Wade spoke again, voice deep as a storm. “You sure?”
This time, the sound I made was soft and wordless. I felt it roll out of me, and I hated that I couldn’t wrangle it back in.
Rhett’s spoon clattered into his bowl. His hands went to the edge of the table the way you might brace for an earthquake. He didn’t look at me yet. He waited, maybe to see if I’d run or shatter.
I could feel it, the three of them, the pressure of their being both present and patient, and absolutely not moving away. My body wanted to fold, collapse into the scent and the steadiness, the warmth collected at the head of the table.
I moaned. This time it was real, and it was full and slow and hot enough that it burned my own ears.
Wade’s mouth opened a little, and his voice dropped, almost a growl now: “Breathe, Lila.”
I did. I drew in the air, thick with the scent of them, and it cracked something ragged and wild inside me.
I pushed my chair back and stood, even as the world spun up around me in a blur of heat and cold.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, but it wasn’t true anymore.
I left the table, closing the door gently behind me, and crossed the dark hallway to the empty living room. My knees shook. My hands went to my belly, holding it, rocking in the thick half-light of dusk. I breathed like Wade told me to.
Through the door, I could hear the men at the table, not talking. Not for a very long time.
Chapter Five – Cole
The following morning, the kitchen light was the only one on in the house. I had seen it from across the yard on my way back from checking the water line at the east trough, and thought nothing of it, as she always kept lights on, I’d noticed that in the first days, the way you learn the habits of a house you’re moving through carefully. But when I stomped the worst of the mud from my boots and came through the back door, I took my boots up and straightened, then stopped.
She hadn’t heard me, and was bent over the kitchen table with her back curved and her shoulders drawn up near her ears, both elbows on the wood, and the table around her was covered edge to edge in invoices. She’d tried to separate them into two rough stacks, but seem puzzled by the remaining ones. A ledger lay open, dense with figures, and a mug sat pushed to the corner, cold by the look of it, the tea or coffee inside it having gone the color of old wood. Her pen was jammed against a column in the ledger, not moving. Her free hand was pressed flat to the side of her belly, the way she pressed it sometimes without knowing she was doing it… I had noticed that too.
I watched her for a moment. The light above the table was the warm, narrow light of the fixture above, and it caught the side of her face and the top of her hair, the light brown of it gone amber in that lamp’s particular opinion about color. Her head was down. Then, without any preamble, a single tear dropped from her jaw onto the invoice in front of her. She saw it happen, or felt it, and her hand came up fast, the back of her wrist across her jaw, and then her fingers went to her eyes and pressed, hard, like she was fixing something rather than feeling it.
I should have announced myself. The sensible thing was to clear my throat or back out or make some sound that gave herthe option of composing herself before she knew I was there. I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I crossed to the table and pulled out the chair beside her and sat down.
She came half out of her seat. Her hands swept the papers toward her chest in one fast, instinctive movement, pulling them in close like she’d been caught at something that required hiding. She looked at me with the expression of a woman whose guard had come up so hard and fast it had hit the ceiling on the way.
I held up my hand, palm out, fingers together. Said nothing.
She looked at my hand. She looked at me. She was reading me the way she always did, quickly and without charity, looking for the angle in it.
I kept my hand up and waited, and after a moment she set the papers back down on the table.
I reached over and began straightening them. The invoices first, edges aligned, the corners corrected where they had fanned out and overlapped. I worked without hurry, setting each sheet flat and even, and I kept my eyes on what I was doing rather than on her, which seemed to help. The ledger was already open, and I turned it toward me slightly and began reading from the top of the page.
It was old. Dog-eared at the corners and stained along where a cup had been set on it that the page darkened by a circular ringlet. The margins were crowded: figures, notes, the occasional question mark beside a line item, the kind of shorthand a person develops for a document they live with. There were two different hands in it. One was a man’s hand with larger letters, the pen pressure heavier, a habit of writing numbers with the seven crossed. I recognized the difference between it and the hand beside it, smaller and moreprecise, without letting myself think too much about what that recognition meant.
The current page was laid out in columns: suppliers down one side, amounts down the other, dates in a third. Several figures had been circled in red ink, two of them twice, with a line running between them and a question mark at the end of the line. The circled numbers were not small.
I worked my jaw and kept reading.
“This your regular hay supplier?” I said. I tapped the line with one finger.
She looked at where I was pointing. “Since we were given the place, yes.”
“How long have you been paying this rate for feed?”
A pause. “Two years, maybe. Ethan, my husband used to handle the supplier negotiations.” She was married. I’d guessed at much looking down at the ring on her finger. I’d guess she’d married a Beta perhaps, as Alphas didn’t worry about marriage, pack bonds were much stronger. I pursed my lips thinking. But where was he?
I asked the next question very carefully. “Is he around so I can ask him about them?”
Her bottom lip wobbled, then she straightened her spine, and took a deep breath. “No, he… he died… in a storm.”
