Chapter 5

Caden's POV

The man had been outside her building for six hours and she had not seen him and I had.

He was good at it. Changed positions every forty minutes, used the café across the street as cover when he needed it, never looked directly at her window. I would have missed him myself if I had not been a wolf with a wolf's nose and a wolf's patience and the specific knowledge of what a syndicate spotter smelled like, which was cigarettes and a particular cheap cologne that I had catalogued on three separate operations over the past two years.

I knew who sent him. I knew what came after spotters.

I had told Marcus that morning in a three-line message sent from Nora's bathroom while she was making coffee. Marcus had said: two days. After that we move. I had said I understood.

I had been lying at the foot of her bed watching the door ever since.

She had a bad night.

She did not tell me it was bad. She did not need to. I heard her breathing change at two in the morning, the shift from sleep to something else, and then she was sitting up in the dark and her hands were in her hair and she was doing the breathing thing, in through the nose, out slow, the thing she did when the nightmares came and she was trying to put herself back together.

I moved up the bed without being asked and pressed against her side.

She put her hand on my back and held on.

We sat like that for a while. The room was dark and the street outside was quiet and the spotter had gone home for the night, I had tracked him leaving at one, but I was not going to sleep regardless. I did not sleep much in this apartment. Too aware. Too many things to track. Too much of her in every part of the space.

After a while she started talking.

She said: I keep dreaming about the pier. She said it quietly, to the dark, the way she said the true things, not performing them for anyone, just releasing them because holding everything was too heavy.

She said: in the dream I do not run fast enough. In the dream they see me.

I stayed very still.

She said: the stupid thing is I know it is not real. I know I ran fast enough. I know they did not see me. My brain knows that. My brain is just not very good at telling the rest of me.

She leaned her head against the top of mine.

She said: you are a very good listener for a dog.

There were about a hundred things I wanted to say.

I said none of them.

She fell back asleep eventually, slow and gradual, her breathing evening out under my paw. I lay there and thought about Marcus and the forty-eight hours and the spotter who would be back tomorrow morning and the move that was coming and what I was going to have to do before it reached her door.

I thought about what it had cost her to say that. The pier dream. The brain knowing and the body not catching up. The careful way she lived inside all of that every day and still made her coffee and went to the café and talked to a dog at two in the morning because talking was better than not.

My wolf was very certain about what she was to me.

I was very certain about what the mission required.

Those two things were going to keep colliding and I was going to have to keep choosing and I was already tired of the choosing and it had only been two days.

At five in the morning I slipped out while she slept and shifted in the alley behind the building and handled the problem I had been watching for six hours.

It took four minutes.

I was back at the foot of her bed before six.

She woke up at seven and made coffee and gave me a piece of toast and said good morning Ghost like it was the most normal thing in the world and I sat in her kitchen and ate the toast and thought: she has no idea. She does not know about the pier spotter. She does not know about the forty-eight hours. She does not know what I am or what I did last night or how close the thing she is running from actually is.

She sat down across from me with her coffee and looked at me for a moment.

She said: do you ever feel like something is about to change and you cannot tell if it is going to be good or bad. Just that it is definitely going to be something.

I looked at her.

She said: yeah. Me too.

She drank her coffee.

Across the street, through the window, a new car parked where the old one had been.

Different car. Same smell.

They had sent a replacement.