Chapter 2 The Tell

Wren had always been good at pretending to sleep.

She'd learned it young: the specific stillness, the measured breathing, the slack jaw; because her brothers had been the kind of teenagers who thought it was funny to dump cold water on whoever woke up last. Twenty-four years later the skill had evolved into something more useful: lying in the dark with her eyes closed, running the previous night through her head until the pieces stopped moving long enough to look at.

Declan Mór. Blackridge. You don't smell low-rank.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her wrist. The mark was still there. She'd checked twice in the night, hoping it had faded, hoping it was a bruise or an ink smear or some perfectly mundane dermatological event. It hadn't faded. If anything, it was cleaner: the lines were more defined, like someone had gone over them a second time while she was sleeping.

Her wolf lay quiet. Alert, the way it had been since last night, a kind of coiled watchfulness it had never bothered with before. She didn't trust it. She didn't trust anything that had changed overnight without asking her permission.

She got up at six. Washed her face, pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved thermal despite the fact that it was almost June. Put the card (plain white, blunt handwriting) in the back pocket of her jeans. Did not look at it again.

The garage opened at seven.

The Calloway garage was technically named -Calloway Auto & Service-, but most of Harlow just called it Wren's, which she appreciated because it was accurate. Her father had left it to all three of his kids equally, which had lasted about six months before her brothers realized they didn't want to be mechanics and Wren realized she did. She'd bought them out at twenty and hadn't second-guessed it once.

It was good work. Concrete and specific. Things were broken and then, because of her, they weren't.

She was elbow-deep in the undercarriage of a 2009 F-150 when she heard the crunch of tires on gravel, and then the particular way sound changed when someone large and dominant stepped into a space she occupied. Not a customer energy. Pack.

She slid out from under the truck.

Garrett Cole was fifty-two and looked forty-five on a good day, which he knew and used. Salt-and-pepper hair, a broad honest face, the permanent tan of someone who spent time outdoors. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and carrying two paper cups from the diner, which meant this was a casual visit. Garrett didn't do casual visits. He did visits that were costumed as casual.

"Brought you coffee," he said. "Maureen put too much sugar in mine."

"She does that on purpose." Wren wiped her hands on a rag and accepted the cup. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. Can't I stop by?"

"You can. You don't, usually, on a Tuesday morning." She sipped the coffee. It was good; she was not going to let that soften her. "Pack business?"

"Passing through." He leaned against the hood of a Civic she'd finished yesterday, which she minded slightly but didn't say. His eyes moved around the garage, the truck she'd been under, the parts laid out in order, the logbook on the workbench… in the way of someone checking a room and calling it conversation. 

"Quiet night last night?"

There it was.

She felt it land in her chest, small and specific, the difference between a question and a probe. She'd heard Garrett ask questions her whole life and had never once noticed the distinction before. It was there now, lit up like something had changed the frequency she was operating on.

You don't smell low-rank.

"Quiet enough," she said. "Couple of highway guys coming through. Closed up around midnight."

"Highway guys." He nodded. Turned the cup in his hands. "Anybody you knew?"

"Didn't catch names. You know how it is." She met his eyes and smiled, and the smile was the one she used when she wanted someone to think she was fine with something she wasn't. "Why? Something I should know about?"

Garrett looked at her for a beat too long. Not threateningly, Garrett never threatened, that wasn't his style. He was the kind of man who put his hand on your shoulder and asked gentle questions and made you feel cared for, and most of the time Wren had believed it, because she'd had no reason not to.

The mark pulsed under her sleeve. Faint. Like a second heartbeat.

"There's been some outside pack movement in the region," he said finally. "Nothing serious. Just keeping an eye out." He pushed off the Civic and handed her his barely-touched coffee. "Take this. You look like you didn't sleep."

"I slept fine."

He smiled. Warm, familiar, the smile she'd grown up trusting. "Pack run Friday. You coming?"

She was never invited to the Friday run. She had not been invited to a full pack run in three years, not since the last assessment, not since they'd put her at omega-adjacent for the second time and Garrett had patted her shoulder and told her she'd always have a place here regardless.

She'd thanked him. She'd meant it.

"Sure," she said. "I'll be there."

She watched him walk back to his truck, and she watched him pull out of the gravel lot, and she watched until his taillights disappeared around the bend on Miller Road.

Then she looked down at her coffee, and at his coffee, and at the garage that was hers and the town that had always been hers and the pack she had never once questioned belonging to.

The mark pulsed again.

Your alpha's been hiding what you are.

She'd spent last night trying to dismiss Declan Mór as an arrogant alpha playing games, making moves in a regional chess match she had no stake in. She was good at dismissing things. She'd had a lot of practice.

But Garrett had come here this morning. On a Tuesday. With coffee he didn't want, asking about a quiet night she was supposed to have had, and his voice had been warm and concerned and absolutely steady. 

And for the first time in her life, Wren had heard something underneath the warmth.

He already knew.

Not guessed. 

Not suspected. 

Knew. 

Someone had told him, or he had ears in the bar she'd never identified, or he'd smelled Blackridge on her from ten feet away and the whole coffee visit had been an audition he was watching her perform.

She'd passed. She was fairly sure she'd passed.

She went back to the truck. Slid under it. Stared up at the undercarriage without seeing it.

Her wolf was not lying flat anymore. It was sitting up, and it was watching the direction Garrett's truck had gone, and the expression on its face. If wolves had expressions, if the thing inside her chest had a face… was something Wren had no vocabulary for. It wasn't fear. It was the moment before fear, the moment when the body figures out something the mind hasn't caught up to yet.

She made herself work for two more hours. She was good at that too, at continuing, at doing the next thing and the next thing until the thing she was avoiding either resolved itself or became impossible to avoid.

At nine forty-seven, she slid out from under the truck, sat on the concrete floor with her back against the tire, and pulled the card from her pocket.

Plain white. A phone number. Nothing else.

When it gets hard to hold it down, call that number.

She thought about Garrett's eyes moving around her garage. She thought about the three years without a pack run invitation. She thought about the mark on her wrist, which she'd had assessed twice by pack assessors that Garrett had personally selected, and she thought about the particular careful way he'd said you'll always have a place here regardless, like he was reassuring her of something nobody had threatened to take.

Or does it sound like what you do when you're hiding what someone is?

Her wolf pressed forward. Not toward the door. Not toward anything external.

Toward the phone in her hand.

Wren looked at the card for a long moment. She thought about all the very good reasons not to call: an alpha she'd met once, a pack fifty miles north, a Bond she hadn't asked for and didn't want and absolutely did not intend to acknowledge.

She thought about Garrett asking if her night was quiet.

She dialed.

It rang twice.

"Calloway." His voice was the same as last night, not warm, exactly, but solid. Like a wall you could lean against if you were willing to admit you needed to. "I didn't expect you to call this fast."

"Don't make it weird." Her voice came out steady. She was going to continue being proud of that for as long as it lasted. "You said Garrett's hiding what I am." She watched a moth move across the garage ceiling, slow and purposeless. "So what am I?"

A pause. Not hesitation, she had the sense Declan Mór didn't hesitate, exactly, but rather chose his moments.

"Not something I should tell you over the phone," he said. "Are you at the garage?"

She stiffened. "How do you know about the garage?"

"I know a lot about you. That's part of the problem." Another pause, shorter. "I'm twenty minutes out. Don't go anywhere."

He hung up.

Wren lowered the phone. Looked at the empty garage entrance, the square of pale morning light, the dust moving slow in the air.

"Don't go anywhere," she repeated, to no one.

Her wolf, for the first time in her memory, almost seemed to smile.