The thumping started at eight a.m. on the last morning of my leave.
Furniture legs on hallway marble. The elevator chiming over and over. A voice — Trask's, unmistakably, in full evangelical flow — saying "careful, CAREFUL, that's a sofa, not carry-on."
I padded out for water, ears already pricked, and opened my front door onto a scene I had thirty seconds to comprehend and no hope whatsoever of preventing.
Victor Ironclaw stood in the doorway of 2809 in a gray henley, holding a potted olive tree like a housewarming gift. Behind him, his severe-suited assistant directed a river of boxes with the expression of a man conducting his own funeral. Down the hall, Trask conducted the movers. The door of my apartment, and the door of his, faced each other across a hallway wide enough for one regret.
"You—" I said.
Victor crossed the hall in three steps, took my elbow with scandalous gentleness, steered me backward into my own entryway, and shut the door behind us with his heel.
"Good morning," he said, and set the olive tree on my console table, and looked down at me with the calm of a captain announcing that yes, the weather ahead is worse than forecast.
"Neighbors now. Hello, my neighbor."
"You CANNOT be—" I dropped my voice to a hiss, one eye on the corridor to the bedrooms. "You bought the apartment? Across from mine? Sight unseen?"
"Trask says you call it 2809. I call it home." He leaned back against the console, arms folding, entirely too comfortable in my house at eight in the morning. "It has good light."
"It has BAD light! It's been empty for eight months! Nobody wants 2809!"
"Nobody did," he agreed pleasantly. "I did."
I pressed both hands over my face, breathed once through my fingers, then grabbed his wrist — it closed all the way around, obviously — and dragged him through the living room and out onto the balcony, sliding the glass door shut behind us with a click that felt, in my own home, like locking the barn after the horse had fully moved in.
The morning was cool and blue. Eight floors down, the street was doing its morning noise. We stood in my small balcony with the herb pots and the drying rack, and I crossed my arms and looked up at him.
"Victor. What exactly are you doing?"
"Moving in," he said. "The boxes give it away."
"You have a house. You have houses. Why on earth would you move here?"
He didn't answer right away. His gaze slid past my shoulder to the building across the street, and I followed it, and saw what he saw: one floor down and across, a balcony almost the mirror of mine. A couple in their pajamas leaned against the rail, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her, a little boy sprawled on a swing-seat between them, reading a book upside down and reporting on it at intervals. Ordinary. Warm. The kind of picture that doesn't know it's a picture.
When I looked back, Victor was watching me instead, and his voice came down to almost nothing, under the traffic.
"Because home is here."
"Victor—"
"Where you are is home." A low laugh, entirely without humor in it. "Three years, Luna. I flew the moon route for three years and every landing felt like departing. You want to know what I'm doing?" He tipped his head at the door, at the boxes, at the whole absurd arithmetic of it. "I'm done flying to you. I'm staying."
My heartbeat was conducting itself badly, loudly, at a volume the whole pack could probably hear. My wolf had stopped pacing. She was sitting very still against the locked door, ears forward, listening to him the way you listen to a voice on a black-box recording.
"You can't just—" My voice cracked on nothing. I took a breath and rebuilt it. "Buying apartments isn't — you can't fix three years with real estate, Victor."
"I know." And he said it simply, no armor on it at all. "The petition was never filed. That's the only fact I own, and I'm not going to stop standing in it. Everything else — the tree, the boxes, the nine feet of hallway — is just me, being where you can see me. That's all. Take it or report it."
He said it lightly, but his eyes were amber-bright — the wolf close under the skin, the way they go on final approach — and the moon was two days from full, and I was standing four feet from the only storm I've never learned to fly through.
And then the glass door slid open behind us.
"Mommy, why are you standing out—" Charlotte stopped. Rubbed her eye with one fist. Stared directly at the six-foot-two Alpha in my herb garden.
I have flown an emergency descent with a screaming cabin. I have done it in heels. I have never moved as fast as I moved in that moment — one arm swooping up the pup, the other hand seizing Victor's sleeve and yanking him bodily behind the curtain panel, hissing "don't. move. not one sound," like I was hiding contraband at customs, and then sliding the door shut and turning to face my daughter with the bright, grave lie already loading.
Charlotte, still squinting, frowned at the balcony. "Mommy. I just saw the uncle from the airport standing next to you!"
"You didn't, baby."
"I did! He was right—"
"That was an eagle," I said, with total calm, total authority, total nonsense. "A very large eagle. It flew away just now. They come up high sometimes. It's gone."
Charlotte considered this. Three-year-olds audit nothing.
"Okay," she said, and then, wide-eyed, gravely: "A BIG eagle?"
"The biggest," I said solemnly.
Behind the curtain, utterly silent, I heard nothing at all, which somehow made it worse. Later, I would learn exactly what he'd muttered into my curtain — I could lip-read it through the fabric — this woman improvises fairy tales for the pup and lectures ME about honesty —
I carried Charlotte to the kitchen for breakfast, and when I came back through the living room, the balcony was empty, the glass door was shut, and an olive tree in a terracotta pot had migrated from the console table to the corner by the window, positioned with great care so that it was visible from exactly two places: the breakfast table, and my daughter's play mat.
"Mommy." Charlotte pointed at it, spoon suspended, delighted. "Where did the tree come from?"
"The super left it," I said. "Building maintenance. Trees get... moved."
"Maintenance gave us a whole TREE?" she breathed, in the reverent tone she reserved for aquariums and her father. "We're SO lucky."
We were. That was the problem.
I was buttoning my uniform jacket by the door that afternoon — rotation starting tomorrow, seven days of flights, back to the moon route, back to his cockpit and his galley and his everything — when Victor let himself out of 2809, crossed nine feet of hallway, and stopped in front of me.
For a moment he just looked, in the way that still undid me, and then he glanced down at my insignia, and his voice dropped into something I hadn't heard from him before. Not teasing. Not begging. Cold, level, and absolutely certain.
"One thing, before you go. My family will find out I'm here. When they come, they will not come through me first." His eyes held mine, amber-flashing at the edges. "My mother will be polite. My grandfather will be kind. Those are the safe ones. But my half-brother — his name is Pierce, and his wolf runs rogue when no one is holding the leash. If a man you don't know takes an interest in you — at the crew hotel, in the terminal, anywhere — you call me before you open any door. Before you speak. Before you're kind to him. Promise me."
"Why?" I asked quietly. "What did your brother do?"
Victor looked at the olive tree in my window, and something moved behind his face like weather over open water.
"Not what he's done," he said. "What he is."
The elevator chimed. He stepped back into it, and the doors began to close on him, and just before they did, he said — quietly, like a final approach call:
"Good luck this week, neighbor. I'll be nine feet away."
The doors shut. I stood in my hallway, heart pounding, holding my flight case, with an olive tree in my window and a rogue wolf somewhere on the continent and my daughter inside asking if eagles eat olives.
Three years I'd kept us hidden. Nine feet of hallway, and it was over.