Declan comes back to where I'm standing.
"Ready?"
"You didn't have to do all of?—"
"Mila."
"Yes," I say. "Ready."
He nods.
And then, because apparently this is a reflex now, his hand comes up and tucks the piece of hair that has escaped back behind my ear, and the grey-green eyes hold mine for one moment before he turns toward the door.
I follow.
Out of the shop and into the afternoon—the March air still cool but the sun present now, the storm having cleared sometime while I was sleeping ten hours and two men were filing provisional pack paperwork.
The Cadillac is at the curb and the bags are going into the boot and Finn is making commentary about storage space that Rowan is ignoring with practiced expertise.
I stand on the pavement in a white-and-yellow dress with wedge sandals and blonde hair and the afternoon sun doing something entirely unfair to all of the above, and I think about the next twenty days stretching ahead.
New clothes. A registry appointment.
Three Alphas with three distinct signatures that have become—in less than twenty-four hours—recognizable enough that I can clock each of them without looking. A phone somewhere in the next town that I can use to call Elowen, who is going to have approximately seven hundred things to say about all of this, all of which I will deserve.
A provisional pack bond until Easter.
Declan opens the car door for me, which I file in the category of things I have not historically had done for me and am apparently going to have done now.
Twenty days...please universe...let me not fuck this up.
CHAPTER 22
The Shark And The Swimmer
~FINN~
I've always been a slow walker.
Not because I'm lazy—I've had that argument with Rowan enough times to have developed a complete rebuttal—but because speed assumes you've already decided what's worth your attention and everything else is just distance to be covered. I don't operate that way. The world is interesting. People are interesting. The particular way a small town arranges itself on a Monday afternoon, when the storm from last night has washed everything clean and the light coming off wet stone is doing something architectural that nobody planned for, is interesting.
I hold Mila's hand.
This started approximately forty minutes ago when the third Alpha in ten minutes tried to compliment her as we moved through the market section of this town, and my brain made a decision that my mouth had already endorsed and my hand implemented before the rest of me caught up. I simply—took it. Her hand, warm and small in mine, and the Alpha in question recalculated his evening plans immediately. I have zero regrets.
Rowan is ahead of us, which is his natural position in any geographical situation. He moves with the contained efficiency of someone whose relationship to space is entirely functional—point A, point B, least obstructed route between them. The town's main commercial strip is laid out in a sensible grid, clean stone buildings with painted shopfronts that have the particular character of places that know they're pretty and have decided to lean into it without overdoing it. Window boxes with early spring plantings. A clock tower that is presumably decorative at this point. Cobblestones that are charming until you're wearing the wrong shoes, which none of us are.
Declan is on the phone behind us, dealing with whatever the security situation is—some technical breach in one of his outer operations that requires his particular brand of focused problem-solving, which he applies to infrastructure crises the same way he applies to everything else: calmly, thoroughly, and without commentary unless commentary serves a function.
And Mila.
I watch her from the side of my vision, which is where I've been running most of my observations since we left the dress shop.
She moves the way she does everything—with a baseline efficiency that occasionally gets interrupted by something genuinely interesting, at which point she slows without deciding to, drawn toward it with the instinctive pull of a person who has trained herself to move fast and never quite suppressed the part that wants to stop and look. A jeweler's window catches her eye for three seconds before she reassembles the pace. A bakery exhaust hits the street—warm butter and something with cardamom—and her chin lifts slightly, nostrils catching it before she consciously registers the input. A tabby cat on a windowsill gets a full five seconds of attention and a barely audible "oh" that she doesn't intend to be audible at all.
She's enchanting.
I've been in enough rooms with enough Omegas to know how I usually operate: the social ease that most people read as flirtation, the conversational warmth that I've been told registers as interest even when it's just my genuine default. I understand the reputation. It's not inaccurate. I'm a man who finds people interesting and has never been good at concealing it, which creates a specific impression that most Omegas clock within the first twenty minutes and file under: charming, not serious, probably trouble.
