The van was cleaner than I expected.
I don’t know what I’d been picturing — something out of a true crime documentary, probably, with zip ties on the floor and a suspiciously new air freshener. But the van that rolled into the parking lot of Murphy’s Gas & Bait was a perfectly normal, dark green Ford Transit with a Moon Shadow Landscaping magnet on the side and a woman behind the wheel who stuck her head out the window and hollered, “Oh my GODDESS, are you okay?!” before the vehicle had even fully stopped.
I decided immediately that I liked her.
“She seems fine,” I told myself. Seems being the operative word, V. You met her four seconds ago.
She was out of the van in a fluid, easy motion — not quite normal-fast, not quite weird-fast, but somewhere in between that I filed away to think about later. Flaming auburn hair loose around her shoulders, a flannel tied at her waist, a smile that took up approximately sixty percent of her face.
“Gina,” she said, sticking out her hand. “Beta Knight’s mate. You must be the woman who survived Rhett catching her.”
From somewhere behind me, Rhett made an indignant noise.
“I wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“You caught her like you were accepting a Grammy,” Gina said, not looking at him.
Knight made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell. The man had the emotional range of a very large, very handsome glacier.
I shook Gina’s hand. Her grip was solid. Her eyes were warm. She looked at me the way some women look at you when they’ve already decided you’re going to be friends and they’re just waiting for you to catch up.
I was catching up embarrassingly fast.
“Veronica,” I said. “V. Either one works.”
“V,” she repeated, like she was trying it on. “Yeah. That fits.” She glanced past me toward the Beast, and her expression shifted into something genuinely sympathetic. “Oh, honey. What happened to her?”
“These two greasy idiots,” I said, with a look toward the direction of the RV park. “Snapped the serpentine belt messing with something they had no business touching. And she needs a part that—” I stopped, because my throat was doing something I didn’t appreciate. “It’ll be a day or two.”
Gina put her hand on my arm. Just briefly. Just enough.
“She’ll be fine,” she said. “Our guy Dex is a genius with engines. He’ll treat her like royalty.”
I looked at the Beast. The Beast sat there in the morning light, patient and scarred and perfect, with the whole of my life in her storage bays and a busted belt and absolutely no say in any of this.
“I’m sorry, Beasty,” I told her silently. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”
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The fur babies had opinions about the van.
Emmy’s carrier was on the seat beside me. She’d been completely silent since I’d buckled it in, which was either a sign that she was fine or a sign that she was preparing a formal grievance to be delivered at a later date. With Emmy, it was genuinely fifty-fifty.
Smudge, as the oldest, had been extremely vocal.
Specifically, she’d been making a sound I can only describe as “bureau-catic disapproval” — not quite a yowl, not quite a meow, but a sustained, measured protest that said I am registering my dissatisfaction through the proper channels and expect a response within five to seven business days.
“She always like this?” Rhett asked from the seat behind me. He was draped across it like a golden retriever who’d been given too much square footage and wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“Only when she’s right,” I said.
Rhett laughed. He had a good laugh — easy and real, not performative. The kind of laugh you trust.
Storm was in the passenger seat. He hadn’t laughed.
He also hadn’t said much since Gina arrived, which I’d clocked immediately and filed under Interesting. He’d introduced Gina to me with the kind of restrained warmth that told me he liked her but didn’t love that she’d folded me into the situation so effortlessly. Like he’d had a plan for how this was going to go and Gina had cheerfully bulldozed it with her smile and her van.
I understood the feeling. She’d kind of done the same thing to me.
He was looking out the window now. The trees were getting thicker — real Minnesota forest, the kind with shadows in it even at ten in the morning. Pine and birch and something older underneath both of them, the way the Midwest always had something older just under the surface if you knew how to look.
“How far?” I asked Gina.
“Ten minutes, maybe.” She glanced in the rearview. “We’re in the same woods you camped in, actually. Just further back.”
I processed that.
“The campground,” I said slowly. “Moon Shadow Campground.”
“Mmhm.”
I looked at the back of Storm’s head.
“You own the campground,” I said. Not a question.
A pause. “The pack does, yes.”
“So I’ve been your neighbor for the night.”
Another pause. Shorter, this time. “…Yes.”
I sat with that for a moment. The Beast. The campground. Overnight with two sneaky creeps outside my door. Ten minutes from a pack of — I was going to have to deal with what I knew about that eventually, but not right now, not in a moving van with four strangers and two skeptical cats.
“You’ve been right there,” I said to nobody in particular.
Smudge made her sound again.
“I know,” I told her quietly. “I know.”
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