Chapter 3 Friction

Twenty minutes was not enough time to prepare.

Wren knew this the moment she hung up, which was why she spent the first five of those twenty minutes doing something useful, finishing the oil change on the F-150, and the next ten doing something less useful, which was standing at the garage sink scrubbing grease off her hands and trying to have a serious conversation with her own reflection about what she was and was not going to feel when a six-foot-something alpha from Blackridge Pack walked back into her life.

Her reflection was unhelpful.

She heard his truck before she saw it. Low engine, well-maintained, the kind of vehicle that didn't announce itself any more than its driver did. He pulled into the gravel lot and cut the engine and the quiet that followed was the specific quality of quiet that happened when something large and patient decided to wait.

Then the door opened, and he stepped into the garage, and Wren's wolf came fully, embarrassingly awake.

She turned around. Leaned against the workbench with her arms crossed, because she needed something to do with her hands and crossing her arms was at least better than the alternatives.

Declan looked different in daylight. Not softer, nothing about him suggested soft, but more present, more specific. Last night had been bar lighting and eleven forty-six and the mutual unreality of strangers. Now it was nine in the morning and her garage and the particular unflattering fluorescence of the overhead strip lights, which treated everyone equally badly, and he still looked like that. Which felt mildly offensive.

He was wearing a dark jacket over a grey shirt and he hadn't shaved since last night and she was absolutely not cataloguing any of this.

"Calloway," he said.

"Mór." She'd decided on the drive from the truck to the sink that she wasn't going to give him anything for free. Titles included. "You said twenty minutes. It's been eighteen."

"I drive fast." He looked around the garage, taking it in the way he'd taken in the bar, the same methodical sweep that missed nothing, and then he looked back at her with those grey-shale eyes and she had the uncomfortable sensation of being read. Not assessed, the way pack assessors assessed. Something more careful than that. "You spoke to Cole this morning."

Not a question.

"He came by," she said. "Routine check-in."

"It wasn't routine."

"No." She held his gaze. "It wasn't."

He moved further into the garage, which she hadn't invited him to do, and every step closer sharpened the awareness in her chest from something background into something she had to actively manage. 

The Pull. 

She'd read about it, pack libraries had old texts, most of them romantic to the point of uselessness, but reading about something and standing ten feet from the source of it were two entirely different experiences. It wasn't attraction, she kept telling herself. It was biology. Irritating, unwanted, deeply inconvenient biology.

He stopped beside the F-150 and looked at her over the hood.

"You're a female alpha," he said.

The garage went very quiet.

"That's not possible," Wren said.

"It's rare. It's not impossible."

"I've been assessed…"

"Twice. By assessors Garrett Cole selected, scheduled, and was present for." Something moved in his jaw. Not quite anger. "Do you know what suppression looks like, from the outside? In an assessment?"

She didn't answer, because she could already see where this was going and she needed a second to get her feet under her before it arrived.

"Low-rank," Declan said. "Ambiguous signature. Omega-adjacent." He said it the way you said something you'd known for a long time and found steadily less acceptable. "All it takes is the right compound in the right dosage, administered consistently from early adolescence. It doesn't eliminate the alpha signature. It just makes it too quiet to read." He paused. "Unless you know what you're looking for."

Wren became aware that she was gripping the edge of the workbench behind her.

"He's been drugging me."

"Most likely in your pack's communal spaces. Water, food, it doesn't take much if it's consistent." Declan's voice was level, deliberate, the voice of someone delivering information he knew was going to land like a brick and had decided the only kindness was to be direct. "It's called a binding compound. Old practice. Pre-Accord. The kind of thing that should require a regional tribunal to authorize."

"Should," she repeated.

"Should."

She turned around. Faced the pegboard with its rows of hanging tools, because she needed to not look at him for a moment, needed to put her eyes somewhere neutral while her brain caught up with her body, which was doing something complicated and loud involving her lungs and the back of her throat.

Twenty-four years. Her whole life in this town, this pack, this garage. Her whole life in which she had been lesser, in which she had been looked through and passed over and patted on the shoulder and told she had a place regardless, and she had been grateful for it…

Her wolf surged.

Not a metaphor. Not a feeling. A physical reality, a sudden heat in her blood and a pressure beneath her skin that she had never once in her life been unable to manage, and she couldn't manage it now, the suppression that had made it easy her whole life was twenty-four hours into wearing off and this particular piece of information was apparently what it took to breach the dam, because her hands were changing.

She looked down. Claws. Short, involuntary, and she could feel it spreading up her forearms, the shift trying to climb.

"Okay," she said, out loud, to herself. "Okay, I need you to…"

"I know." He was already moving. She heard him come around the truck but she didn't look up, too focused on the heat crawling up her arms, the sound of the fluorescent light suddenly oppressively loud, every smell in the garage amplified to something almost painful, oil and metal and sawdust and him.

Especially him.

He stopped directly in front of her. Close. Closer than he'd been last night, closer than was strictly necessary, and every piece of her that was awake and running hot moved toward him on pure instinct before she caught it.

"Look at me," he said.

"I'm managing it…"

"Wren." Not an order. Not quite. It was the tone of someone who could have made it an order and chose not to. "Look at me."

She looked up.

He was right there. Close enough that she could see the specific grey of his eyes wasn't uniform, darker at the edges, lighter toward the center, like weather. Close enough that the warmth coming off him was a physical thing. His jaw was tight in the way of someone who was making a choice he found difficult, and one hand came up slow and deliberate and settled against the side of her face, his thumb just below her cheekbone, and the mark on her wrist went off like a flare gun.

She sucked in a breath.

He felt it too. She watched it move through him, the slight widening of those grey eyes, the almost imperceptible pause, and then he controlled it, visibly, the way she imagined he controlled everything, by deciding to.

"Breathe," he said. Low. Close. "Match me."

She breathed. In when he did, out when he did, three times, and the heat in her arms receded by degrees, the claws pulling back, the shift retreating to wherever it lived when she wasn't paying attention to it. She became aware, in the ringing quiet afterward, that his hand was still against her face and neither of them had moved.

His thumb hadn't moved.

The mark on her wrist was pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

"Better?" he said.

"Yes." Her voice came out lower than she intended. She took a half-step back and he let his hand fall, and the absence of it was… notable. She filed that under things she was not examining right now. "That's going to keep happening, isn't it. The more the suppression wears off."

"Yes."

"Great." She exhaled. Turned to look at the middle distance in a way that was absolutely not avoiding his eyes. "So what am I supposed to do about it? I can't exactly move into the woods."

"No." He was quiet for a moment. "You need to leave Harlow."

She turned back. "Excuse me."

"Cole knows Blackridge was here last night. He came this morning to assess the damage. It won't take him long to work out that you've made contact." His voice was even, but his eyes were not entirely even. There was something underneath them she didn't have the vocabulary for yet. "When a pack alpha decides to suppress a female alpha in his own pack, Wren, it's not because he has her best interests in mind. It's because he wants what she represents."

"Which is?"

"Power. Legitimacy. A female alpha bonded to a pack alpha doubles the strength of every wolf in that pack." He held her gaze. "He's been waiting for you to present. Waiting until he could control the circumstances."

The workbench was solid at her back. She was grateful for that.

"And you?" she said quietly. "What are you waiting for?"

It was the most direct thing she'd said to him. She watched him hear it, the slight shift in his expression, not quite a flinch, the careful way he chose his next words.

"That's a longer conversation," he said.

"I have time."

"Not as much as you think." He reached into his jacket and this time what he set on her workbench wasn't a card. It was a key. Old-fashioned, heavy. "Cabin on the north ridge of Blackridge territory. It's neutral ground. I'm not asking you to come into my pack. I'm asking you to get out of his." He stepped back, and the distance helped, and she resented that it helped. "Tonight. Before he puts a sentinel on you."

Wren looked at the key. She looked at him.

"You know a lot about me," she said. Same as last night. Testing.

"Yes."

"And the Bond." She watched him carefully. "You felt that. Just now."

Something moved in his face that he almost, almost, didn't catch in time. 

"Yes."

"And you're still keeping me at arm's length."

"I'm trying to." The honesty of it landed differently than she expected. Raw-edged, unpolished, nothing like the controlled delivery of everything else he'd said. He looked at her for one long moment that had too many things in it, and then he looked at the key on the workbench. "That's what I'm waiting for. To see if you'll let me."

He walked out.

His truck started, gravel shifted under the tires, and then he was gone, and Wren was standing in her garage with a key in her hand and the ghost of his thumb against her cheekbone and an answer she hadn't given yet sitting in her chest like a lit match.

Her wolf had an opinion about that.

She was choosing not to hear it.