The morning after a near-drowning shouldn’t feel this quiet… I woke up in the oversized bed with Smudge heavy against my shins and the Minnesota sun stretching long, pale fingers across the quilt… My body felt heavy, a dull ache in my shoulders from that frantic sprint to the pool, but my mind was already racing…
I shouldn’t be here…
I’m a woman who lives in a bus… I’m a woman who moves when the scenery gets too familiar… and yet, the smell of this room—pine, old wood, and a hint of something like ozone—felt like it was trying to anchor me…
I dressed slowly, pulling on my last clean pair of jeans and a charcoal hoodie that seen better days… I needed coffee, and I needed to check on my Beast… mostly, I needed to see if the world still looked the same as it did before I jumped into a freezing pool for a child I barely knew.
When I reached the kitchen, the house was humming with that low, domestic energy I was starting to realize was just the “Moon Shadow way”… People moving with purpose, a pot of oatmeal the size of a tire on the stove, and Gina… looking like a radiant auburn-haired whirlwind as she packed a lunchbox.
She saw me and stopped, her smile softening into something so genuine it actually hurt a little to look at… “V… how are you feeling? Knight said he’d let you sleep in, but I think Kyle’s been asking for ‘the splash lady’ since six a.m.”
I felt a hot flush creep up my neck… “The splash lady? I’ve been called worse… Is he okay? The head wound?”
“A little bruise, a lot of attitude, and he won’t let go of that new car,” Gina said, walking over and squeezing my arm… her touch was warm, but her eyes were searching mine, like she was looking for a secret I hadn’t even told myself yet…
“Knight is with him now… they’re both pretty stuck on you, V… we all are. Alpha Storm’s out back… by the workshop… he’s been waiting for you…”
My heart did a weird, rhythmic stutter… “Waiting? For what?”
“To talk, I imagine… or to just loom… he’s very good at the looming…”
I found him exactly where she said he’d be…
The workshop was a sturdy building of cedar and stone, and Alpha Stormy was leaning against the heavy workbench outside, his arms crossed over that massive chest… He wasn’t wearing the flannel today… just a black t-shirt that looked like it was losing a fight with his shoulders.
As I approached, the air changed… It wasn’t just the smell of sawdust and motor oil… it was that static again… that prickly, charged heat that made the hair on my arms stand up… It was stronger today… much stronger…
He didn’t move as I stopped a few feet away… those ice-blue eyes tracked me, landing on my face with a weight that felt almost physical.
“You’re awake,” he rumbled… the sound was low, vibrating in the space between us.
“I am… unfortunately… I’m not a morning person without at least three cups of high-octane caffeine,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, trying to play it cool… “Gina said you wanted to see me… is there news about my Beast errrm my bus?”
Storm stepped closer… just one step, but it felt like the entire world tilted toward him… I could smell him now—the forest after a storm, something metallic, and a deep caramel, musk-heavy scent that made my inner voice tell me to run and stay at the same time…
“Dex is working on the belt,” he said, his voice dropping an octave… He was looking at me, but not at my eyes… he was looking at the way my pulse was jumping in the hollow of my throat…
“But that’s not why I’m standing here…”
“No?” I breathed… the word felt small…
“Knight and Gina’s son is safe because of you,” he said… he reached out, his hand hovering near my shoulder, not quite touching, but I could feel the heat radiating from his palm… “You’re a human in a world you don’t understand, Veronica… you should have been terrified… you should have yelled for help… but you just… went…”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I interjected, the Ohio grit bubbling up to mask the fact that my knees felt like jelly… “He was in the water… I don’t care who you are or what this ‘pack’ is… I don’t wait for permission to save a life… especially a child’s”
A slow, dangerous grin pulled at the corner of his mouth… it wasn’t a mean look… it was the look of a man who had just found something he didn’t know he was looking for.
“I know you don’t,” he whispered…
He finally closed the gap, his fingers brushing a stray lock of hair away from my face… the contact felt like a literal electric shock… my breath hitched, and for a second, the rest of the world—the bus, the road, the cats, the “normal” life I’d fought for—simply ceased to exist… there was only the blue of his eyes and the sudden, terrifying realization that I wasn’t just a visitor here.
I jerked back, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird… “I… I need to check on my fur babies… and the bus… I have a schedule, Stormy…”
“The road isn’t going anywhere, Veronica,” he said, his voice trailing after me as I turned to walk away… “And neither are you… not yet…”
I didn’t look back, but I could feel his gaze on my spine the entire way to the house… The push-pull had started, and as much as I wanted to believe I was the one pushing… the pull was starting to feel a lot more like… fate.