Page 69 of Fate, Interrupted

I sit there and think about the drive back through Larkin with her beside me saying I almost didn’t come today like admitting it required vulnerability she hated showing.

I drag a hand over my mouth and get out of the truck.

Logan is at the side entrance to the warehouse when I come around the front of the truck.

He’s got one shoulder against the brick wall, hands loose at his sides, looking out across the lot. It reads as incidental. It isn’t. I feel the familiar low-grade tightening that comes with being called out before I’ve decided what I want to reveal. Logan has always done this—positioned himself where he can observe without appearing to, absorbing information before the conversation starts. My father trained him for it. Or he was born to it, and my father recognized a tool when he saw one.

He glances toward me as I cross the lot.

“You took your time,” he says.

“I was out.”

His eyes move over me once, quick and thorough. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look my entire life. Half the time I think he genuinely doesn’t know he does it. The other half I think he knows exactly what he’s doing and has never bothered to stop.

“I can smell the lake. And something else.”

I close the truck door behind me. “You can smell half the city.”

“That’s true,” he says, without argument. “Doesn’t make it less informative.”

There’s the thing about Logan. He doesn’t argue when he doesn’t need to. He holds the ground he’s on and lets you come to him, lets you do all the work of closing the distance, because he learned from our father that patience is its own kind of authority. Elias picked well. The first-born wolf who never needed to raise his voice because the room already knew he was the one who mattered.

The evening air moves between us. Somewhere beyond the back fence a siren passes on a distant road and fades. I cross the lot and stop a few feet from him. “So, what’s your point, Logan?”

“I’m making conversation.”

“You’re out here waiting for me.”

“I was getting air.”

“Oh, big brother. You suck at lying.”

He almost smiles. “Henry saw you at the lake.”

I see Henry’s grin, followed by Norah’s laughter and the easy open way she says I like him on the drive back, like seeing my brother in a parking lot next to a lake was a perfectly ordinary extension of the afternoon. Henry, who inherited none of my father’s gravity and all of his instincts, who moves through the world without the weight that Logan and I carry differently and badly. I love my youngest brother the way you love the version of yourself that got out early.

“He needs to get a job. Oh wait, he has a job. What he needs to do is get a life.”

“You know Henry,” Logan says. “He’d rather spend his time irritating his brothers.”

I stick my hands in my pockets to keep them from clenching. I know Logan. He came out here for a reason, and he’s going to say it, and I might as well cut to the chase.

“How was it?” he asks.

The question is more careful than it sounds. He’s not asking about the lake. He’s asking whether I’ve gone far enough that the conversation about consequences has become unavoidable, whether the afternoon was the kind of thing a man shakes off in a week or the kind that doesn’t shake. Logan asking how was it is Logan deciding how worried to be.

“Fine,” I say.

His mouth quirks slightly. “That’s not much to go on.”

I look past him toward the warehouse entrance, where two younger wolves are wheeling a loaded rack through the propped-open door without paying obvious attention to us, but aware of us all the same. The pack always knows. That’s not paranoia; it’s how it works—information moves through a pack the way current moves through water, invisibly and everywhere at once. Half these men already know I took Norah to a lake this afternoon. The other half will know by morning.

“It was a good afternoon,” I say.

That hits differently than fine had. Logan absorbs it without reaction, which is its own reaction.

“And now?” he says.