I stepped inside, crossing to the barstools at the island. I dragged one out, sat, and propped my elbows on the counter. “I’ll get that looked at,” I said.
“You do that.” He pressed the back of his wrist to the inside of his forearm, testing the formula’s temperature in a gesture so practiced it bypassed conscious thought. He shifted Grace higher, then maneuvered the bottle into place and, with an ease that bordered on supernatural, coaxed the nipple into her mouth.
The room went silent.
He held her like she was both priceless and indestructible, his whole body curved to the shape of her hunger. The only sound was the tiny, ferocious suction of a baby draining half an ounce at a time.
I watched him watch her. In the half-shadow, he looked softer than usual, but only just. There was nothing tentative about how he held her, just a zeroed-in focus that reminded me, for a second, of the men I’d run with at war: calm in the kill zone, loose in every joint, but always, always ready for the move.
“You’ve never done this before her,” I said.
Not a question.
He shot a glance my way, lollipop-bright and biting as ever. “Nope. Turns out it’s not that complicated. She’s hungry, you feed her. She’s wet, you change her. She’s scared, you hold her. Basic mammal logic.”
I watched the lines of his arms, the precision of his grip. “You make it look easy.”
“I make everything look easy,” he said, deadpan. “It’s a gift.” He kept one hand at the base of Grace’s head, two fingers flexed to keep her jaw from going slack, and it occurred to me that every movement he made, even the ones he’d never practicedbefore, was engineered to keep something smaller than him alive.
Her eyes were half-closed, lashes almost translucent in the cone of amber light. I tracked the rise and fall of her chest, the steady hand feeding her, and the thin, sharp slice of Jai’s profile as he watched her drink.
He shifted her, thumb working a lazy, absentminded circle on the back of her neck. Grace’s grip tightened on his finger, and she made a greedy, satisfied grunt.
I catalogued it all. The faded ink on his left bicep—regimental, but amended. The way his jaw locked when he was holding in a laugh. The deliberate tension in his feet, which never quite rested flat, as if he was always expecting a call to move.
“What time is it?” he said, without looking up.
“Three-fifteen.”
He exhaled through his nose. “That tracks.”
The city below was running at full burn. I glanced out the glass wall—orange and white, bridges shining like bone, the river gleaming with rain and a sliver of moon.
If I listened, I could almost catch the throb of nightlife at the street level, but up here the only pulse was the baby’s heart and the soft, persistent hum of the refrigerator.
The kitchen smelled like formula, detergent, and, faintly, the aftertaste of whatever expensive scotch I’d poured before I gave up on sleep. Under that, the unmistakable signature of my own territory, cedar and heat. It was in the paint, the grout, the fibers of the furniture. Every wolf I’d ever brought into the apartment had clocked it in the first second.
Jai seemed immune. He just fed the baby, like she was the only variable left in the equation.
Grace’s eyelids fluttered, the weight of milk and midnight catching up to her. Her grip softened, but she didn’t let go.
I spoke, because the silence was close to unbearable. “She trusts you. Instantly.”
He looked down at her, and for the first time since I’d met him, there was something like awe in his face. “She trusts anyone who can hold a bottle and keep her upright.” He said it with his usual fatalism, but I saw the crack in the mask: a sharp, involuntary tenderness, gone as quick as it appeared.
“She doesn’t relax with me,” I said, just to test it.
He snorted. “You’re three million times her size and you have a stare that could intimidate a brick. She’ll get used to you.”
I watched the side of his mouth curl, just for a second, and let the moment hang.
Grace slowed, then stopped. Jai extracted the bottle with surgical efficiency, wiped her mouth, and braced her against his chest, palm at the center of her back. She burped, loud and astonishing, and the noise hung in the air like an accusation.
He grinned, proud and resigned. “That’s my girl.”
I thought of saying something trite, like you’re good with her, but that would’ve landed like a grenade. Instead, I just watched, memorizing the geometry of the scene: the sine wave of his spine bent to cradle her, the contrast of bare muscle and infant soft, the way he never seemed to be aware of how closely I watched him.
I catalogued everything about him, down to the ragged edge of the shirt collar and the powder residue on his hands. I could taste his pulse from across the counter, a restless, high-frequency want that had nothing to do with hunger or fatigue.
