Branded Rouge

3

CHAPTER THREE

Nobody Worth Knowing

NYLA

He came back every day that week.

Same corner. Same order, except by Thursday he had started adding toast, which I noted without comment. He tipped the same amount each time. That precise, unhurried generosity. I had decided said more about a person than almost anything else. He didn’t linger in the uncomfortable way some lone customers did. By filling silence with small talk until you had to invent a reason to leave. He just sat. Read things on his phone. Looked out the window. Occupied his space without demanding anything from anyone around him.

I noticed. I did not make anything of the noticing.

That was what I told myself, anyway.

****

I hadn’t seen it coming. I never did, with the things that caught me off guard. if I could see them coming I would have braced.

Bex had spilled an entire pot of decaf on herself while retrieving it from the machine. an event so catastrophically timed that the whole diner went quiet for a beat. before she looked down at herself and said, with great dignity, “at least it wasn’t the good stuff.” The table by the window laughed. The couple by the door laughed. I was already turning away with a cloth when I heard it. A low, unhurried, real. Not the polite chuckle of someone participating in the moment. Something that sounded like it had surprised him too.

I looked over before I could stop myself.

He was already looking back. Not smiling, exactly. But the edges of it were there. the way a word is there before you’ve decided to say it.

He held my gaze for one second longer than a stranger would. And then he looked back out the window, and I turned back to the counter, and I stood there for a moment doing nothing at all.

I was annoyed at myself for the rest of the morning. Not at him. At myself, which was important. He hadn’t done anything. He had laughed at something funny. That was an ordinary human behavior and I was treating it like evidence of something. Which was the problem with living quietly for five years. "you started reading significance into things that didn’t have any." I said to myself.

I wiped the counter. I refilled the sugar caddies. I was completely fine.

****

The wolf thing I noticed on Saturday.

Not for the first time, I had felt the dominance signature from the beginning. It banked, contained heat that told me ranked wolf without telling me anything else. But on Saturday he came in with his hood down and his cap off for the first time. and I saw the scar along his right knuckles clearly, and I understood suddenly that it was a fighting scar. Old and settled, the kind that came from a shift mid-conflict. When your hands were halfway between shapes and something got through.

High ranked. Experienced. Not the kind of wolf who got his rank from a name.

I noticed, and I filed it, and I said nothing, because the wolf world was not my world anymore. I had made that decision five years ago and I kept making it every day. The same way you kept making any decision that was right but not easy. Whatever pack he belonged to. whatever history he carried in that scar, it was none of my business and I intended to keep it that way.

He caught me looking at the scar.

I expected him to pull his hand back, or to offer some deflecting explanation. the way people did when they were caught carrying something they hadn’t meant to show. He didn’t. He just looked at me looking, steady and unhurried, and then he said, “old habit.”

“Of what?”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Not walking away fast enough.”

I should have left it there. I had a table to check on and a coffee to refill and approximately eleven other things to do. Instead I said, “You seem like someone who walks away plenty fast.”

He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t categorize. Then he said, “Not from everything.”

I left. I checked on the table. I refilled the coffee. I was, I told myself firmly, completely unaffected.

****

He asked me to have coffee with him on Tuesday.

Not in the diner. He said it quietly after I had brought his check. While I was still close enough to the table that Bex couldn’t read my face from the counter. “There’s a place down the street. After your shift. If you want.” He paused. “No pressure either way.”

No pressure either way. Like he actually meant it. Like he would get up and leave the same either way and it would genuinely be fine.

I had three reasons not to. I kept them in a list, which was how I managed most things I didn’t want to examine too closely.

One: I didn’t know him.

Two: I didn’t do this.

Three: the last man I had trusted had left without a word.

Because of that, I had spent five years building something from the wreckage. and I was not in the business of handing anyone a wrecking ball and calling it hope.

I said yes anyway.

I told myself it was just coffee.

****

I was clearing table six an hour before the end of my shift when I stopped moving.

The two men in the booth behind me were talking football. I tuned it out automatically, the way I always did. football lived in the same locked room as Ryker’s name, and I kept that room shut. But one of them said something that snagged.

“can’t touch him this season, the Beta’s got him rattled. Some enforcer from Nighthollow, crossed into the league three years back. nobody saw him coming -”

I set the plates down. Quietly. Kept my back to them.

“Voss won’t admit it publicly,” the other one said. “But you watch his interviews. Every time somebody brings up the Nighthollow Beta he changes the subject. That’s not nothing.”

Ryker’s name moved through me the way cold water did. Fast, clarifying, unpleasant. I had not heard it spoken out loud in a long time. I had worked very hard to keep it that way.

A Beta enforcer from Nighthollow. Crossed into professional football three years ago. Ryker’s biggest competition.

I picked up the plates. I walked to the kitchen. I set them down and stood at the pass-through for a moment, looking at nothing.

A wolf that had Ryker rattled was a wolf with leverage. And leverage, i was beginning to understand. It was the only language Ryker had ever respected.

I wasn’t thinking about the man in my corner yet. I wasn’t making connections I didn’t have enough information to make. I was just thinking about Ryker, and Wren, and the five years between them. And the specific quality of rage that had nowhere to go because you had been too busy surviving to aim it.

I tied my apron strings tighter. I went back out.

He was still at the table, patient and still, and when I passed he looked up and I thought. 'after my shift. Coffee. One hour.'

I thought. 'I still don’t know his name.'

I thought. 'I am going to find out whose wolf he is.'