— N
I read it twice, adjust the tone on the second sentence — too accusatory, dial it back — and send it. Daniel will read between the lines. He's good at that. He'll also cover for me with Langford, which is the part that matters.
The IPA arrives first. Jason sets it down with a napkin underneath, which is new. Small touches. The kind of thing a server does when someone stops being a stranger and starts being a regular. I don't know when I crossed that line. Sometime between day one and now, apparently.
I take a sip and open the spreadsheet I've been building — the one labeled LANGFORD - WHY THIS PROPERTY. Three days of data and I still don't have an answer that makes sense. The zoning doesn't support Coldwell's usual model. The infrastructure timeline is years out. The location is wrong for retail, wrong for residential development, wrong for office space. On paper, this acquisition would be a loss leader at best, a write-off at worst.
Which means it's not about the property. It's about something else.
I make a note:Check Coldwell acquisitions in similar profile areas. Rural, low-density, shifter-adjacent. Pattern?
The nachos come. I eat the edges first. Laptop, nachos, IPA. This is my office for the week, and I've worked in worse. The motel in Spokane didn't even have functioning Wi-Fi.
No humans today.
I notice it about twenty minutes in. The pastry guy isn't at the counter. The book guy isn't perched on his stool. It's just — shifters. Five of them, moving through the space in their usual patterns. The alpha in and out of the office. One somewhere inthe garage — I can hear tools. The quiet one in his corner. Jason behind the bar. And the one with the spreadsheet, Ezra, on a stool near the register with his laptop and what appears to be an enormous mug of tea.
Five apex predators and me.
I wonder, with the detached calm of someone who processes anxiety through analysis, whether they killed the humans. Ate them, maybe. Buried the bones in the back. The librarian was small — that's maybe a day's worth of calories for a large predator. The pastry guy would've put up more of a fight, based on the way he glared at me for the first two days. Maybe they saved him for the weekend.
I'm not actually worried. This is just what my brain does when it's idle — worst-case modeling. Risk assessment as white noise. If they were going to eat me, they would have done it on day one when I tried to buy their home. The nachos would've been a waste.
More likely, the humans have lives outside this bar. Jobs. The book guy probably works at a library. The pastry guy has a café or something — I've seen him with supply lists. They're not here because they're not here. Simple.
But it's different without them. The energy is different. Quieter, more watchful, the low hum of predators in a shared space. They're more relaxed, actually — fewer performances, less code-switching. Jason's movements behind the bar are looser, less careful. The mechanic came through ten minutes ago and said something to Ezra in a tone I couldn't parse — flat, short, almost a growl — and Ezra responded with a hand gesture that apparently communicated an entire paragraph because the mechanic nodded and left. Silas turned a page.
I realize I've been cataloging them.
Species. That's the thing I keep circling back to. The gold eyes suggest big cat — wolves trend amber or pale, bears don't usually have the reflective quality I've seen in Knox's eyes when the light hits them right. The predator stillness is wrong for canines, who tend toward restless alertness. These men go still the way ambush predators go still. Patient. Conserving energy. Waiting.
Big cats. Lions, maybe, given the group structure. Lions are the only big cats that live in social groups — prides. The rest are solitary. If these were leopards or jaguars, they wouldn't be piled into apartments above a bar. They'd have separate territories, minimal overlap. The communal structure, the deference to Knox, the—
My phone rings.
Not the dating app notification that made me want to crawl under the table yesterday — I'd heard the shift in background noise when it went off, the way too many ears turned toward my booth. Shifter hearing. They all heard it. Probably knew exactly what app it was. I'd rather not think about that.
This is an actual call. The ringtone is specific — a ten-second clip of a Taylor Swift song that I didn't choose and can't figure out how to change because my sister set it from three thousand miles away and apparently locked it with a code.
CASS, the screen says.
I glance around the bar. Five shifters who can hear a phone vibrate from across a room are definitely going to hear a phone call. This is a terrible place to take a personal call.
I pick up anyway. I always pick up for Cass.
"Hey."
"Nico! Oh my God, I need you." She's breathless, which either means she's in crisis or she ran up the stairs to her room. With Cass, it's usually the stairs. "Are you busy?"
"I'm working."
"You're always working. This is an emergency."
"What kind of emergency?"
"Fashion emergency. Charlotte's party is Saturday and I have two dresses and I can't decide and Priya is useless, she said they're both fine, which is the most unhelpful thing anyone has ever said in the history of clothing."
I close my eyes. I'm sitting in a bar full of shifters who can hear every word of this conversation, and my eighteen-year-old sister is calling me about dresses.
