Chapter 21
Ophelia
My heart still thumped after the encounter with the fae in the bank; I didn’t have a good name for what to call them other than fae, although Rocko had made deals with some who looked far less human than Aria. It gave me the shivers to think there were fae in the city, though Aria didn’t have the same manipulative, greasy aura as the ones that Rocko dealt with. It was entirely possible she wasn’t like them. Or maybe she just hid it better.
I glanced back just once as he drove and thought I saw a lone coyote standing on the sidewalk, looking in our direction as we pulled away. Tension crackled in the air and I held my breath, about to warn Henry about it, but when I looked back the second time, there was no sign of the coyote at all. It was absurd to think that a wild animal had made it all the way downtown without being run over or spotted by the people walking on the sidewalk. And people kept walking, right where it had been. I shook my head and turned around. I must have imagined it. It was just a hallucination, a trick of the mind. Maybe it was just a dog or a really big rat.
I was still a little preoccupied as Henry parked the car and led the way into a hole-in-the-wall restaurant crammed to the gills with people looking for a late lunch. I didn’t even mind that his hand rested at the small of my back to guide me through the crowd to a pair of free stools at the end of a long counter. The familiar touch, easy and casual, sparked warmth in my cheeks, though I would have blamed it on the crowd around us if anyone had asked.
Some balance had shifted between us, and I couldn’t tell what it was. It made me deeply uneasy, or at least it should have. Instead, it was like Henry had relaxed and realigned himself, and my nerves eased in response. I didn’t mind leaning against his side as we squeezed onto the stools at the counter; he let me sit between the wall and him, while he was shoulder-to-shoulder with a burly construction worker. The noise was another excuse to lean close, until my head practically rested on his shoulder, and Henry adjusted so his arm went around my back in an easy half-embrace.
He laughed though, and looked just a bit self-conscious. “I’m not putting the moves on you, I promise. I just don’t want to elbow you by accident.”
“I’ll elbow you back if you get too fresh,” I said, and tried out a smile. He was so free with his expressions, like he had plenty of smiles to share and didn’t fear running out of the happiness that made them.
Henry shouted an order to the harried waitress who finally braved our end of the counter, then ducked his head to mutter, “I ordered some of everything. You have to move fast here or you’ll never eat, and looking at a menu is a sign of weakness. Whatever you like, we can get more of.”
It was a relief to not make a decision or have to offer an opinion. Not that I wanted to admit that to him. I’d had choice taken away from me before and railed against it, fought tooth and nail to get my independence back—so admitting I just wanted him to order so I didn’t have to think felt like too much of a failure. A betrayal of myself.
Henry turned to face me, shielding me from the rest of the crowd, and with his body blocking everyone else out, it suddenly felt like we were the only two people in the whole restaurant. His pale gaze searched my face, and I knew something was bothering him by the wrinkle in his forehead, just between his eyebrows. “I really am sorry about…this morning. Pretending that we’re together just to get rid of Nola. I hope you don’t mind going along with it for a little while longer?”
“It’s fine,” I said. My knee bumped his as I moved on the stool, wanting to get a little closer to the warmth of his body. “I don’t mind. It should make dinner interesting. Do you think she’ll actually leave?”
He grunted, glancing away. “I don’t know. With my luck, she’ll probably want to stick around for the rest of her life.”
I bit my lip to keep from smiling. She’d been fairly unpleasant, but it felt like there were deeper emotional currents moving around them. His aura was stirred up and hers had been tangled and knotted with anxiety and fear. “So what was she talking about, that you’re supposed to be in charge? How did that happen?”
Henry hesitated for so long I started to think I’d trespassed on a topic that the wolves didn’t discuss, and braced myself for a rebuke or an abrupt change of topic. He rubbed the back of his neck and glanced around, then lowered his voice. He even leaned a little closer, until it was an intimate conversation instead of a stolen moment in the middle of a crowd.
“My father was the alpha, long ago, although he died when I was young. My family comes from a tradition where leadership stays within a family unless dire circumstances come about, so rightfully I should have been the next in line to lead the pack. Unfortunately, I was four and not strong enough to hold the pack together. My mother remarried and he was... not a nice man.”
I held my breath, no longer certain I wanted to hear the rest of the story. His expression lost its typical easygoing, jovial relaxation, and instead hardened into the mask of a man who’d survived his share of trauma. I’d imagined him living a charmed life, to have come out a good guy with an easy smile and the willingness to help others. Perhaps he was such a good guy because he’d seen how truly bad some men could be and deliberately chose the opposite.
The pause before he spoke again held a wealth of information that he didn’t want to share, and I knew enough about the bad things that some people did to others that I could fill in the gaps. Henry frowned into the beer bottle that the waitress delivered, along with a basket of onion rings, before going on. “I challenged him when I thought I was strong enough, but he defeated me. I ran a few years later. I should have stayed, maybe, and tried to save the pack from him, but I was selfish. I wanted to be on my own.”
“That’s not selfish,” I said quietly. “It’s not selfish to need to protect yourself.”
Henry shrugged, his gaze sliding away. “Doesn’t always feel that way, does it?”
I nodded, since I knew what he meant. I picked up my own beer and hoped that it would take the edge off the raw emotions that bounced around inside my chest. I was still too hyped up by the confrontation with the fae banker and the swirling headiness of Henry’s kiss. “So she wants you to go back now, is that it? Take over for your stepdad?”
“That’s what she wants.” Henry frowned as he stared off to the side, attention no doubt drifting back to Montana or wherever his old pack waited. “I left that pack and have no interest in revisiting the memories there. It’s better for everyone if I stay gone. The alpha can come from any family in the pack—they’ll fight it out until the strongest wins, then that will start a new family dynasty for alpha.”
“But what if the one who’s strongest is as bad as your stepfather? Or worse?”
Henry’s frown deepened. He didn’t respond as the waitress appeared with baskets of spare ribs, smoked brisket, pulled pork, sausage, and heaps of mashed potatoes, corn bread, and every other sort of carbohydrate under the sun. The sheer amount of food stunned me into silence, compounded by the fact that apparently there weren’t plates at the restaurant—people ate family-style right out of the baskets. Henry heaped the tender ribs in front of me and piled up a mountain of juicy bits of brisket, attentive even as he inhaled several pounds of meat in the blink of an eye.
I hardly made a dent in my share of the food by the time he’d cleaned up approximately half a cow and most of the cornbread, and he wiped barbecue sauce off his hands—almost to his elbows—before he swigged from his beer and watched me with a faint smile. “I hadn’t thought about whether the man who took over as alpha would be worse than Ulrich. I didn’t think it was my problem.”
“Maybe it isn’t,” I said, trying to wipe sauce from the corner of my mouth and only succeeded in smearing it across my cheek more. From the look on his face, I didn’t have quite the gravitas that I might have liked. “But maybe that’s what makes your sister so afraid. Instead of telling her you won’t go back no matter what, maybe it’s worth having that conversation about what really scares her about you not being the one in charge.”
He grumbled and shifted his weight on the stool, then put more pulled pork in front of me. “You’re too smart, witch.”
I laughed, shaking a rib at him and flinging a little sauce at his arm. “You mean I’m right.”
“You might be right,” he said, though he smiled as he said it. Something twinkled in his eyes as he watched me. “We’ll find out tonight, though, won’t we? How do you like the food?”
“At this rate, I won’t be able to eat for days,” I said. I tried to lick my fingers clean, since it didn’t look like the kind of restaurant with wet-wipes. “It’s delicious. How did you find this...”
