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“Do you want to talk about it?”

She considered this with the seriousness it deserved.

“No.”

“Then we won’t.”

“But we’re going to—” she paused, struggling to finish as his patient, warm gaze across the table—evidence of a long-standing, unspoken interest—made it difficult to speak clearly. “Later.”

“Later,” he agreed.

She finished her eggs while he ate. She stayed until three.

He walked her to the door, standing in the doorway as she went down the front steps. The ocean breeze rustled in, cool and direct from the water. She didn’t look back—she didn’t need to; she could feel him there, just like she had for weeks. She had convinced herself it was just the closeness, the magic, and nothing more.

It was not proximity and the magic.

She walked home in the dark with her hands in her pockets, feeling the steady warmth in her palms. The list she’d been keeping—things she wasn’t thinking about—had one less item than at the beginning of the evening.

She did not once consider adding the kiss to that list.

That ship, she acknowledged, had sailed.

TWELVE

DRAYCE

Pike had made the argument for bringing her, which meant it was the correct one, delivered with maximum efficiency.

“She needs to see what she’s dealing with,” Pike had said during the pre-patrol briefing, already convinced and turning it into a discussion anyway. “The training provides her with technique, while field observation offers her context. The ward data then points us toward the dock district next.”

The ward data indicated that direction. Drayce examined it three times, each confirming the same results. He approved Althea’s presence as a prudent tactical choice, while privately grappling with the fact that he’d kissed her in his kitchen fourteen hours earlier and hadn’t yet addressed it. Now he was escorting her toward a potential combat zone, which didn’t use either fact efficiently.

Drayce had kept his face level and moved on to patrol assignments.

At eleven at night, the warehouse district smelled of diesel, salt water, and aged timber—an industrial aroma starkly different from the festive boardwalk two hundred meters to the north. Security lights cast sharp shadows across the alleyways between warehouses, creating dark elongated rectangles interrupted by pools of yellow light. The dock structures stretched out over the sheltered cove, where the water beneath the planks whispered with a low creak.

Drayce knew this route, having run or delegated it for eleven years. He knew which dock boards were softer, where the lane between the third and fourth warehouses angled left before straightening, and how the water’s sightlines offered a view of three entry points if positioned correctly.

He knew, within the first forty seconds of the patrol, that tonight was wrong.

The quiet sat strangely. The waterfront usually had its own sounds — creaking docks, water against the pilings, the distant radio from the overnight security booth at the south end. Tonight, all of it was gone.

He stopped.

The patrol team read it. Four pack members fanned out without signaling — they’d run enough of these to understand what his stillness indicated. Pike, on his left shoulder, had his hand on his radio but wasn’t pressing the talk button, which would make noise.

Althea stood behind him and to the right, right where he’d positioned her. He could feel how closely she was tracking the scene — the training-cleared kind of attention, taking in the whole environment instead of trying to sort it into categories. She wasn’t reaching for magic. She was listening, fully present.

His wolf tracked it all while keeping its eyes on the lane ahead. It was good at this.

The first creature slipped through the dock pilings.

They didn’t stay on the dock surface but moved through the structural gap underneath, using the water access the patrol route didn’t cover. Then there was a second, then a third. They moved in a disjointed way, like Rift creatures—weight shifting improperly, angles snapping to slight offsets from natural positions, as if their bodies were trying to correct a nonexistent error.

They were in formation.

Drayce had time to notice the spacing, the approach vector, and how they quickly spread out to cover three lanes instead of converging on one — and he understood what this signified before he moved.