I push the inner door open with my hip.
The scent of the house hits us before the sound does, and it is, even to me — who lives here — disarming. Cinnamon and butter from something currently in the oven, which means Rémi has been baking again. The grassy green of the basil plants Rémi keeps on the kitchen sill. Cedar from his woodworking corner in the den. Beeswax from the candles I keep lit on the mantel, currently a low spiced honey. Beneath the lot of it, layered into the very weave of the rugs, the steady combined scent signaturesof three Alphas who have been each other’s nearest neighbors for two years and have stopped having strong opinions about each other’s presence. The house smells, in a word, like a home.
I push the door wider and step in.
And step into a level of in-house chaos that, on a normal Wednesday, I would simply walk around.
Hargrove is on the back of the couch with one sock half on and one sock missing, gesturing with the missing sock at someone I cannot see. Murray and Linder are in the kitchen arguing over the toaster. Petrov is on the floor doing what appears to be his hamstring stretches but might be a slow surrender. The TV is playing the highlight reel from last night’s NHL game with the sound off. Somebody, somewhere, is heating up leftover pasta in the microwave and has put it in for too long. The whole shared room is moving and loud and lived-in in the precise way it always is at four in the afternoon when half the guys have just come off the ice and the other half are pretending they have homework.
Then they see me. Then they see her.
The room does not so much go quiet as it loses the will to make noise.
Hargrove’s sock-hand drops slowly to his lap. Petrov stops, mid-fold, and stays folded. Murray turns from the toaster with a piece of bread still in his palm and forgets entirely that he was holding it. Linder closes his mouth in the middle of a word and does not open it again. Even the microwave seems to register the change in atmospheric pressure, because the beeping starts and no one moves to address it.
Iris stands at my shoulder with the very last bite of her sugar cone in her hand and a small smear of strawberry at the corner of her mouth that, I will swear in a deposition, she does not know is there.
She does not flinch. The wall stays. Chin up, shoulders square, the goalie set.
Then a whistle cuts the silence — short, bright, two ascending notes I have heard come out of Matteo Santori’s mouth at least five thousand times — and Matteo himself is suddenly off the arm of the couch where I had not, in the chaos, noticed him perched, crossing the room in his lazy long-legged amble with a grin spreading wide enough to require maintenance.
“Pinky.” He stops a foot off her, eyes dropping to the cone and back up. “Excuse me. Now who got you ice cream. I distinctly remember claiming the feeding-you portfolio not four hours ago.”
Iris’s mouth crooks. She tilts her chin toward me without breaking his gaze.
“Captain took sympathy on me.”
I roll my eyes. “Captain is the third party. Captain was forced into ice-cream purchase by a woman who stood on a sidewalk and gave a strawberry truck the kind of look I am usually reserved for at faceoff.”
“I was investigating.”
“You were drooling.”
“I was not drooling. I was observing.”
“You pulled puppy eyes, O’Shea.”
“On the contrary. I conducted a forensic review of a known commercial vehicle and discovered, to my professional dismay, that it operated cash-only, a hostile policy in this day and age, and at no point did I solicit you to remedy that gap.”
“You pouted.”
“My face moves. It is one of its features.”
Matteo barks a laugh, full-throated, the first uncomplicated noise to break the room since the door opened, and the rest of the boys watch it land with the slack-jawed fascination of a crowd discovering the previously stoic captain has a regularconversational gear that they had not been issued the manual for.
“Captain, do not lie under oath. The girl had you wrapped around a soft-serve handle inside thirty seconds.” Matteo turns back to Iris, sweeps a flourish that includes the cone and the room. “And you. For the record. Found her first, Cap. Called dibs.”
Dibs.
As though dibs is a real legal instrument.
I ignore him entirely because that is the only currency he respects.
Rémi has materialized.
He has come from the kitchen on those quiet feet of his, towel slung over one shoulder, a smear of flour on his forearm, and without any visible decision he has angled himself between Iris and the front door we just walked through. Not crowding. Not announcing. Just present, his enormous pale-blond bulk forming a quiet wall on her open side, and I watch her notice and not comment, and I watch the small private way her shoulders settle a degree she does not have a conscious budget for.
“Rémi Bellerose,” I say. “Defenseman, thirty-three. Bakes. Builds things out of wood. Will not say more than fourteen words to you for the first month.”
