by Selena Scott
Quill couldn’t sleep. He’d spoken with the Director tonight. He’d known that he couldn’t avoid him forever, and honestly, his training had been chafing at him. It went against all of his conditioning from the last decade to avoid the Director.
The Director was the one who’d rescued Quill from the almost certain death in the internment camps. Quill had been young and alone and sick. Separated from his family. Terrified. He’d stopped eating, opting to sleep deliriously whenever he could, he’d had a fever for what felt like weeks. He’d known that he wasn’t going to make it much longer. He’d watched as shifters all around him succumbed to illness and starvation. Some of them dying right there in the pens where they were kept and some of them being dragged off and never heard from again. He’d hoped against hope that he’d been thrown into the worst of the internment camps, that wherever the rest of his family had been distributed was better than this. But even then he’d known they were dead. There was a silence in his heart that he just knew was because there was no one else on this earth carrying his blood. He was alone in every sense of the word.
That was when the Director had come. He’d visited the internment camp where Quill was being held and was drawn to Quill for some reason or another.
“You’re a survivor,” he’d told Quill. Though the word had seemed strange and foreign to him. He hadn’t thought of himself as surviving. He’d thought of himself as dying. Just perhaps a little more slowly than the rest of the shifters around him.
The Director had had Quill moved to a different part of the internment camp and seen to his recovery. Quill was given better food and a cot to sleep on. Medicine was administered in shockingly painful shots into the muscle of his thigh. Within weeks, he knew for sure that he was no longer dying. He wasn’t thriving, but death wasn’t imminent.
He wasn’t sure he was grateful for that.
But that was when the Director started working with Quill.
That was when Quill realized that he didn’t have to be alone forever. He could be a part of something. He was never getting his family back. They were dead. He was never getting his old life back. That was dead too. But that didn’t mean that he had to shrivel up and roll over like so many of the other shifters in the camp. He came to see them as weak and pathetic. He refused to join their ranks. Quill’s single goal had become to survive. He was a survivor, just like the Director had told him. He held that word in his heart, above all others. It was the only thing that was important to him anymore.
He almost didn’t care what it was that the Director asked him to do. For years, he never questioned his orders. Because those orders were the only structure in Quill’s life. The world was an ugly, unfair place. What did it matter if Quill added to the ugliness?
But unfortunately for Quill, the ugliness had started to matter. At the worst possible time. In the Director’s time of need. A time when if Quill let him down, the Director would lose everything. The entire program that they’d been building together for a decade. It had been a hard five years since the internment camps had been shut down. Sure, Quill was relieved to be living free again. But the Director had run out of government money years ago. And now, with the cultural tide starting to accept shifters, the Director’s actions were starting to appear more and more extreme from the outside. Quill didn’t care. The man had kept him from dying in the internment camp. It wasn’t that Quill felt any sort of love for the man, but loyalty? Loyalty was something that still ran deep for him. And since his family had been killed, the only place for Quill to place that loyalty was at the feet of the Director. He couldn’t let him down.
The problem was, now he knew the Director’s plan for the Wolf family. And he couldn’t un-know it. In fact, Quill himself was to be instrumental in pulling the whole thing off.
He sat in his kitchen in the dead of night and tugged at his dark hair, the overhead light too bright against his scratchy eyes. There was a burning sensation in his throat. The backs of his eyes felt tight. He couldn’t believe he was about to cry.
An image popped into his head, unbidden. Phoenix, Orion, and Dawn all tranquilized and cuffed in the back of a van, enough medicine pumping through their veins to keep them from shifting.
He shook his head. “No,” he whispered to himself, as if that word alone could erase the image. As if his aversion to the thoughts that tortured him could make them evaporate.
He couldn’t stop the turning wheel. It was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not. The Director would not be stopped. The only choice that Quill had was whether or not he remained loyal to the Director. There was nothing he could do for the Wolf siblings. He had to let it go.
The image popped into his head again, only this time, Phoenix and Orion weren’t there. This time, for whatever twisted reason, his brain forced him to zero in on Dawn and Dawn alone. Even unconscious, she shivered against the metal floor of the van, the cuffs cutting into her wrists, her dark hair tangled, stuck to her lips, her eyes moving rapidly beneath her lavender eyelids.
“No,” he said again, tugging even harder against his hair.
A loud knock at his door rent the stillness of the night in two and had Quill jumping up from his chair as if he’d been electrocuted. He glanced at the clock over his stove. One AM. Who the hell was banging on his door in the middle of the night?
The knock came again and Quill strode forward. If they knocked a third time, they were bound to wake his neighbors. He lived in an apartment complex and the walls were thin. The last thing he needed right now was a complaint from Ms. Murphy next door. Quill strode to the door and looked through the peephole. He frowned immediately and yanked open the door.
“What the hell are you doing here at one in the morning?” he demanded of Dawn who was standing in his hallway, her humongous eyes filling up her face and her short black hair dusting her shoulders. She jumped at his tone and for a moment, looked just like the silent, meek woman he’d first met when he’d become her mentor last year. But then her eyes narrowed and a steely resolve seemed to wash over her. She put her hands on her hips and straightened up.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
The position of her hands brought his attention down her body. She wore a fitted black pea coat, stylish jeans that hugged her legs, boots with a heel, and a librarian sweater to go with her librarian glasses.
He felt something quiver deep in his gut and it was almost, almost, enough to have him sending her away without ever finding out why she was here in the first place.
Life was already complicated enough without adding hot-ass librarian sweaters into the mix.
He stepped back and waved her inside, only then realizing the mistake he was making, letting her into his home. He closed the door behind her and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was such a dumbass. He was never going to get the image of her in his kitchen out of his head.
“Your house is… nice,” she said in mild surprise, turning a slow circle to take in the kitchen and the slice of his living room that she could see.
“This surprises you?” His house was nice. Homey even. It was the loyalty thing rising up inside of him. Even though she’d been dead for over a decade, and even though Quill had been a mercenary for almost all of that time, dead inside and working for the Director, Quill’s mother would roll over in her grave if she ever caught him living in a bachelor pad. Homes should be welcoming, how many times had she said that to him in her life? A thousand? Every time she was shoving a laundry basket into his hands and making him tidy up his room. A person’s living space didn’t need to be trendy or stunning, but in his mother’s eyes, they needed to be welcoming.
So, even though most of Quill’s life was depressing and bleak and duplicitous, his home was not. There were carefully folded afghans over the couch and recliners, packed bookshelves, plants on windowsills, coasters on the coffee table. His dishes matched, leftovers were stacked neatly in the fridge, the refrigerator magnets arranged in a pleasing sunburst of color.
“Why?”
She shrugged, looking mildly embarrassed. “Aren’t single men supposed to have pictures of sports teams and half-naked women on their walls?” She craned her head around. “Where’s the pyramid of beer cans?”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “Been in many single men’s houses lately?”
She flushed, her eyes dropping and her bottom lip getting caught between her teeth. For a second Quill’s stomach absolutely bottomed out. As her center-issued mentor, he knew a lot about her life, but he certainly didn’t know everything. Was it at all possible that she had been spending time in single men’s houses? His eyes surveyed her again. Buttoned up and sexy and dark and sunny all at once.
Shit.
Yes. It was totally possible that there were dudes in her life that he knew nothing about. Shit.
“No,” she said, her hands reaching up in a familiar gesture. She was reaching for the long hanks of her dark hair that had been lopped off a few weeks ago. She still wasn’t used to not being able to hide behind the impenetrable curtain of her locks. As soon as her fingertips encountered the blunt ends of her haircut, Dawn straightened, shaking her hair back, as if she were remembering who she was, all the ways she’d changed since she’d come to the human world. “I know about it the same way I’ve learned about everything.”
Ah. The light came on in Quill’s brain. “You read about it.”
She shrugged in affirmation.
He squinted at her. “What kinds of books talk about how men’s houses look in such detail?”
She shook her hair back, semi-defiantly. “Romances, mostly.”
“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t know you were reading romances.”
He’d only ever brought her classic fiction and some biographies. Some manga here and there because she had a special place in her heart for it. She’d learned to read using manga, after all.
She rose and moved into the living room to inspect his bookshelves. “Only at night,” she replied.
He stopped in his tracks and stared at her back. She genuinely didn’t seem like she knew she’d said anything interesting with that sentence.
“You read romance novels at night,” he repeated, almost tonelessly.
“Yeah,” she confirmed, pulling a book out, looking at it for a moment and then re-shelving it.
“Like, right before you fall asleep?” His voice was much too gruff. His skin was too hot and too tight. His apartment was suddenly way too small. Why was he doing this to himself? He needed to be picturing Dawn in her bed, hot and bothered, like he needed a hole in his head.
The image of her on the van floor slashed in front of his vision and he winced. This was all so fucked up.
“Yeah. They pretty much always have a happy ending. It’s nice to fall asleep with that kind of story in your head.”
She turned back to face him and her explanation immediately made him feel like a perv. She was reading romance novels for the happily ever afters, not for getting herself off before bed. He needed a therapist.
“Dawn,” he tried again, his voice still as rough as the serrated edge of a saw. “Is there a reason you’re in my house in the middle of the night?”
She stared at him, her eyes all over his face, the quiet between them intensifying. With anyone else, this would be a very weird moment. Just staring at one another like this. With Dawn, it was the usual. It had taken weeks for her to even speak a single word to him at the beginning of their mentorship together. And even now, she was often more quiet than not. The woman was stingy with her words, and generally speaking, so was Quill. They spent a lot of time locked in eye contact, playing a game of chicken for who was going to be the chump who spoke first.
“How did you even know where I live?” Apparently Quill was the chump. Just like always.
She tapped her nose in response.
Of course. The infamous Wolf Sibling sense of smell. The whole reason they were in this mess in the first place. They had the best sense of smell of any shifter that Quill had ever met, which meant that not only could Dawn track him down across town, right to his apartment door, it meant that the Director wanted nothing more than to recruit them. Which was how Quill found himself in this horrible predicament. Dawn in her black coat looking so lovely next to his packed bookshelves. Soon to be Dawn knocked unconscious, lying on the cold metal floor of a van, handcuffed and speeding toward the Director.
“Right,” he grumbled, turning and going to sit on the couch. He collapsed down, gripping the back of his neck like a vice.
Maybe he should just come clean.
“I’m here because something is wrong with you.”
He raised his head and his eyebrow at once. “What?”
She sighed and moved to sit on the coffee table in front of him. She was so close that their knees could have knocked together if he’d let them. “Something is wrong with you,” she repeated in that blunt way that all the Wolf Siblings had. They hadn’t grown up speaking a lot of English so sometimes their colloquialisms were a little bit rough around the edges. “And don’t deny it. I’ve been noticing it for the last few months. You’re moody and tense and weird. And I know it sounds silly, but I couldn’t sleep tonight thinking about it. I don’t know if you’ll tell me about it or what, but yeah, I think you’re in some kind of trouble.” Her eyes shot up to his. “I’m almost positive that you are.”
Those eyes of hers were dangerous. The same kind of dark that waited for a man at the end of a dock at midnight. Dark water. Black with an unknown depth. She had eyes that could suck him down to the bottom of the ocean if he let them.
“You think I’m in trouble so you drove over here in the middle of the night uninvited?”
She shrugged. “We’re friends.”
It was just two words, simple ones, ones that had been said by millions of people over the course of thousands of years, he was sure of it. But those two simple words simply skewered him.
“Yeah,” he croaked, his throat raw and aching, his fate laid out before him, already sealed.
They were friends.
According to Dawn, they were friends. Which meant trust. Affection. Honesty.
Quill had never wanted to deserve anything more than he wanted to deserve Dawn’s friendship.
The only problem was that friends didn’t sell one another out to government programs that would seek to radicalize and weaponize them, thereby stripping them of freedom and future. Friends definitely didn’t take part in plans to get each other tranquilized and handcuffed in the backs of unmarked vans.
Dawn thought she was friends with Quill. But she didn’t know Quill at all. She only knew the minuscule part of himself that he let her see.
Silence descended again and Dawn sighed, leaning back on her palms. “You’re not going to tell me what’s wrong, are you?”
He said nothing. He was too tired to lie to her. To claim that nothing was wrong. He just sat there and let her eyes search him. God only knew what she saw.
“Fine,” she eventually said. “Then you give me no choice.”
She rose and disappeared into his kitchen. He heard his refrigerator open and close. The silverware drawer. She came back in and he found a pint of vanilla ice cream that he’d forgotten he even had shoved into his h
and. She eyed his television dubiously and then stepped around to the bookshelves instead.
“I’d put a movie on but it’s all so loud. I’d rather do a book.”
“A book?” What the hell was she talking about?
She pulled one off the shelf. “I haven’t read this series yet. But people talk about it all the time.”
He saw that she was holding the first book of a popular fantasy series for adults. He’d read it in high school but barely remembered it. He watched, utterly mystified, as Dawn came back to the couch and sat down next to him, just close enough that he felt the cushions depress under her weight. She leaned over and took a spoonful of the ice cream he still held in his hand. For a moment, she was close enough that he could have leaned down and smelled her hair. Luckily, his self preservation instincts chose that moment to kick in and he saved himself the torture.
“Dawn,” he said hoarsely. “What the hell are you doing?”
She shoved the spoon back into the carton and leaned back, cracking the book open and clearing her throat. “I’m giving you company,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Why?”
“Because you’re clearly sad and stressed and you’ve been a good friend to me over the year. I’m returning the favor and making sure you’re not lonely tonight. It’s the least I can do.”
She cleared her throat again and began to read.
Quill stared at her, the ice cream growing soupy and warm in his hand. He couldn’t remember the last time his loneliness was anyone’s concern. Certainly it hadn’t happened since before his family had died. Since before the shifter camps. Before he’d had his heart ripped out by the cruelty of the unaccepting world.
He didn’t listen to a word she read, all he could do was look at her. All he could think about was what was coming for her. And how there was no way in hell that he could stop it.
***
Diana got to work extra early the following morning. Perhaps it was her way of paying some kinds of karmic penance for her indulgent evening with Orion. She wasn’t going to take it back. She wasn’t going to apologize for it. But maybe, just maybe, she should work extra hard at her job today. She figured it was a good compromise between her orderly half and her wild half. Rome wasn’t built in a day and she couldn’t be expected to let messiness enter every single aspect of her life just because she’d allowed herself to start fooling around with Orion.
