CHOSEN FATE

CHAPTER THREE: DECLAN

He appeared on a Tuesday.

I was eating lunch on the low wall outside the admin building, the one that faced the dry fountain, because it was a clean autumn day and eating at my desk for five days straight had started to feel like a personal defeat.

I had my notebook and my sandwich and I was going over the filing system restructure proposal I had been working on, the one I intended to present to senior admin as soon as I found the right moment, when someone sat down on the wall beside me.

I looked up.

He was tall, brown-skinned, with an easy smile that arrived before he introduced himself, like his face had decided to be friendly before the rest of him had quite caught up.

"You look like you're winning an argument," he said.

"With myself," I said. "I usually do."

He laughed. "Declan Frey. I'm starting in council relations Monday. My father took the new senior council position."

"Nova Chase," I said. "Admin filing."

"You're the one who sorted the Henderson backlog in four days," he said.

I looked at him. "You know about that?"

"My father told me the admin wing had someone sharp in it and I should introduce myself before the senior clerks tried to take credit for everything." His expression was open and a little amused. "He was right, I think."

"He was right," I said.

He smiled again.

We shared the wall for twenty minutes, and he asked good questions about the filing system and actually listened to the answers, and when lunch was over he said he would see me around and walked back into the building.

I sat on the wall for another minute.

Then I went back to my desk.

Bev was at her partition when I came in. She looked up.

"Was that Declan Frey?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"He's handsome," she said.

"I noticed," I said.

She looked pleased with herself.

I sat down and went back to the restructure proposal and told myself it was not relevant that I had noticed. I was not available for noticing. I was building my life. Noticing was a distraction.

By Thursday, Declan and I had eaten lunch on the wall three more times.

He was funny without trying to be. He remembered things I said in passing and referred back to them. He brought his own lunch and also, on Thursday, brought a second cup of coffee from the campus kitchen with the right amount of sugar in it because he had paid attention on Tuesday to how I took it.

On Friday he said, "Would you want to come to the east-side market with me Saturday? I'm trying to learn the area and I work better with a local guide."

I looked at him.

He looked back, easy and patient, giving me full space to say no.

"Sure," I said.

He smiled. "Good."

I walked home Friday with something light sitting where the weight usually was, and I was careful with it because I knew what it was and I knew it had nothing to do with bonds or mates or silver eyes in a dark corridor.

It was just two people. Just ordinary kindness. Just someone choosing to show up and be warm.

It felt like water on cracked earth.

I was not going to be reckless with it.

But I was not going to turn it away either.

Saturday at the east-side market was easy in the way that some mornings are easy when you have been expecting difficulty. Declan bought fruit and asked too many questions of the vendor and made me laugh three times before we had been there fifteen minutes. I showed him the good bread stall and the woman who sold the best honey in Greystone and the alley behind the cloth section where there was a coffee cart that nobody outside the southern housing district knew about.

We sat with our coffees in the thin autumn sun and talked about everything and nothing.

"Why filing?" he asked.

"Because I needed a job at sixteen and it turned out I was good at organizing other people's chaos," I said. "And because the pack administration system is genuinely terrible and someone should fix it and I intend to be that person eventually."

"What's the plan?"

"I'm building a restructure proposal," I said. "I've been working on it for six months. It would cut document retrieval time by forty percent and eliminate three of the most common error categories."

He looked at me with an expression that was not quite impressed and was actually better than impressed. Like he had expected a small answer and gotten a real one and was pleased about it.

"Show me," he said.

I pulled out the notebook.

He leaned over and read it. Asked two sharp questions. Made one suggestion that was actually good.

I noted the suggestion.

He smiled.

"Nova Chase," he said. "You are not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone quieter," he said. "Given how little noise you make about how much you're actually doing."

I looked at him.

He looked back.

There was something in his expression that was clear and uncomplicated and present in a way that required no interpretation.

I was about to say something when the feeling in my chest shifted.

The pilot light.

I looked up.

Axel Grey was standing at the entrance of the east-side market, thirty meters away, with two of his senior council members and Cassidy Vale. They had stopped to speak to a fruit vendor. He was not looking in my direction.

But he was twenty seconds from looking in my direction. I knew it the way you know weather.

I looked back at Declan.

His face had followed mine. He had seen where I looked. He was reading something in my expression.

He was smart enough not to ask about it.

"Good coffee," he said instead.

"Best in Greystone," I said.

I picked up my cup and held the warmth of it.

The pilot light in my chest pulsed once, steady and complicated.

I chose, for right now, to focus on the coffee and the man beside me who had brought me here and was asking nothing more than my company.

Twenty seconds later I heard Axel's voice at the bread stall.

I did not turn around.