“God help us all.”
Jai appeared in the kitchen doorway holding his espresso mug like a trophy seized from conquered territory. His yesterday’s t-shirt—faded black, Army Ranger, the one with thetear along the shoulder seam that he refused to throw out—hung loose on his frame.
His hair was doing the thing it did in the mornings, standing up at odd angles like it had been conducting its own experiments overnight. The espresso stain on his wrist had migrated to his forearm, a dark crescent that he had clearly noticed and elected to ignore.
He looked at Ashe. “Your boss snores.”
Ashe didn’t blink. “I’ll note that in the log.”
“You should. It’s disruptive. The thread carries everything. I get a front-row seat to the nasal symphony.”
“I don’t snore,” I said.
Jai drank his espresso. Looked at me over the rim with the specific expression of a man who held incontrovertible evidence and was prepared to deploy it at length. “The thread doesn’t lie. You sound like a bear with a sinus infection.”
“I don’t have sinus infections.”
“You have a deviated septum from that fight in Vancouver. I felt it. The thread is very informative about your deviated septum.”
I had discovered, over the past six months, that the mate bond was an exceptional source of ammunition in Jai’s hands. He deployed it with visible, cheerful ruthlessness, cataloguing every physical detail the thread carried and weaponizing it at precisely the moments designed to produce maximum irritation.
I found it infuriating.
I also, privately, found it completely wonderful, though I would not say so under threat of waterboarding.
Grace pulled herself upright again. Both hands on the oak edge, round-bellied, standing with the wobbling certainty of a creature who had just discovered that verticality was possible and was now determined to master it. She looked at me with thefocused satisfaction of a pup who had decided that physics, after all, was a suggestion.
Then her expression shifted again. The quality of focus that preceded the change. She sat down hard on the rug, and the shift ran through her—human to wolf in the space of a breath—and she grabbed the throw blanket corner with renewed enthusiasm and started chewing.
Ashe closed his notebook. Slipped the pen into his inside pocket with the economy of a man who had delivered his report and was now preparing to exit a conversation that had veered into personal territory he had no interest in listening to.
Jai dropped onto the couch beside me. The leather creaked under his weight. He reached across, stole the corner of my toast without asking or acknowledging the theft, and ate it in two bites. Said nothing. Leaned his shoulder against mine and watched Grace destroy the throw blanket with the focused dedication of someone who believed fabric crimes were her divine right.
The thread hummed, warm and steady. Grace chewed. The Douglas fir stood dark beyond the glass. The estate held its Saturday-morning quiet around us, timber and stone and the particular weight of a place that had stopped being just a house somewhere in the past six months and had become something I did not have a clean word for.
I finished my coffee. Jai finished stealing my toast. Grace finished destroying the corner of the blanket and looked up at both of us with the expression of a pup who had accomplished everything she set out to do and was now considering her next project.
I reached down and picked her up. She came into my arms and her small body settled against my chest with a warmth that the thread carried alongside Jai’s shoulder against mine, and Iheld them both in the pale Oregon light and did not say a single word about it.
* * * *
I passed the study doorway and stopped. The sound reached me first—Jai’s voice, low and dry, in the specific low tone he used when he was reading his own work aloud and had decided, privately, that it was good.
He sat on the floor with his back against the front of the desk, cross-legged, manuscript pages balanced on one knee. Grace was in his lap in wolf pup form, ears forward, round eyes tracking the pages with the focused attention of someone conducting literary criticism, oversized paws splayed against his thigh.
Jai held the manuscript at an angle that suggested he’d been at this for a while, his thumb marking a line halfway down the page, and his voice carried the rhythm of a man who was enjoying himself thoroughly and would categorically deny it if asked.
I leaned in the doorway and watched.
The study held its weight around them. Dark timber shelves lining three walls, books stacked tight and actually read—spines cracked, pages dog-eared, the particular evidence of use rather than decoration.
The humidor sat on the side table beside the leather chair, its cedar interior carrying the ghost of cigars smoked over territory negotiations that had cost more than I wanted to admit.
The scotch collection ran along the back wall in the glass-front cabinet, crystal catching the amber morning light through the single east window and throwing small reflections across the timber floor.
The leather chair across from the desk had a divot worn into its seat—the specific depression of a man who sat in the same spot every day for seven years and had never once considered sitting anywhere else. I had not noticed the divot until Jai pointed it out, at which point it became ammunition he deployed with regularity and visible satisfaction.
Jai read a line, stopped, and looked down at Grace with the expression of a man consulting a trusted colleague. “That’s too on the nose, isn’t it.”
