She stops when she sees me.
The laugh cuts out. Her face shuts down, and the look she gives me isn't angry or sad. It's the look of a woman who already said everything she needed to say.
She doesn't say anything. She walks behind the bar, grabs a water bottle from the mini fridge, and twists the cap off. I catch it then. Tyler's cologne again. Not on her jacket. On her skin. Her neck. The hollow below her ear where someone leaned in close, goodbye kiss or just close enough that his cologne sank into her skin.
My nostrils flare. Every nerve in my body fires at once—the territorial drive grinding up through my chest, the possessive fury that narrows my vision to the point on her neck where another man's scent sits on skin I've tasted, and underneath both of them, louder than anything, a sound like a door being kicked open from the inside:
Mate.
Not a whisper this time. Not the low hum I've been drowning out with engine noise and highway miles for months. The word cracks through my skull in the old language, the one nobody taught me, the one Knox said finds you whether you're looking for it or not. It found me the first time Holly touched my tusks. It found me every time her scent shifted around me, every time she walked into a room and my whole body oriented toward her like a compass needle locking north.
I buried it because the last time something felt like mine—a woman named Mrs. Franklin, a bedroom with blue walls, game balls on a shelf beside her son's trophies and eight months thatfelt like a life—ended with a social worker's car in the driveway and the back door already open.
The cologne on Holly's neck rips the burial open and leaves it bleeding in the dirt.
"Don't." Holly's voice carries nothing. She doesn't look at me.
"Don't what?"
"Whatever that face is. Whatever you're about to say." She caps the water bottle. "Just don't."
I grip the bar with both hands. My knuckles go white against the wood. The word roars through me and I clamp my jaw shut around it because saying it out loud makes it real.
Holly takes her water bottle and walks to the back stairs. She doesn't turn around. The door swings shut behind her and the sound echoes through the empty bar like a period at the end of a sentence I didn't get to finish.
Sal collects my glass. She doesn't offer a refill.
Garrett sits on the steps outside my apartment above the garage.
I don't know how long he's been there. Could be an hour, could be ten minutes. The minotaur doesn't fidget, doesn't check his phone, doesn't shift his weight. He sits with his forearms on hisknees. The security light above the bay doors throws his shadow long across the gravel.
I drop onto the step beside him. The concrete is cold through my jeans. I lean forward and put my head in my hands and press my palms against my eyes until the pressure builds into a point I can focus on instead of the cologne on her neck, the dead weight of her voice, her back turning away from me.
Garrett doesn't ask. He sits with me in the cold, breathing in the slow steady rhythm I've heard him use when the nightmares pull him out of sleep and he needs to remind his body where he is. Twenty minutes of silence. Neither of us moves.
"You look like a man running from something that's already caught him."
"Yeah." My voice comes out scraped raw.
Garrett nods. He stands and pauses at the bottom of the steps. He doesn't turn all the way around, just angles his head enough that the edge of his jaw and the horn stump show against the night sky. "I pushed Nina away thinking it'd keep her safe. Almost lost her for good. Don't do the same thing."
"I know."
Then he's gone, his footsteps fading into the gravel, and I sit on the stepswith my jaw aching, my hands shaking, and a word I can't say pressing against my molars like it's trying to crack through bone.
Chapter 5
Holly
The photo loads on my laptop in strips, top to bottom, slow enough to make me grind my teeth. The harbor first. Then the boats. Then the dock and the men hauling crab pots under a sky the color of a week-old bruise.
I took this one at four in the morning, standing on the wet boards in rain boots, fingers numb around the camera body. The fishermen didn't notice me or didn't care, and that's always where the best shots live, in the gap between someone knowing they're being watched and forgetting about it. The grain from the high ISO gives it the texture of an old newspaper print, and I like it, the way it makes the harbor look like a photograph from 1970.
I click to the next image. A waitress at Betty's leaning out the service window, cigarette between her teeth, steam from the kitchen rising behind her head. Next: Griz in the Anchor's doorway with the neon sign throwing red across the flat planes of his face. I shot that one last Tuesday and he didn't flinch. Four years as Sal's bouncer and I've never seen the gargoyle flinch at anything. All that red light against a man who doesn't move.
The back office is small enough that my knees touch the filing cabinet when I scoot the chair forward. One desk, one lamp, Sal's ledger books stacked in a column that hasn't moved since I started here. The laptop's fan whirs and the screen throws blue light across my hands while the uploads crawl.
I scroll past the harbor shots and the Betty's series and land on the Toy Run folder.
