New York in summer smells like hot asphalt and cheap perfume.
To everyone else, anyway.
To me, it smells like nothing at all. Three years of practice taught an Omega how to flatten her scent into something forgettable — a candle blown out, a window painted shut. You can't reject what you can't find.
"I can't believe it!" Daisy practically vibrated across the café table, her iced latte sloshing. "We're flying with Captain Ironclaw today. THE Ironclaw. Alpha of the Ironmoon Pack. Do you know how many she-wolves would trade a fang for my roster?"
"Congratulations," I said, and sipped my americano.
"You're not even a little excited?"
"I'm thrilled."
Daisy squinted at me the way pups squint at the sun — earnest, blinky, determined. "Luna Winters. Did Captain Ironclaw do something to you? You've got that face."
"What face?"
"The face you make when you're smiling but your wolf isn't."
Cute. Observant. Wrong. My wolf wasn't anything at all. I hadn't let her speak in three years.
"Wishful thinking, sweetheart." I checked my watch instead of her eyes. "Come on. Uniform check is in twenty minutes."
You could just say his name, my wolf murmured from the dark little corner where I kept her. It's been three years. It's just a name.
Not in this lifetime, I told her, and locked the door behind her too.
At six p.m. sharp, Silverwing Flight 07 rolled off the tarmac at JFK, London bound. The wolves in first class settled their expensive suits and expensive scents as we climbed, and the cabin hummed the way it always does at eleven thousand meters — that steady, engineered quiet that people mistake for safety.
I was doing my final galley walk when the ceiling panel blinked pink.
Cockpit call.
Daisy was closer. She tapped, slipped in, and came back out thirty seconds later with her brow creased and one hand pressed flat against her stomach.
"Two coffees," she murmured. "They want two coffees."
"You okay? You look gray."
"Must be the turbulence coming." She smiled too fast and moved off toward the coffee machine, and that was where the sky decided to remind me who was in charge.
The first drop was gentle. A shiver, nothing more — the kind seasoned crews sleep through.
The second put the aircraft on its side.
I heard the carts before I felt my feet leave the floor. A coffee pot went cartwheeling past my shoulder and burst against the bulkhead. Somewhere behind me, Daisy screamed. The seat-belt sign didn't chime so much as shriek, and the whole cabin tilted the way a dream tilts when you know you're falling.
My hip caught the galley counter. My arm caught worse — the lip of the steel service rail, driven in by the full weight of my body, and I felt the skin part before I felt the pain.
Then the aircraft righted itself. The chaos settled. The cabin lights flickered back to their patient gold, and forty wolves pretended nothing had happened, because that's what wolves do.
What I remember most is not the pain.
It's the cockpit door.
It opened. Nobody opens that door in flight — but it opened, and Captain Victor Ironclaw filled the frame like a wall deciding to become a man. Three-piece charcoal suit. Crest of the Ironmoon Pack at his throat. The kind of face that makes junior wolves apologize for breathing.
His eyes weren't on the cabin.
They were on me. On my arm. On the thin red line where my Omega scent, flat and dead for three years, had suddenly split open like a dropped bottle.
Blood. My blood. In the air of his aircraft.
"Luna."
It hit my mind like a hand hitting a door. Not a word so much as a weight — his Mindlink voice, the one I'd heard every morning for five years and not once since, rough and stunned and furious all at once.
I hadn't granted him the link. That should be impossible. The link should have died the day I handed him those papers.
The bond was supposed to be gone.
Captain Ironclaw looked at me the way a man looks at a fire he thought was out, finding it still burning under the ash. His knuckles were white around the doorframe, and for one unguarded second the cold, legend-of-the-skies mask cracked clean through.
Then the mask came back down, seamless as a cockpit door.
"First Officer will take your report, Miss Winters," he said, in the polished crew-briefing voice that meant nothing and cost him nothing. "See the medic when we land. That's an order."
He didn't wait for "yes, Captain."
He didn't need to.
Duck, my wolf whispered, dazed, from behind her locked door. He said my name. Three years, and he still says my name like that.
I pressed a napkin to my arm, kept my face arranged into pleasant professional nothing, and thought, very clearly, in the direction of that door:
He signed the papers, Wren. Whatever this is — it's not ours anymore.
But thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, in the aircraft of a man who had signed away his mate without asking why, I could still feel his eyes on my back the entire way to London.
Like a hand I couldn't shake off.
Like something that had never, not once in three years, let go.