Chapter 3 - Keira

Rosecreek is tiny, isolated, and utterly beautiful.

Lots of our kind live in the Midwest, even more in Minnesota—back in New York, I often wonder how safe I truly am as a shifter. It isn’t as if there aren’t many of us, but dense, urban, integrated communities aren’t always as accepting as they appear. I’ve never felt actively anxious living there, not to any great extent. But I never felt fully relaxed, either, I realize now as I step off the bus on the outskirts of Rosecreek.

I feel something melt off my shoulders as I see a little gaggle of shifter kids scatter across a sideroad from where I stand, laughing, free, and happy.

I did some research before coming here—I couldn’t help it. Not much is available online about the management of this territory, but its alpha is, by all accounts, decent. I've read that there was trouble a few years ago with the incumbent alpha of the territory’s involvement with unsavory business. But he’s long gone now, and whoever runs Rosecreek today is clearly greatly invested in its safety, especially if they hired me.

A black ops team. I think of the last special ops team I worked with. I hear the kids laughing on the road, and I think I would like to set my mind to brighter things than that.

I find the pack center easily, a tall, modern-looking building in the middle of town. It’s only just past ten in the morning, but the hub is already bouncing with activity. I see families and kids milling outside. Strangers smile at me. I had honestly forgotten what that felt like.

A kind lady at the closest thing to a reception desk on the first floor points me upstairs to where the pack leaders live and work.

“We heard we were getting a newcomer,” she gushes, and I believe her enthusiasm somehow.

“That’s me.” I put my hand out, and she glances down, startled, before shaking it. I feel painfully out of place.

Upstairs, I find myself in an open, inviting space, bright with sunlight. I spy what looks like a gym through an open doorway, guns lined up on the wall, and a punching bag that looks like it’s never been touched hanging from the ceiling. I stand awkwardly at the top of the wide, clean stairs, staring around, taking in the doors and windows that seem to extend out infinitely from me, until I hear movement from my left and spot two figures moving toward me from down a hallway, heads bowed in conversation.

A long-haired man with a kind, crafty sort of face looks up at me. At his side, a young woman with bubblegum-pink hair glances up, too.

They both seem to realize who I am at the same moment, then begin speaking at the same time.

“You’re the intelligence analyst Aris hired, right?” asks the man, approaching with his hands out jovially, as if to invite me to greet him in whichever way I’d like.

I catch his scent, something sharp and unfamiliar, and something far more dominant, overlaying it, which I have sensed since I got here. The pack scent. The girl smells the same.

There is something faint I can’t put my finger on that makes me pause. I’m sure I’ve scented something like this before. For the life of me, I can’t figure out when it might have been.

“Rafael Diaz—it’s good to meet you.” The man takes my hand in his and shakes it firmly.

Next, the bright-haired girl introduces herself as Olivia. She smiles at me warmly, and I think, as I look at her, that she might have one of the kindest faces I’ve ever seen. I’d like to be her friend, if I’m here long enough for friendships to become a possibility.

Rafael gestures me forward. “Come on up to the meeting room; I think Aris is waiting for us. We expected the bus to arrive earlier.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting.” We move off down the hallway together. I tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. “I got on my connection early, but—”

“Delays on the highway, we know,” Olivia interrupts. She flashes Raphael a knowing smile. “I took a peek into their intranet to see if things were going to schedule. Just curious.”

“You’re a hacker?”

“I like computers,” she tells me with an air of mystery. I decided I was right—she’ll be one of my people while I'm here.

We ascend another shorter flight of stairs to a half-level, elevated over a sunlight platform dotted with greenery. Light refracts inward through high, segmented glass windows, casting tiny rainbows across the tiled floor. Black leather couches surround a low glass coffee table on one side of the room—on the other is a more traditional meeting space, a long table, computers, desks, a projector screen, a pinboard.

I immediately know the alpha, even from the back of his head. He’s speaking with another man, both of them turned away from us. He’s tall and broad, dressed casually in a thick knit sweater. I can tell immediately that his is the energy only the best alphas possess, a kind of quiet, assured confidence—leading through reason and communication, not fear. He doesn’t dominate the room, but you would know his position from a mile away. There’s a talent in that.

Raphael calls out a greeting. The alpha and his companion turn to look over at us, and suddenly, I am in the military again, and the world cracks open in front of me.

Ado’s face hasn’t changed much. Nothing about him has. I look into his dark brown eyes, narrow and utterly focused, and I remember him the way he was, the way I assumed he would remain forever in my mind. He’s still beautiful. Bizarre and impossible details rattle through my mind, carriages of a steam train flying off the rails: I am exactly two inches shorter than Ado, and I know this because once, we measured each other against the wall. The first time I made him laugh, we were eating lunch together, sitting outside somewhere. He tipped his head back, and I remember even now how the perfect lines of his throat moved in tandem with the rumble of his sound, his breath.

All of this passes through me in a heartbeat, faster and faster. I see the faces of the girls we couldn’t save back at the agency, then the inside of my cell at the base of the Bloodtooth Pack. Birds crest into the sky over the barracks as the boys kick around a soccer ball in the early morning. Ado’s tired eyes find me in the dim light the night he came to get me out. I feel the cold steel of a gun pressed between my palms.

Aris clears his throat beside Ado. I had forgotten he was there.

“This is—shit,” he says. “Okay. Keira, hello, I guess. It’s been a long time.”

I feel Olivia and Raphael’s confusion, their eyes flicking between me, Aris, and Ado like it’s a tennis game.

I wrangle myself back to decorum as if it’s life or death. This is my job, I remind myself, and I take my job seriously. And I’d rather die than let Ado think that the sight of him can render me to a shaking mess after all this time. Neither of us wants that to be true, I know implicitly.

“Aris,” I say. “It’s a surprise, I have to say.”

He strides over to meet us. I watch him move to shake my hand, then hesitate, and then pat me on the shoulder firmly, letting his hand linger there.

“It’s good to see you,” he says honestly. “I mean that. How have you been? Still in intelligence?”

“Private now—though, you knew that.” I subtly shake his hand from my shoulder by moving to rifle through my bag. I handed him back a paper copy of my contract, signed with my name. “For your records.”

“You think we’re this old-fashioned?”

“I don’t know how they do things out here in the sticks,” I joke.

Aris smiles. I feel Olivia hovering close to my shoulder. A somewhat awkward silence descends upon us all.

“I used to work intelligence for Aris’ pack way back when,” I tell the room needlessly, then cringe at the volume of my voice. “So, we know each other. I didn’t know you’d settled down somewhere, though.”

“It’s a story,” Aris says wearily. He smiles, and a knot of tension inside me undoes itself.

Ado stands dead still on the other side of the room. I can feel the others all resisting the urge to look across at him.

“We’re all going to meet to brief on the mission later, and to get you acquainted with the rest of the team, though you’ll already know some of us, I guess,” Aris tells me. “Early afternoon. You should get settled before that. Olivia, do you mind showing Keira to her room?”

I think my feet must be cemented to the floor. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to move them. But when Olivia takes my arm, I find myself able to move somehow, through some power that isn’t my own.

I catch a single glimpse of Ado’s face as I am pulled from the room. I have never seen that expression on a person’s face before. I’m not certain I ever will again. Beneath the fraying stone of his hard exterior, he is reckoning with something inside himself. Even after all this time and immeasurable distance between us, I can see it all.

***

“So, we’ve decided we won’t ask for the baby’s sex before the birth—we’d like a surprise.” Olivia hangs one of my sweaters on a hook in my sizable wardrobe. I find myself wishing I had brought a bigger suitcase. “You and Byron would get along great—”

“I know him,” I tell her, perched awkwardly on the windowsill. She insisted on helping me unpack, but now, I get the sense I have been iced out of the process entirely.

“Oh. Oh, yeah, I guess—of course you do.” Her face alights with mischief. “What was he like when he was younger? I need to know.”

“Socially inept. Well—” I think about it, then rephrase. “Not as much as Ado. We were all bad. About ninety percent of our interactions every day were with each other. The military makes you a bit crazy like that.”

“But he’s always been his techy, nerdy self?”

“In all the time I knew him.” My memories of Byron are almost entirely positive, though faint. We worked together on lots. Our jobs were aligned that way, and I suspect the same will be true now.

To imagine Byron—and, indeed, the rest of the boys—settled with mates like this is surreal. It’s as if when I stepped into Rosecreek, I entered a world where we were all capable of that kind of thing, this soft-edged, suburban paradise Aris has managed to settle. God knows how.

Birds over the barracks. The smell of chloroform. Ado’s laugh. My bloodied fingertips, shredded from failing to crack the lock.

Olivia peers over her shoulder at me. She has been talking this whole time, though I get the sense she isn’t an especially chatty person. I think it was to keep me at ease. But she must be curious, too.

“You and Ado?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Ancient history.”

Olivia hums. She closes my empty case and packs it neatly into the top of the wardrobe.

“I didn’t think he was the type to ever date… anyone,” she says. “He’s very—um—”

“Impossible,” I fill in. “Impervious.”

“Kind of, yeah.” Olivia sits on the windowsill beside me. With the glass against our backs, the room seems to darken.

I want to indulge her curiosity. Simultaneously, I want to never have to talk about this stuff ever again.

She speaks before I can. “If things are uncomfortable, Aris will make sure you don’t have to work with him much,” she says. “He’s a good leader like that.”

Humming, I place my hands flat on the sill on either side of my hips. I know she’s right, but some part of me also knows that if it will affect the outcome of the mission, Aris will have me work with whoever I have to.

I wonder how much Aris remembers about what happened. Did he, too, agree to leave me behind? Did he send anyone to look for me, or did he leave it to Ado?

“I’ll be fine,” I say, trying to believe it. “I’m starving, though.”

Olivia leads me through the upper floors of the pack center to a lived-in-looking kitchen on the far side. I spot other people’s food on the counters and inside cupboards: three types of cereal, two types of milk, two kinds of bread, a fruit bowl overflowing with apples, bananas, kiwis, and more. I wonder how many members of the pack actually live here. Certainly not all of them. Nonetheless, they probably spend a lot of time here—I get the sense that the pack center is a second home to those for whom it isn’t a first.

We make sandwiches and sit to eat them. I catch Olivia scrolling through her phone, smiling. Probably texting with Byron, who’s due back here in an hour or two for the briefing.

A shape moves past the door, then into the frame. Lingering, Ado does a double take as he sees me again.

Despite our best wishes, we stare at one another. I see one of Ado’s broad, veiny hands flex and unflex at his side. He must have just come from the gym, because his black hair curls slightly at his forehead, tousled and sweaty, and I see his broad-set chest rise and fall beneath his tank top. I glance back up, and his sharply focused eyes are still fixed on my face, full of their singular, serious intent. My face heats.

Olivia shifts in her chair, and the air breaks. Ado continues down the hall. I see his shadow as it disappears out of sight, as if he was never there. I could have imagined him.