“Sorry. What?”
“I asked if you had any food allergies. I was going to make dinner.”
“No allergies. You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” She was already heading toward the kitchen, pulling the pencil from her hair and tossing it onto the counter. “Consider it a welcome-to-Chicago gift. Avery’s been surviving on protein shakes and takeout. It’s honestly tragic.”
“Hey,” Avery protested weakly but he didn’t argue.
Hana made dinner while Avery and I finished the dresser—herb crusted roast chicken, the smell of it moving through the apartment in a way that was almost aggressive, warm and savoury and insistent. Mashed sweet potatoes with a hint of something spiced. Roasted vegetables that actually had colour and texture instead of the sad, limp things that came in takeout containers.
The kind of meal that suggested she cooked not out of obligation but because she genuinely wanted to. Because feeding people was its own form of care.
We ate at Avery’s table, which technically seated four but was usually covered in gear and unopened mail.
I took a few slices of breast meat and a small spoonful of sweet potato, arranging it on my plate with the particular precision I’d gotten very good at making look casual.
Avery was watching me. I could feel it—the peripheral awareness of his gaze tracking what I’d taken, doing the math, deciding whether to say something. Would it always be like this now that my secret was out in the open?
I kept my eyes on my plate.
“This is incredible,” Avery told Hana and for the moment his attention shifted.
“I learned this technique in culinary school,” Hana said. “Makes the breasts extra juicy.” She waggled her eyebrows as Avery choked on his bite of chicken. Then she glanced at me—not at my plate, just at me. “How are you finding the apartment? Avery’s decorating choices notwithstanding.”
“It’s fine. Better now that the room has actual furniture.”
“That bar was on the floor,” she said. “Literally.”
“It had a mattress,” Avery said. “That’s furniture.”
“A mattress on the floor is a life choice, not furniture.” She looked back at me. “Do you cook?”
The question caught me slightly off guard. “A little.”
“I can teach you how to make the chicken. Avery mostly uses the kitchen to store protein powder and make toast.”
“That’s not—” Avery started.
“There are four containers of protein powder in the pantry,” she said. “I counted.”
Something in my chest shifted. Small and barely perceptible, like a hinge that had been stuck and was now, reluctantly, beginning to move.
“Five,” I said. “There’s one behind the blender.”
Hana pointed at me like I’d confirmed something important. Avery looked briefly betrayed.
I ate my chicken. Outside, Chicago moved in its indifferent way—big and loud and completely unbothered by any of us.
It wasn’t terrible.
7. Derek
I liked bonding with my team. My parents still lived outside of Traverse City, my brothers had fled to opposite coasts the moment winter became optional, and I had been in Chicago seven years. This city had absorbed me in the way cities do when you stop fighting them—gradually, without ceremony, until one day you realized you couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Mackenzie and Cooper had made that move with me. Young and stupid and certain, the three of us packed into a sublet in Wicker Park while I found my footing with the Frost. I didn’t think about that much anymore. I thought about it slightly more lately for reasons I was actively choosing not to examine.
My team was my family. That was just true. I had stood in Morrison’s wedding in a rented tux that didn’t quite fit in the shoulders. I was his daughter Rosie’s godfather—a fact that still startled me sometimes, that a man as steady and deliberate as Luc Morrison had looked at me and decided yes, him, that one. I had carried Petrov home from bars more times than I could accurately count, had held Jensen’s daughter at the hospital when she was forty minutes old, had driven Avery to urgent care last December when he’d convinced himself his bruised rib was broken.
