Page 55 of Fate, Interrupted

I nod once and turn for the door.

“Silas.”

I stop.

“If you’re going to place your heart somewhere complicated, do not make the mistake of thinking the rest of us will not be affected by it.”

I leave before I answer.

Logan is in the hallway, leaning against the wall with his arms folded in a posture deliberately arranged to look relaxed. He straightens when I step out, his gaze moving over my face in a quick, thorough assessment.

The vibration of the warehouse presses up through the floor, steady, reliable.

“You told him,” I say.

“No,” Logan says.

I believe him immediately, irritating me more than the alternative would have.

“You didn’t have to,” I say bitterly. “He has his little spies all over the city.”

He pushes off the wall and starts for the stairs. I follow, because standing still feels worse than moving, and we descend without speaking, the smell of solvent and hot fabric thickening as we get closer to the floor. A forklift beeps somewhere below. Someone calls across the dock for a pallet jack. The ordinary noise of an ordinary weekday.

None of it touches what’s sitting under my ribs.

Halfway down the landing, Logan speaks. “You should stay away from her.”

No force in it. That makes it worse.

I stop. He comes down the last two steps and turns, and we’re nearly eye level with the railing between us.

“Since when do you give advice about my personal life?”

“Since it stopped being personal.” His gaze goes briefly toward the office above us, then back. “Father didn’t call you up there because he had nothing better to do.”

“He’s getting ahead of himself.”

Logan doesn’t answer that. He rests his forearms on the railing and looks out over the floor below—the entire operation turning on its own reliable axis.

Pack territory. Order. Structure.

The exact opposite of what has been happening in my head since Norah stepped onto the dock with her shoulders squared and her chin up like she’d been visiting wolves her whole life.

Logan raises his eyebrows at me. “Is he?”

He turns slightly, leaning back against the rail. “You’ve been seen with her more than once. In town, at the bar, and now here.” A pause. “The pack isn’t small, Silas.”

“Apparently.”

“And she came onto the dock today.”

“She came to see me.”

“She came into pack territory. Uninvited. Alone. To do what? Come to some kind of resolution with you? Tell me why your conversation couldn’t have waited for you to go to town. Tell me why you haven’t warned her of the dangers, both to us and to her.”

His logical execution wears me down. I exhale. “She doesn’t know it as danger.”

“Exactly. And that is the point Father was trying to make with you.”