Chapter 2 - THE KING WHO CAME WITHOUT A CROWN
June hung up without answering the question.
She was not a woman easily frightened. Once, during a burglary, she'd chased a man out of the bakery using a bag of frozen rolls and a vocabulary she'd learned from her grandmother in Brooklyn. But now she stood with both hands around the receiver, looking at the dark street beyond the pastry display.
“Was that the government?” she asked.
“I don't think so.”
“That isn't comforting.”
The car outside didn't move. A man in a pale raincoat stepped out and walked to the bakery door. He didn't knock. He simply looked through the glass, smiled, and held up a small silver disk. The strange ache in my chest tightened. I heard a faint pulse, almost like a tuning fork pressed to bone.
“Get away from the window,” I told June.
She obeyed without arguing. I wasn't used to being believed that quickly. The man touched the disk to the glass. For a moment the security lights dimmed. A hairline crack appeared beside the door handle.
Then a second vehicle braked hard behind him.
Rafe Calder got out with two people in plain dark jackets. He showed an identification card to the man. Whatever was written on it drained the smile from his face. The man in the raincoat raised both hands and retreated into his car.
Rafe knocked on the bakery door. June kept the chain secured while he spoke through the gap.
“Mrs. Torres?”
“Miss. And unless you've come for a wedding cake, you've got five seconds.”
“I work for Dondre Ashford. We traced a hostile call to this address. Your shop's security system was tampered with less than a minute ago.”
June looked at me. I nodded reluctantly.
Rafe held up a sealed envelope. “This contains a number for independent police assistance and a contact at the city's supernatural liaison office. You don't have to let us in. We'd like permission to stay on the street until morning.”
“Supernatural what?” June said.
Rafe sighed. “I thought he'd already explained.”
“He's not much of an explainer,” I told him.
Rafe's mouth twitched. “No, ma'am. He isn't.”
I called the number on the envelope myself using June's phone. A tired woman answered, identified herself as Inspector Lenora Price, and confirmed Rafe's credentials without asking me to trust a stranger. She described the disk as an illegal acoustic device used against shifters. I asked what a shifter was. She was silent long enough for me to wonder whether the line had disconnected.
“A human who can change form,” she said at last.
I stared at June. She stared back.
“Like a werewolf?” I asked.
“Not all shifters are wolves. But yes.”
I thanked her, hung up, and took a seat on an overturned flour bucket because my knees had forgotten their job.
June sat beside me. “I need a bigger pot of tea.”
By morning, I had slept perhaps forty minutes. Dondre hadn't called. I kept looking at his card, irritated by his silence and strangely grateful for it. He had given me room to breathe, even while his security team watched the bakery from a respectable distance.
At nine, I went to my old apartment with June and Inspector Price, who turned out to be a compact woman with gray braids, a state badge, and the patience of someone accustomed to hearing impossible things before breakfast. The lock had scratches around the cylinder. Inside, nothing appeared stolen, but my desk drawer stood open.
I knew exactly what had been inside it: the notebook from my work at Asterline Analytics. During the layoffs, I'd taken home copies of approved expense summaries for my personal portfolio, with client names removed. Company policy permitted employees to retain anonymized work samples. Still, I'd noticed odd payment patterns and had written them down separately.
The notebook was gone.
“So this started before I met him?” I asked.
Price walked the room, careful not to touch anything. “That's what we need to determine.”
I showed her the photographs of the pages I'd taken before packing. One heading appeared three times: WARDHOUSE SERVICE CLEARANCE. Another listed monthly transfers under the initials C.A. All the amounts ended in seventeen. It had seemed like a rounding error then.
Price's face changed. “Where did this come from?”
“My department's cost reports.”
“Who authorized those transfers?”
“My manager, Greg Wynn. But he told us the client was a children's housing contractor.”
She asked me not to distribute the photographs until they could be reviewed and preserved. I agreed, provided I received a copy of anything I handed over. She smiled with real approval.
“Good,” she said. “Keep asking for receipts.”
The landlord knocked at noon. He carried a notice claiming my tenancy had been reviewed after an anonymous safety complaint. The apartment wasn't condemned, but he had scheduled an inspection for the next day and suggested, with theatrical sympathy, that I might find it easier to move out.
I read the notice twice. “You can't evict me on a day's notice.”
He avoided my eyes. “I'm only the messenger.”
It was the phrase everyone had used at work when something cruel happened through an email.
June offered her couch again. Price gave me the phone number of a tenants' legal clinic. I called the clinic before I packed a single thing. The lawyer who answered told me to photograph the notice and refuse any unofficial relocation demand. It was a small step, but it returned some weight to my feet.
At three that afternoon, Dondre arrived at the bakery without an entourage. Rafe remained across the street. Dondre wore jeans and a plain black sweater beneath a rain jacket that looked almost ordinary. No crown. No bodyguards crowding the doorway. June eyed him over a tray of cinnamon rolls.
“If you turn into a wolf in my kitchen,” she said, “you clean the floor yourself.”
“I'll remember that,” he replied solemnly.
We sat at the small table near the back door. His coat was folded on the chair between us. I pushed it toward him.
“First, thank you,” I said. “Second, I am not joining a pack, accepting a royal title, or being kidnapped by attractive strangers.”
“You should never accept any of those things without understanding them.”
“Even the attractive-stranger part?”
“Especially that part.”
It was hard to stay furious when he answered like that.
I folded my arms. “What happened under the awning?”
Dondre considered me carefully. “Wolves recognize certain people through scent. A connection can form between two individuals. We call it a mate bond.”
I watched the word settle between us.
“And you think that happened to us.”
“Yes.”
“How much control does it give you over me?”
“None that you are required to surrender.”
“That wasn't the question.”
“No,” he said. “The bond can make people feel drawn to one another. It can sharpen our awareness of emotions. In some wolves, it can become physically painful when ignored. But feeling something isn't permission to act on it. You still decide who I am to you.”
I looked at him. The man everyone called a king was struggling to keep his hands still on the table. It was the first time I noticed he might be frightened too.
“Can you read my thoughts?”
“No.”
“Can you smell when I'm lying?”
“Not reliably.”
“Can you force me to love you?”
His answer came immediately. “I would rather lose the crown than try.”
The strange warmth in my chest responded to the conviction in his voice. That annoyed me. My body had apparently formed an opinion without consulting me.
He explained the Cascadia Council governed several wolf territories across the Pacific Northwest and that the king served as its executive leader. Under the old charter, kings had possessed a power called the Command, a way of exerting pressure on weaker wolves. Modern law restricted its use. The Council, however, controlled records about bonds, bloodlines, and the children born between different kinds of shifters.
“Why would anyone care that I borrowed your coat?” I asked.
“Because I'm expected to announce a politically approved match next month.”
I sat back. “You're engaged?”
“No.”
“That sounds suspiciously close.”
“I refused the proposed arrangement. The Council has not accepted my refusal.”
The air seemed suddenly cooler. “And I'm an obstacle.”
“You are a person,” he said, “not an obstacle.”
I wanted to believe him. I also wanted proof of what he was telling me.
“Show me.”
He blinked. “What?”
“The wolf.”
June dropped a spoon in the kitchen. Dondre looked toward the door, then back at me.
“Not here. It could frighten your friend.”
“She's already threatening you with cleaning supplies.”
“Then perhaps somewhere private, when you are comfortable.”
He didn't offer a spectacle. He offered me time. I realized, uneasily, how unfamiliar that felt.
As he stood to leave, I took out my parents' photograph. “Do you know my mother?”
Dondre's face went still. He touched the edge of the picture but did not take it.
“Her name was Mae Evans before she married my father,” I said. “She lives in Ohio. She fixes teeth and complains about people who don't floss.”
Dondre looked at the woman in the photograph for a very long time. “Twenty-seven years ago, someone using that name testified before the Council. She disappeared the same week the testimony was sealed.”
“My mother didn't disappear.”
“No,” he said softly. “It seems she escaped.”
I called Ohio before he could explain further. My father answered after nine rings. He sounded tired, and somewhere behind him I heard a door close.
“Dad, was Mom ever involved with people who call themselves the Cascadia Council?”
His breath caught. “Honey. Where are you?”
“Seattle. At June's. Why?”
“Do not go home. Do not tell anyone about the wooden box in your mother's room.”
I hadn't mentioned a box.
“Dad?”
“Your mother wants you to know,” he said, his voice shaking, “that she never forgot what happened the night you were born.”
Then the call ended.
Dondre heard enough to understand my expression. He didn't reach across the table. He just waited.
I looked at the coat between us and realized that whatever had begun in the rain had started long before either of us was standing on that street.
My phone was charging on June's counter. On its newly bright screen, a message appeared from an unknown number.
Your mother signed the first bond ledger. Ask her why your name is in it.
May you like
Beneath the message was a photograph of a handwritten entry dated twenty-six years earlier.
The name was mine.
