The Last Direwolf

Expectations

Morning

"So," Tamsin said, not looking up from the supply inventory, "you're volunteering for extra work now. For the new division head. Specifically."

"It's a data project. It needs a physician's eye." Vesper kept her own eyes on the chart in front of her, which did not require nearly as much attention as she was giving it. "You make it sound scandalous."

"I make it sound accurate." Tamsin finally looked over, grinning in the way she'd been grinning since Monday, entirely too pleased with herself. "You've worked here six years and never once volunteered for anything that wasn't strictly your job. And now, the week Rhys Kade walks in, you're suddenly very invested in interdepartmental data quality."

"The timing is coincidental."

"The timing is delicious," Tamsin said, and went back to counting gauze before Vesper had to find a real answer for that.

It wasn't a lie, exactly, to let her think it was a crush. It was, if anything, easier than the truth — easier to be teased about wanting to be near a handsome division head than to explain that she'd volunteered because the alternative was spending the next several weeks wondering, from a distance, exactly how close he'd gotten to the truth without her in the room to manage it.

She thought about the six files most of the day, underneath everything else. Underneath a sprained ankle from Facilities and a very long conversation with someone in Legal about whether stress counted as a workplace injury. The reagent-drift story would hold up to a casual read. It would not hold up to anyone who actually pulled the supplier logs and noticed the shipment in question hadn't run hot at all.

She had, roughly, until Rhys got around to checking.

He passed the med bay twice that day without coming in — she felt it both times before she saw him, the specific, unmistakable weight of him somewhere nearby, like weather she'd apparently developed a personal forecast for overnight. The second time, their eyes caught through the glass for exactly as long as it took him to decide not to stop, and something about the deliberate way he kept walking told her he was carrying something he didn't want to bring into her doorway today.

She found out what, secondhand, an hour later ,his assistant stopping by to confirm a late meeting cancellation, mentioning offhand that Mr. Kade would be out from six onward for "the Ironvale dinner." Said the way people said things they assumed everyone already knew.

Vesper hadn't known. She filed the name away with the same careful, unhurried attention she gave everything that might matter later, and told herself, with only partial success, that it didn't.

Evening

His father called him at five, which meant it wasn't really a call so much as a formality attached to a decision that had been made without him.

"You'll want to leave by six," Silas said, no greeting. "Traffic on the bridge this time of year."

"I hadn't forgotten."

"I didn't say you had." A pause, the kind his father used the way other people used punctuation. "Her father's already at the restaurant. I want you there before he starts wondering why."

"I have work I'm in the middle of."

"You have a merger you're in the middle of," Silas said. "The work will still be there tomorrow. Tonight isn't optional, Rhys. I've told you that already, and I'd rather not tell you a third time."

Rhys stood at his office window for a moment after he hung up, looking down at a city he'd spent six years deliberately not living in, and thought — not for the first time, and with considerably more force than it had ever hit him before that there was a version of his life where his father had never once asked him to be anywhere, and he had no real idea anymore whether he'd have chosen that version or not.

He went. He always went.

**

The restaurant was the kind that didn't put its name on the door, a private room upstairs with a view of the river and a table set for four before anyone but staff had arrived. Isolde was already there when he came in, seated with the particular composure of someone who'd learned young exactly how to hold a room without needing to raise her voice in it — dark hair swept back, a green dress that didn't try nearly as hard as the occasion technically called for, because she'd never needed to try.

"You're on time," she said, standing to greet him. "I'm almost disappointed. I had a whole speech ready about punctuality."

"Save it. I'm sure I'll earn it eventually." He kissed her cheek, the old, easy habit of it arriving before he'd decided whether he still wanted it to. "You look well, Isolde."

"I look like a woman who flew in for a business dinner dressed for a business dinner." But she smiled, real enough, and something old and warm moved behind it — six years of history neither of them had ever properly closed the book on, back before Ironvale and Kade Global had needed each other on paper, back when it had just been the two of them and considerably less at stake. "It's good to see you, Rhys. I mean that."

"I mean it too."

They were three courses in — her father holding court about shipping regulations, Silas nodding along with the specific patience of a man closing a deal rather than having a conversation — before Isolde leaned over during a lull and said, quiet enough that it stayed between the two of them, "You're somewhere else tonight."

"I'm right here."

"You're not, though." She studied him with the same sharp, unhurried attention she'd always had, the thing he'd once found so easy to be looked at by. "I've known you a long time. I know what you look like when you're actually in a room."

He didn't have an answer for that he was willing to give her at a business dinner, in front of both their fathers, so he didn't try to build one.

"It's been a long week," he said instead, which was true, and told her almost nothing, which she clearly noticed and, for now, let go.

His phone buzzed against his leg twenty minutes later — a priority alert, Sentinel's field designation, the kind that didn't wait for dessert.

"I have to take this," he said, already standing.

Silas's jaw tightened, one fast, controlled flash of displeasure gone almost before it registered. Isolde just watched him go, the particular, familiar patience of a woman who had, he understood distantly, been losing him to exactly this kind of interruption for longer than tonight.

"Go," she said. "We'll finish this another time."

He was already in the hallway, phone to his ear, Callum's voice tight and clipped on the other end, by the time he registered that she'd said we'll finish this like she meant something considerably larger than dinner.