Page 7 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

"I'm just going to grab a coffee."

"There's coffee in the kitchen."

Hunter doesn't answer. He swings a leg over the bike and the engine turns.

"Say hi to Claire for us," Knox calls after him.

Hunter's hand tightens on the throttle, but he doesn't say anything about it. He pulls out of the lot and turns toward town. Knox shakes his head and goes back inside.

I stand at the apartment window holding my mug and think about a man who rides past a full coffee pot to get to a bakery twenty minutes away. Not that I can talk.

That evening, in the garage.

Tom's workspace runs the back wall, a long wooden bench with a pegboard above it, gauze and tape and scissors and antiseptic hung on labeled hooks, two sizes of surgical clamps, a suture kit at the far end. The first time I saw this layout at a drop-off, it mirrored the way I organize my intake cages.

"Let me see your hand," he says.

I hold it out. The hawk bite from Monday has turned a deep purple around the puncture, and the tape I've changed twice won't hold against the swelling.

He pulls a stool over and sits me on the workbench. My feet hang off the edge. He stands in front of me with the antiseptic and fresh gauze and doesn't speak while he works.

He peels the old tape. Cleans the puncture with antiseptic on a cotton pad, pressing firm enough to flush the wound and light enough that I don't pull away, his mouth goes flat while he works, focused, not looking at me. He dries the skin around the bite and cuts a new strip of gauze and begins taping it in place, his fingers covering my entire hand.

His glasses slip down his nose.

It happens fast—the frames hit a patch of fur at the wrong angle and slide, and he can't push them back because both of his hands hold my bandage in place. He tilts his head, trying to resettle them, and they slide further.

I reach up and push them back onto the bridge of his nose.

My fingertip lands on the warm bone between his eyes, and his glasses settle under my touch, his whole body locks.

I feel his purr through the workbench before I hear it. Not the buried tremor from Monday night. This one fills the garage. The wooden bench hums under my legs. The tools on the pegboard rattle against their hooks. His chest rumbles with a sound so low it sits in the base of my spine rather than my ears.

He catches my wrist.

Not hard. His fingers close around the bone and stop, and the grip has the tension of a man holding himself back from leaning into my palm. His thumb finds my pulse point and presses, and we both know what my heart rate looks like right now because my blood hammers against his thumb hard enough that he can probably count the beats without trying.

He sets my hand down on the bench, finishes the bandage, and steps back.

"Keep it dry."

I nod.

Neither of us mentions it. He cleans his supplies, returns each one to its labeled hook. I slide off the workbench and walk back across the lot to his apartment in the compound. The night air hits the back of my neck. I press my bandaged hand against my chest and feel my heartbeat still pounding.

I lie in his bed at midnight with my phone on my chest. The room smells like Tom and the bed holds the impression of someone taller than me.

I open my voicemails. Twelve saved messages from the same number. Thomas's name beside each one—not Steel, Thomas—and every message dated and filed in chronological order because I keep everything organized and labeled.

I press play on the oldest one. Two years ago, the first hawk he brought me.

His voice comes through steady and warm. "Isla, it's Thomas. I've got a juvenile Cooper's hawk on the shoulder of Route 4, looks like a wing injury. I've got her wrapped and stable. I can bring her in tonight if you've got cage space. Let me know."

He says Cooper's hawk the way some men say a woman's name. Like it matters enough to get right.

I listen to the whole message. I play it again. I hold the phone against my chest and close my eyes and the room sits lonely around me: the tight-cornered bed, the face-down photograph on the bookshelf, the glasses case on the nightstand, the field guides lined up by height on a shelf where someone put everything in its place and left no room for anyone else.

Two years of his handwriting in a folder I labeled Intake Records because the honest label would have scared the hell out of me.