Chapter 14 — Circling
1153 Words
Marlowe
Something had gone wrong with King overnight, and by breakfast the whole den was tiptoeing around him like the floor might give out.
He snapped at Cricket for being two minutes late to roll call. He snapped at a supplier on the phone loud enough that half the mess hall went quiet trying not to look like they were listening. He snapped at Bear, of all people, over something so minor I didn't even catch what it was, and Bear just took it, jaw tight, the particular patience of a man who'd clearly seen this mood before and knew better than to poke it.
He didn't snap at me at all.
If anything, he went the opposite direction — quieter around me than usual, careful in a way that felt almost deliberate, like he was rationing something out and I was the one exception to whatever had put him in this mood in the first place.
"He's like this sometimes," Nova said, sliding into the seat across from me with a plate stacked higher than seemed physically reasonable. "Not often. But sometimes. Bear says it happens after the moon, if the run gets to him a certain way."
"Gets to him how?"
"No idea. Nobody asks. You don't poke a bear that's already annoyed, you just stay out of his way till he sorts it out himself." She shoveled in a forkful of eggs, entirely unbothered. "Though I gotta say, he's being suspiciously nice to you through all of it. Cricket's already got a theory."
"I don't want to hear Cricket's theory."
"Cricket's theory is that King's finally found something he actually likes more than being terrifying." She grinned around her fork. "I told him he's an i***t. But also I didn't tell him he's wrong."
I didn't have a good response to that, so I ate my breakfast and tried very hard not to think too closely about the exact, careful way King's eyes had followed me across the mess hall that morning — present, watchful, entirely too focused for a man supposedly furious at everyone else in the building.
---
He found me in the garage an hour later, which wouldn't have been unusual except for the transparent flimsiness of his excuse.
"Wrench around?"
"Ran into town for parts." I didn't look up from the brake line I was bleeding, half a bike disassembled around me. "You need something?"
"Came to check the inventory." He picked up a torque wrench off the bench, turned it over once in his hands like he'd never seen one before in his life, and set it back down in entirely the wrong spot. "Club spends enough on this garage. Should know what we're getting for it."
"You've never once checked inventory in the four days I've been in here."
"First time for everything."
I glanced up at that, caught the particular stillness in his face that meant he knew exactly how thin the excuse was and had decided to deploy it anyway, daring me to call it out properly. I didn't. I went back to the brake line instead, and a moment later felt him settle onto the stool across from me, silent, watching, the same way he had that very first morning.
"You want to actually help," I said, after a minute of him doing nothing but existing at me, "or just supervise from a stool like some kind of extremely expensive lamp?"
Something that wasn't quite a laugh moved through him. He reached over without a word and handed me the exact tool I'd been about to ask for, before I'd finished asking, like he'd been tracking the whole job three steps ahead of me the entire time.
Neither of us said anything about it. I took the tool. He watched me use it. And whatever had put the rest of the den on eggshells that morning didn't touch this one small corner of the garage at all — like he'd left it at the door on purpose, the same way you'd wipe your boots before walking into somewhere that mattered.
---
### Alaric
Rook had been insufferable since the moment I woke up, which was, admittedly, becoming the general condition of my life these days, but this particular morning he'd outdone himself.
*[You dreamed about him again,]* he informed me, unhelpful and entirely too pleased about it, the second my eyes opened.
*I dream about a lot of things.*
*[Not like that, you don't.]*
I didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because he wasn't wrong, and I took the not-having-an-answer out on everyone in the den except the one person I actually wanted to be short with, which was, in its own way, exactly the problem.
*[You're being unfair to Bear,]* Rook pointed out, somewhere around the third time I'd bitten someone's head off that morning. *[He didn't do anything.]*
*I know.*
*[So apologize.]*
*I don't apologize.*
*[You should start. Bad habit, otherwise. Man who can't say sorry to his own VP's going to have a hard time saying it to the one person who's actually going to need to hear it eventually.]*
I ignored that, mostly because there wasn't a version of ignoring it that didn't also mean agreeing with it, and I found myself in the garage an hour later with an excuse so transparent I half expected Finch to laugh me straight back out the door.
He didn't. He handed me exactly the kind of quiet, unimpressed skepticism I probably deserved, and let me sit there anyway.
*[There,]* Rook said, settling, satisfied, the whole rest of the morning's foul mood draining out of me the second I picked up that tool and handed it over before he'd even asked for it. *[That's better. That's what I've been telling you all morning.]*
*You've been telling me to apologize to Bear.*
*[Same thing. You just needed to see him first to remember how to be a person again.]*
I watched Finch work — steady hands, sharp focus, that same stillness Silas used to carry into every room he walked into — and felt something in my chest settle for the first time all day, quiet and certain in a way that had nothing to do with the club, the moon, or anything else that had put me in such a foul temper that morning.
*[You should tell him,]* Rook said, quieter now, more serious than his usual running commentary.
*Tell him what.*
*[Whatever this is. Before somebody else figures it out first and you lose the chance to say it your own way.]*
I didn't answer that either. I just kept watching him work, the garage quiet around us, and let the silence do the talking Rook wanted me to do instead — knowing, even as I did it, that he was right, and that the longer I waited, the more expensive that silence was going to get.
- Writer
