Wolf at the Wedding

Too Loud

The rehearsal dinner venue is a converted barn forty minutes outside town, all exposed beams and string lights, and Tyler walks me through it with the enthusiasm of a man who has clearly rehearsed this walkthrough in his head more than once.

"Cocktail hour here," he says, gesturing at the entryway like a game show host, "dinner through those doors, and then they clear the tables for dancing later. I already talked to the guy about the lighting — warmer bulbs, not the fluorescent stuff they had in here when we toured it in March."

"You remembered the lighting."

"I remember everything about this place. I've been picturing our wedding in here since March." He says it so easily, so without irony, that something in my chest twists with an ache that has nothing to do with wolves or dreams or any of the things I can't explain. He's good. He's steady. He remembers the lighting because he wants the day to be perfect for me, and I am standing here half-listening because my body has apparently decided this is the week to fall apart in increments too small to explain to anyone.

"It's going to be beautiful," I say, and mean it, and hate a little bit that meaning it doesn't quiet the low hum underneath my skin that's been there since the dress shop.

He takes my hand and threads our fingers together as we walk toward the dinner room, and it's a good hand, a familiar hand, four years of familiarity in the calluses along his palm from the woodworking he does on weekends. It should feel like coming home. Instead I'm aware — too aware — of the exact temperature of his skin against mine, the exact rhythm of his pulse where our wrists brush, and none of it is unpleasant, it's just loud, the way everything has started to feel loud lately, like the volume on my own senses got turned up two clicks and nobody handed me the remote to turn it back down.

"You okay?" Tyler asks, catching something in my face.

"Headache," I lie. "Probably the lighting discussion. Too many decisions this week."

"We can table the rest. Seriously, El, if this is too much—"

"It's fine. I want to do this." And I do. That's the part that keeps snagging in my throat like a splinter — I want this, I want him, I want the ordinary Tuesday-night version of a life that doesn't involve dreams about forests or a pulse that spikes every time a certain truck pulls into a certain parking lot. Wanting two things that don't fit together is apparently just what my life is now.

We finish the walkthrough. The barn smells like cut wood and old hay and, faintly, something underneath that I can't place — animal, maybe, though the venue coordinator swears nothing's denned in the rafters since they redid the roof. I don't mention that I can smell it at all. I don't mention that I could probably tell her exactly which corner it's coming from if she asked.

Roan's scent-trail report sits on my phone like a stone in my pocket the whole drive to the venue that afternoon — Tyler asked me to come look at parking logistics, groomsman logistics, the kind of task he hands me because I'm steady and he trusts me and has absolutely no idea what that trust is actually protecting him from.

I do the walkthrough with him an hour after Elena and Tyler leave. I can smell her in the room before he even finishes his sentence about valet arrangements — not recently, an hour old at least, faded at the edges, but unmistakably her, layered now with something new underneath the usual warmth of her scent. Something sharper. Something with an edge to it that wasn't there a month ago, that wasn't there even a week ago when I caught it in passing at her father's place.

It's the scent of a wolf who hasn't turned yet but is close. Close enough that I have to stop walking for a second and pretend I'm checking something on my phone so Tyler doesn't ask why I've gone still in the middle of a sentence about the seating chart.

"You good?" he asks, exactly the way Elena must have asked him something similar an hour ago, exactly the question everyone in this wedding party keeps asking everyone else, all of us circling the same unspoken thing from different angles.

"Fine. Long week."

"You've had a lot of those lately." He claps me on the shoulder, easy, unsuspecting, the way he's clapped me on the shoulder a hundred times over four years of friendship that I built specifically so I could be standing exactly where I'm standing right now. "Seriously, man, thanks for doing all this. I know best man stuff isn't really your scene."

"It's not a problem," I say, and it isn't, not the logistics part. The problem is standing in a barn that still smells like the woman I'm not allowed to want, cataloguing the changes in her scent like a man reading a countdown clock he can't stop.

I call Roan again from the parking lot, this time before he can call me.

"I need you to move the timeline up," I say. "Whatever contingency we've been sitting on. However soon you can get eyes fully in place."

"Damon—"

"She's closer than we thought. Days, maybe. Not weeks." I look back at the barn, at the string lights someone's already started testing along the eaves for the actual wedding day, warm gold bulbs exactly like Tyler promised her. "If Voss's people are already circling and she turns before we've got a plan, we lose every advantage we've spent eleven years building."

Roan is quiet for a long moment. When he finally speaks, his voice has the particular gravity of a man who's about to say something he knows I don't want to hear.

"You know what moving the timeline means, right? It means you tell her. Soon. Not eventually. Soon."

I don't answer him, because he's right, and because I still don't know how a man is supposed to walk up to the woman he's loved in silence for four years and tell her that everything she thinks she knows about her own life is a story someone else wrote to keep her alive.

"There's something else," Roan says, before I can hang up. "The trail near the logging road. We backtracked it further than I told you this morning."

"And?"

"It's old, Damon. Older than the last few days. There's a secondary trail underneath the fresh one — faint, mostly gone, but a tracker who knew what to look for would find it. Months old, maybe longer."

The parking lot goes very still around me, the ordinary sounds of the afternoon — a car door somewhere, a bird arguing with another bird in the tree line at the edge of the gravel — all of it fading under the sudden ringing focus of what he's telling me.

"They've been watching this town for months," I say slowly, "and I didn't catch it."

"None of us caught it. That's not on you specifically. Whoever's running this operation for Voss knows how to lay a trail that doesn't trip an enforcer's instincts unless he's already looking for it." A pause. "Which means this isn't a scouting pass that happened to line up with the wedding. This is timed. They picked this window on purpose."

I think about Elena in that barn an hour ago, her hand in Tyler's, discussing lighting fixtures and cocktail hour logistics with no idea that somewhere out past the tree line, men who serve a wolf who wants her bloodline erased have been quietly mapping this town for the better part of a season, waiting for the one day guaranteed to draw every relevant person into a single, predictable location.

"I want a perimeter," I say. "Not obvious. Nothing that spooks anyone at the venue or gets back to Tyler's family asking questions I can't answer. But I want eyes on every road in and out of this town by the end of the week."

"That's a lot of manpower for something we can't explain to the pack council without violating Sera's terms."

"Then we don't explain it. We just do it." I close my eyes, jaw tight, the ache of the vow sitting exactly where it always sits, low and constant, like a bruise I press on purpose because some sick part of me needs to know it's still there. "I made a promise to keep her alive, Roan, not to keep her comfortable. If those turn out to be the same thing, fine. If they don't, I already know which one I'm choosing."

He doesn't argue with that. He's heard me choose it before, in smaller ways, over eleven quiet years nobody but the two of us ever noticed.