Branded Rouge

5

CHAPTER FIVE

Something Worth Staying For

NYLA

I had a rule about Wren and the diner.

She didn’t come here. Not because I was ashamed of either of them. The diner was good work and Wren was the best thing I had ever done. But because I had learned early that keeping things in their separate compartments. was how you kept things intact. Work was work. Wren was home. The two did not overlap. and that boundary had held for four years without requiring explanation.

Then Mike called at half past one on a Wednesday to say that the school had a water main issue. And had sent the kids home early. He could drop Wren at the diner because Bex was mid-shift. And he had a department meeting he couldn’t reschedule. I said it's alright because what else do you say, and that was the end of the rule.

She arrived at two fifteen. Backpack on, raincoat buttoned wrong. Radiating the specific energy of a child. A child who had been told she was going somewhere interesting and had decided to take that seriously.

She looked around the diner with the expression of a general surveying new terrain.

“It smells like breakfast,” she said.

“It always smells like breakfast.”

“I like it.” She said it with the gravity of someone issuing a formal verdict. Then she saw Bex behind the counter. She immediately abandoned the gravity in favor of waving with her whole arm.

Bex waved back with equivalent enthusiasm. They had an understanding, those two. I had never fully decoded it.

I steered Wren toward the stool at the end of the counter. The one nearest the kitchen pass-through where I could see her from anywhere in the room. I got her a hot chocolate and a plate of the shortbread Della kept for the after-school crowd. She settled in with the contentment of someone whose needs had been met, and I went back to work.

I did not look at table three.

I was aware of table three the way you were aware of a sound you were trying not to hear.

****

It lasted eleven minutes.

I know because I was watching the clock. the way I watched it in the last stretch of a long shift, willing it forward. I had just registered two twenty-six when I heard Wren’s voice from across the room. At a volume that was not her indoor voice.

“You smell like a forest.”

I closed my eyes for exactly one second. Then I turned around.

She had migrated from the counter stool. Of course she had and was now standing beside table three with her hot chocolate in both hands. She was looking up at him. With the focused interest she reserved for things she found genuinely worth investigating.

He had his hands around his coffee mug and he was looking back at her with an expression I had not seen on him before. Not quite a surprise. More like something had arrived that he hadn’t expected and he was deciding, very quickly, what to do with it.

He made the right decision.

He didn’t talk down to her. Didn’t perform. The bright, effortful cheerfulness that adults aimed at small children like a flashlight. He just looked at her levelly, the way you looked at a person, and said, “Do I?”

“Yes.” She was certain. “Like pine trees. Are you a bear?”

“No.”

She considered this. “You’re too big to not be something.”

Something moved across his face. Quickly, gone before it fully formed, but I caught the edge of it. Something that was almost undone. “I’m just a person,” he said.

Wren looked unconvinced. “What’s your name?”

“Soren.”

She tested it silently, mouth moving around the syllables. “I’m Wren. Like the bird.”

“I know wrens,” he said. “Small. Very loud.”

She straightened slightly, pleased. “Mama says I have a lot of opinions.”

“That’s useful.”

“That’s what I said.” She looked at him with the expression of someone who had found an unexpected ally. “Do you know Gerald?”

“The dog.”

Her eyes went wide. “Mama told you about Gerald?”

“She mentioned him.”

Wren turned and looked at me across the diner with an expression of absolute delight. like I had done something right for once without being asked. I pointed firmly at the counter stool.

She turned back to Soren and said “Gerald is serious.” with the solemnity of someone passing along important information. And then walked back to her stool with her hot chocolate.

I stood where I was for a moment. Behind the counter, Bex was doing nothing useful. Just watching everything with the expression of someone taking notes.

****

I didn’t say anything to him when I cleared his table. He didn’t say anything to me. But when he left, he paused on his way to the door and said, quietly, so only I could hear it: “She’s remarkable.”

Not cute. Not sweet. Remarkable.

I watched him go and stood there longer than I should have. holding an empty coffee mug and feeling something I did not have a name for and did not want one. Bex appeared at my elbow. with the supernatural timing she reserved for moments I would have preferred to be alone.

“Nyla.”

“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You were about to.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then: “He called her remarkable.”

“I heard.”

“Most people say cute.”

“Bex.”

“I’m just noting it.” She took the empty mug from my hand and went back to the counter. And I went back to work, and I did not think about the word remarkable for the rest of the afternoon.

That's a lie. I thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.

****

Wren fell asleep on the drive home, which she would deny later with great conviction. I carried her in, got her to bed without fully waking her. After that, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open and a cup of tea going cold beside it.

I had been turning the booth conversation over in my mind all week. The Nighthollow Beta. Three years in professional football. Ryker rattled every time someone brought him up.

A wolf that had Ryker rattled was in this town. The dominance signature. the ranked heat of him. the fighting scar. deliberate anonymity. It fits. It fit in the way things fit when you had been paying attention without meaning to.

I typed into the search bar: Nighthollow pack NFL Beta enforcer.

The results are loaded.

The first one was a sports profile, eight months old, with a photograph. I leaned forward.

And then Wren screamed.

Not a pain scream. I knew those. This was the particular pitched wail of a nightmare catching her mid-sleep. The kind that came and went and left her damp and confused and reaching. I was already pushing back from the table before the sound finished.

She was sitting up when I got to her, eyes open but not quite seeing, her hair stuck to her cheek.

"Hey." I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her into my side. "Hey, I've got you. Just a dream."

She made a sound against my shoulder that wasn't words yet.

I stayed. I rubbed slow circles on her back the way I had when she was small enough to fit in the crook of one arm. She settled by degrees, her breathing evening out, her grip on my sleeve loosening. By the time she was fully under again, the tension had gone out of her completely. And she looked so young in the low light that something in my chest folded over on itself.

I sat there a few minutes longer than I needed to.

When I finally came back to the kitchen, the laptop had gone to sleep. The screen was black. The tea was undrinkable.

I stood at the counter for a moment, looking at the closed dark of it.

Then I rinsed the mug, shut the laptop without opening it, and went to bed.

Whatever was in that search bar would still be there in the morning. And maybe, I thought, pulling the blanket up, staring at the ceiling. Maybe he had left the town already, whoever the rival may be.