Three weeks into the arrangement, I woke to the smell of coffee.
Not just any coffee. My coffee. Black, slightly too hot, the way I'd been drinking it since my first Silverfang morning shift when I'd learned that lukewarm meant you'd already lost five minutes you couldn't get back.
I stood in the doorway of our narrow kitchen and stared at the mug sitting on the counter. Steam curled upward in lazy spirals. Rowen was at the stove, humming something off-key while he flipped what looked like an omelet. He wore sweatpants and a faded college shirt. His hair stuck up in three different directions.
He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. "Morning."
"You made me coffee," I said.
"I did." He slid the omelet onto a plate. "You want breakfast? I made extra."
"How do you know how I take my coffee?"
He set the pan in the sink and turned to face me, leaning against the counter with that easy, unbothered posture he always had. "I noticed on day two. You make it the same way every time. Black, you let it sit for exactly thirty seconds before you drink it, and you always take the first sip standing up."
I felt something cold settle in my chest. "This is a contract, Rowen. Not a courtship."
"I know." His voice stayed light, but his eyes went quieter. "I'm not courting you, Cassidy. I'm making coffee. It's not a big deal."
"It feels like a big deal."
"Why?"
Because no one had ever noticed how I took my coffee before. Because Judah had lived in the same pack house with me for three years and couldn't have told you if I drank coffee at all. Because noticing was the kind of thing that led to wanting, and wanting was the kind of thing that led to standing in an Omega section watching someone else get marked.
I didn't say any of that.
"Because it's not in the contract," I said instead.
Rowen studied me for a long moment. Then he picked up the mug and held it out. "Okay. No more coffee. You're on your own starting tomorrow."
I took the mug. The ceramic was warm against my palms. I could feel my wolf stirring under my skin—a faint, inexplicable warmth that made no sense because my wolf had been mostly dormant since the Ceremony. She'd barely moved in six months. Now she was pressing upward like she wanted my attention.
I told her to shut up.
"Thank you," I said stiffly.
Rowen's smile came back, smaller this time. "You're welcome."
I drank the coffee. It was perfect.
That should have been my first warning.
---
The Thanksgiving bonfire happened on a Friday night at a clearing two hours outside the city. It was hosted by a loose coalition of packless wolves, contracted mates, and refugees who'd figured out that the best way to survive outside pack structure was to build something that looked like community without the hierarchy. Someone brought a truck bed full of firewood. Someone else brought a cooler of wolfsbane mead—the kind that hits harder than it tastes and makes you forget why you were being careful in the first place.
I went because Rowen asked.
He didn't push. He just mentioned it over breakfast one morning, said it might be nice to meet people who weren't trying to register us for anything, and left it there. I said yes because the apartment felt too small lately and because I'd spent six months avoiding anything that looked like socializing and maybe that was starting to feel like hiding.
The fire was already roaring when we arrived. Wolves clustered in small groups, passing bottles and telling stories that got louder as the night went on. Rowen knew half of them somehow—he had that kind of face, the kind people remembered even if they'd only met him once. He introduced me to a dozen names I immediately forgot and stayed close without hovering.
I drank more than I should have.
So did he.
The details blurred after the third cup of mead. I remember his laughter, low and warm and closer than it should have been. I remember firelight catching in his eyes and turning them gold. I remember his arm around my shoulder when the night air turned cold, and the way his scent—honey and cedar and something I still couldn't name—wrapped around me like a second skin.
I remember thinking, just for a second, that maybe this was what safe felt like.
Then I woke up.
Sunlight sliced through the gap in the curtains and hit me directly in the face. My head throbbed. My mouth tasted like I'd licked a campfire. I was still fully clothed—jeans, sweater, even my boots—but I wasn't in my bed.
I was in Rowen's.
His arm was draped over my waist. His face was buried in my hair. His breathing was slow and even, the kind of deep sleep that meant he had no idea I was currently having a silent panic attack six inches away from him.
His scent was everywhere.
Not just in the room. On me. In my hair, on my clothes, sunk so deep into my skin it felt like it had been branded there. Warm honey and cedar, indelible, impossible to ignore. My wolf surged awake with a force that nearly knocked the air out of my lungs. She pressed upward, desperate and insistent, and whispered a single word I refused to hear.
Mate.
No.
I extracted myself from Rowen's arm with the careful precision of someone defusing a bomb. He mumbled something in his sleep and rolled over. I stood beside the bed, staring down at him, and felt my chest tighten with something that might have been panic or longing or both.
This was wrong. Wolfless males didn't produce mate-bond scent reactions. It was biologically impossible. Whatever I was feeling—whatever my wolf was insisting on—it had to be residual loneliness. Leftover attachment from Judah. My brain trying to manufacture connection because I'd spent six months refusing to feel anything at all.
It wasn't real.
I packed in silence. One duffel bag. Essentials only. I left a note on the kitchen counter that read like a logistics briefing and said nothing about waking up in his arms or the way his scent had seared itself into my skin or the word my wolf kept whispering that I absolutely could not afford to believe.
*Ironveil liaison assignment. Three months. I'll cover my half of rent remotely. Don't wait up.*
I was gone before dawn.
