reads.
And in the last kennel, curled up on a plush bed, is the most beautiful dog I've ever seen.
Medium-sized, maybe forty pounds, with a thick golden coat that's gone white around the muzzle, and eyes clouded with cataracts. Blind.
"Oh," I whisper.
Ace is already crouching by the kennel door. "Her name's Candy."
