"No. But it's the reason you're letting a Coldwell agent sit in your bar every day without doing anything about it." He leans forward. "Ezra. I'm not your enemy. I'm not Knox — I'm notgoing to tell you what to do in your own territory. But I drove an hour to check on you because I told you a man from the company that's buying shifters out of their homes is sitting in your bar every day, and your response was he tips well."
I don't have an answer for that. The honest answer is that Delgado is right and wrong at the same time. Right that the attraction is a factor. Wrong that it's the only factor. Nicholas told Troy to leave. Nicholas asked about the oak. Nicholas sat across from a man who insulted shifters and chose the shifters. Those aren't the actions of a scout running a play.
But they could be. That's the hell of it. They could be exactly what a very good scout would do.
"He hasn't done anything," I say. "When he does, we'll handle it."
"Him being here is the first move." Delgado stands. "That's how they work. They don't kick the door in. They sit at the bar. They learn the rhythms. They figure out who matters and who's vulnerable and where the pressure points are." He pushes the stool back. "I'm not saying he's a bad guy. I'm saying it doesn't matter if he's a bad guy. He works for bad people, and bad people sent him here for a reason."
I'm quiet. The bar is quiet. The neon hums.
"Find the pattern," Delgado says. Same thing he said last time. "And be careful with the things you want. They make you blind."
He leaves. The truck rumbles to life outside, fades into the evening.
I sit at the bar with my spreadsheet and the silence and the booth that's empty and will be full again tomorrow at noon.
Him being here is the first move.
I turn the sentence over. Examine it from every angle, the way I examine data. Is Delgado right? Is Nicholas's presence — the steady, patient, daily presence that I've been reading as genuine — itself the strategy? Sit in the booth. Be likable. Earn trust. Build the file while they build affection, so that by the time he asks again, saying no feels like a betrayal instead of a business decision.
If that's the play, it's working. Not because of the nachos or the tips or the chinos. Because of the Troy date. Because of Mango. Because of the way he said I don't know when Toby asked why he keeps coming back, and it sounded like the most honest thing anyone's said in this bar in months.
Both things can be true at the same time. He can be genuine and still be dangerous. He can be good and still be the instrument of something bad. He can be the man my lion chose and the man Delgado is right to distrust.
That's the part I can't solve. Not with a spreadsheet, not with logic, not with the careful distance I've been maintaining. The data says Nicholas is part of something ugly. My lion says Nicholas is something beautiful. And I'm sitting between those two conclusions like a man on a barstool with one hand on his laptop and the other reaching for something he can't touch.
Mango is on my windowsill. She was on Nicholas's bench this afternoon. Now she's on my sill. Moving between us like she's the only one in this building who doesn't see a conflict.
"You're not helpful," I tell her.
She purrs.
I don't sleep until two.
Chapter 12
Nico
Something changed again.
I walk into the bar at noon and the temperature is wrong. Not the air — the air is the same, the perpetual warmth of a building that runs radiators and holds heat in old wood. The temperature between me and everyone else.
Ezra was thawing. Yesterday — the Mango comment, the crack in the wall, theI was lookingthat cost him something to say — I thought we were finding our way back to whatever we'd been building during the week. The conversations, the small observations, the thing where we occupied the same room and the room felt better for it.
Today the wall is back. Not the room-temperature politeness of the past few days. Something harder. Something that happened between four-thirty yesterday and noon today, in the hours when I wasn't here.
Ezra is on his stool. His laptop is open but his posture is different — angled away from me, shoulders tight, the body language of a man who's bracing for something. He says good morning. He pours my IPA. He doesn't look at me, and this time the not-looking is different from the careful avoidance of earlier in the week. This is deliberate. Guarded. Like he learned something overnight that put me on the wrong side of a line I didn't know existed.
I sit in my booth. Same seat. Same arrangement. Mango is not on the windowsill today, which feels like a barometer.
The nachos arrive. I eat them in order. I open my laptop.
And for the first time in days, I actually work.
Not on the assessment report — that's been done since day three, sitting in my drafts like a letter I can't send. I work on the thing that's been bothering me since day one. The thing I've been avoiding because pulling the thread means asking questions that don't have comfortable answers.
Why did Langford flag this property?
