Secretly Married to the Lycan Tycoon

Dock 7, Cotton and Cloves

The crane shudders and begins to move, a hooked black moon swinging over SERENE stenciled on steel.

Noah eases the SUV into shadow behind a stack of pallets. The river breathes cold; the wind flips the smells—salt, oil, rust—and slides a thin line of clove through them like a signature.

“Two on the ground, one on the crane,” Noah murmurs. “Fourth in the blind.”

“Police?” Arden asks.

“Two blocks out,” Ashford says into his mic. “Harbor unit is staging for hazmat entry under Alvarez’s order. We have five minutes of quiet if we don’t set off pride.”

“Copy,” Noah says. “Rhea?”

A small drone buzzes to the roof of the east crane, settling like a patient moth. eyes on hook & override panel, she texts. they’re primed to dunk that box if it gets warm. i can stall the console thirty seconds, tops.

“Make those thirty count,” Arden says.

I check the med bag: oxygen, glucometer, IV kits, three masks I bribed out of a hospital supply tech with cookies and pity. I tie a wet cloth over my face; hand the others cloths dipped from a bottle in my bag.

“Wolfsbane trace in the smoke,” I say. “These help.”

Arden takes his without fuss. Noah does the same. Consent is a rule we never have to name.

The crane groans. The container kisses the dock and stops. The two men on the ground move like they know the night; the one on the crane leans over his console like he trusts his switch more than his friends. From the blind spot, a fourth steps out—tall, gloved, head bare. He lifts his face into the wind and inhales as if the night might compliment him.

clove boy, Rhea texts. seen him at Greyroot cam earlier. same gait.

“On your call,” Noah says.

“Wait,” Arden and I say, at the same time, same tone.

The tall man—clove—walks to the container, knocks twice like it’s a joke only the dark would tell back. The smaller man at the lock pops the seal, cautious. When the doors yaw open, my wrist sings. A hair-thin shimmer threads the threshold at ankle height—wire—and I nearly say no out loud, but Noah has already seen it. He raises two fingers. Stop. The small man glances down, freezes. Even he isn’t fool enough to trip that.

“Smart boys,” Clove says, voice the lazy confidence of someone who has never paid retail for consequences. “On the dolly. Don’t breathe too deep.”

Inside, shadows move. Small. Not boxes.

“Now,” I whisper.

Noah flows from shadow and is on the nearest man before the word finishes, silent and efficient, hand to wrist to the ground to the zip tie. Arden is not far behind, not showy—he cuts the distance with a single unhurried decision and relieves the second man of his weapon like he’s correcting an accounting error. They do not shift. The Veil is a rule too.

The crane operator sees motion and hits a switch. The hook rises; the cable jerks; the container door shivers as if it would like to slam on whatever is inside.

stalling, Rhea pings. thirty. 29. 28…

Clove steps back, hands out, palms empty in the universal shape of who, me? “Careful,” he calls, almost warm. “Hazardous material.”

“Hands where I can see them,” Noah says.

Clove smiles at me. “Doctor.”

I know the voice now. The Greyroot employee—Milo—described him as tall and gloved and calm while the back door whooshed into fire. The clove had been the wrong note in a room made to teach right ones.

“Stay back,” Arden says, not to me this time, to Clove, and makes it sound like a good offer.

“Tempting,” Clove says, and lifts something in his right hand—small, oblong, thumb-ready. A remote. “But I’d hate to waste a teachable moment.”

“Rhea,” I say.

jammed console, not the remote, she replies. he’s got a direct to the hook’s emergency release. i can’t… 14. 13.

“Lose the toy,” Noah says, and takes a step.

Clove’s thumb twitches.

“Don’t,” Arden says, and there’s iron in it that isn’t human-only.

Clove’s gaze flicks to Arden, to the way his body takes up space, not big but present, to the ring on his hand. He doesn’t understand what matters about that. “Mr. Walcott,” he says. “Friends in high places. Toys that file themselves. You should stay out of gardens that aren’t yours.”

“Dock 7 is public,” Ashford says, stepping out with a notary and a harbor officer who looks offended by this entire situation. “And you’re under a hazmat hold. Captain Ruiz will take your mea culpa.”

Clove laughs, a small amused sound, and clicks the remote.

The crane cable doesn’t drop the container. The hook judders, whines, stops.

you are welcome, Rhea texts, the bubble shaped like outrage and triumph.

Clove watches the hook not obey him and smiles wider. “Someone smart hid by the river,” he says. “We should change our syllabus.”

He tosses the remote into the dark. Noah doesn’t chase it. He watches Clove’s hands, and so do I, and so does Arden, because men like Clove always keep one more choice in their palm.

“Police,” Captain Ruiz snaps, stepping in with blue jackets stacking neatly behind her. “This is a hazardous scene. Drop everything and lie down. Now.”

Clove looks past her to me. “Doctor,” he says conversationally, “what do you fix when the break is the moon itself?”

I don’t answer him. I answer the container.

Because inside, under the wire, someone whimpers—a child’s sound that never learned how to lie.

“Wire,” I say, and move.

“Lynn,” Arden says, but it isn’t a stop. It’s a go careful.

I kneel, hand hovering over the thread. The hum is higher than the one at the Stone Court, tuned to panic, designed to snag anything that dares to be more than human near it. I don’t pull. I invite.

Pain bites, clean, bright. The scar on my wrist warms as if the moon breathed on me. The wire loosens like it remembers it used to be ore, not shame. It pools in my hand, light as spilled hair.

The door opens the rest of the way.

Five shapes, small, huddled—two fully human, two mid-shift, one curled around a knee trying not to become anything in public. The air inside the container is bitter, the kind of breath that trains lungs to stop hoping.

“I’m Lynn,” I say, voice low. “I fix broken things.”

They don’t move. Fair. I don’t ask again. I go to the closest, a girl with wolf eyes blinking in a human face, and press a mask gently to her mouth. She flinches, then inhales because her body wants to live and I’m offering it a way.

“Slow,” I say. “In. Out.”

A boy’s wrist glints. Wire. Fine as a thought, biting just enough to make panic ring. My hand shakes; I steady it. Skin to wire, hum to hum, unwind. A tremor runs up my arm; I catch it with my jaw. Arden’s weight arrives in my periphery—not a touch, a nearness I can lean toward if I want to. I don’t, yet. The wire sighs into my palm and stops being a reason to scream.

Outside, Clove decides on his next lesson. He steps sideways into the blind gap as if a wall opened for him and vanishes toward the river.

Noah pivots. “East crane, boat,” he says into his mic.

already on it, Rhea replies. pushing his face to docks cam with the words “wanted for questioning, pls do not tackle without gloves”

“Police have the pier,” Ashford adds. “Boat patrol in two. Ruiz, your call.”

“Go,” Captain Ruiz tells her people. “Don’t fall in.”

I don’t watch Clove go. I am repeatedly invited to choose who gets my eyes and refuse everyone but the children. The older boy—maybe twelve—tries to bristle and fails. He has that in-between look, bones not sure if they’re allowed to grow in front of strangers.

“Don’t shift,” I warn, gentle. “Not in this air. You keep your shape and I’ll keep the world off your throat.”

He tries to glare; the glare collapses into a sob. I put a mask on him and pretend to be made of granite.

Oxygen. Pulse. Pupils. Each breath that doesn’t hurt is a door opening.

Behind me, the night coughs up a bang—not close, not friendly. Noah’s curse is a whisper. Clove just bought himself a hole in his boat or put one in someone else’s. The harbor will sort it. I can’t afford to.

“Last one,” I say, easing a tiny hand out of a too-big sleeve. A thin silver filament shines, half-cut into skin. Not a wire snare—thread—stitched through like someone thought they were fixing a hem, not a person.

The city tilts. My throat fills with metal.

“I’m going to take this out,” I tell the child, and my voice says we are not what they tried to make us.

It burns when I touch it. The hum is wrong. The crescents etched into the filament are backward, a mockery of the mark I carry. The wire loosens anyway, not because I pull, but because it hears something in me and chooses to let go.

When it lifts, the child’s breath deepens. The scar on my wrist throbs, enough. I swallow the urge to lean sideways into the heat that waits beside me and put the filament down where Ashford’s camera can see it.

“Chain-of-custody,” Ashford murmurs, steady and grateful, and the notary says the date and the time like a prayer.

Sirens multiply. Cameras bloom at the perimeter. Veronica arrives like she never left, smooth as silver in a coat that cost an ambulance.

“Tragic,” she says prettily to Captain Ruiz’s back. “The Hale Foundation would like to pledge urgent support to these poor children. We brought blankets.” She gestures to a runner struggling under the weight of luxurious, impractical cashmere.

“Cotton,” I say without turning around. “It washes.”

Veronica’s smile doesn’t alter. “We do both,” she says. “Optics is caring.”

“Care is caring,” Arden says, and the Harbor unit’s body language shifts almost imperceptibly toward us, toward the voice that didn’t make their lives harder tonight.

Clay appears at the edge of the light like guilt in a nice shirt. “Lynn—”

“No,” I say, without heat. “If you have armory logs, give them to Ashford. If you have courage, give it to someone who can’t borrow mine.”

He nods, small and true, and peels back into a crowd that doesn’t know his story and will forgive him anyway if he writes them a check.

Ruiz taps my shoulder. “Ambulance,” she says. “Now.”

We transfer one, two, three small bodies to gurneys. The older boy refuses to cry in public and cries anyway; I pretend not to see and give him the mask like a shield.

When the last gurney rolls, my hands decide to tremble with or without my permission. The cost is due; I pay.

“Sit,” Arden says, near my ear, not an order. An offer. A chair appears out of nowhere (Noah, efficient as weather). Someone—Ashford?—produces a glucose gel. It tastes like a manufacturer’s idea of fruit and a promise I didn’t expect to keep.

“Fine?” Arden asks quietly.

“Fine adjacent,” I answer, and his mouth does that almost-curve that isn’t for cameras.

Noah returns from the pier, rain in his hair, a small victorious absence in his eyes. “Boat got clever,” he says. “We tagged the hull, not the man. Rhea has his face, gait, height. You’ll get a file in twenty. He dropped this.”

He holds out a coin wrapped in a handkerchief. It’s heavy, old silver, the size of a watch face, etched with a crescent hallmark and a string of numbers around the rim.

Ashford brings it under light. “Stone Court armory token,” he says, thoughtful and angry at the same time. “Issued to unlock ceremonial crates. Serial… CM-—” He stops. Looks at me. “This date.”

The numbers around the edge are the night I was marked.

Ice slides into my stomach and sits there like a choice I didn’t get to make.

“That coin wants a chain,” I say, because Ashford collects receipts, not pain, and because my bones are too tired for poetry.

“We’ll find it,” he says.

Celes arrives without sound and with more law than a place should be able to hold. He stops inches from Captain Ruiz’s jurisdiction and does not step over it. I count that as respect or strategy; with him the shapes are the same.

“Neighbors,” he says. “Efficient.”

“Busy,” I say.

His gaze dips—wrist, ring, the place the air remembered a spark at dusk. “The Council will require a written account.”

“You’ll get two,” Ashford says. “One for human law, one for the veil. Same facts.”

Veronica hovers, waiting for a camera angle. Clay waits for a chance to be useful. The harbor crews coil hose. A medic raises a hand from inside the ambulance to say stable in a language I was born to answer.

The older boy on the last gurney grabs my wrist as they lift him. His fingers are cold; his eyes are too old.

“They said your name,” he whispers, a confession or a curse. “They wrote it on the wire. The wrong way. So you’d come.”

My skin goes hot and then very cold. “Who?”

He swallows. “The man who smells like… cloves.”

The gate on the ambulance swings shut. The doors thump. The siren lifts the night by its roots and drives away with what matters.

We stand in the wind’s leftover sentences. Rain tick-ticks off the container’s lip. The SERENE stencil looks stupid now—an adjective that never earned itself.

“Cotton,” I say again, because it’s either that or scream.

Arden’s mouth tugs. “Blankets beat headlines,” he says, our private theology in four words.

Noah looks at the dark water where a clever man vanished. “We’ll get him,” he says.

“Of course you will,” comes a new voice, soft as an apology sharpened into a knife.

We all turn.

A woman steps under the dock light with a walk I recognize from courtrooms and funerals—unhurried, like the world will wait for her diction. Gray coat. No umbrella. Face you’d forget in a crowd by design. She holds up an ID for Captain Ruiz; the captain frowns because the ID is real and she dislikes that fact.

“City Oversight,” the woman says. “Interdepartmental liaison to… keep our neighbors neighborly.”

Her gaze touches my wrist and Arden’s ring and moves on before it can be counted.

“Names are receipts,” she says. “You’ll have mine in the morning.”

She looks at the SERENE stencil, then at Veronica, then at Celes. So many neighbors. So many doors we didn’t know we had.

“Tonight,” she says, “you all did enough.”

She leaves as if the scene agreed with her beforehand.

Rhea’s drone buzzes in like a gossip and lands in Noah’s palm. file sent, she writes. clove-boy tagged “Marius Vale” in a foundation gala album from last year. guess whose table.

I don’t have to ask. The city never gets tired of its own punchlines.

“Take me to Noor Street,” I say. “I want to watch the heat run.”

Arden nods. “And then home,” he says. “A chair. Sleep. Ten minutes where no one names you.”

“Five,” I bargain.

“Astonishing,” he says. “A compromise.”

We walk away from SERENE, from clove and smoke and coins that remember nights I’d rather not. Behind us, Celes speaks in a voice that sounds like a ledger closing. Veronica arranges her cashmere to look like compassion. Clay hands Ashford a flash drive that might weigh more than his apology.

The wind shifts. The crane creaks. The river keeps the secrets it is paid to keep.

My wrist warms once, brief and bright, as if the moon tapped a knuckle against my bones and said seen.

I don’t look up. I look forward.