The Best Man's Wolf

Monica Samuels, forty-four years old and twenty-two years on the job, pulled her rented Corolla into the gravel drive of the lakeside estate at two in the afternoon on a Friday, and the first thing she thought was, wow, somebody is making serious money.

The second thing she thought was, please don't let him be here yet.

She should have known better. Tyler Zhang's black SUV was already parked dead center in front of the manor house, angled like it owned the gravel. Of course it was. The man had probably arrived at dawn and personally inspected the trees.

Monica grabbed her garment bag and her duffel and marched up the steps. Lulu had texted her a schedule that was honestly more detailed than some search warrants she had executed, so she knew the rehearsal was at four, dinner at six, and that she and Tyler were expected to coordinate the seating chart together. Together. Lulu Gibbons had been her best friend since Monica was twenty-three and Lulu was eighteen, sharing a dorm room that was very cramped, and this was how she repaid her.

"Monica!" Lulu appeared in the doorway in cutoff shorts and a tank top, thirty-nine years old and glowing like a lamp. "Oh my god, you made it!"

"I said I would, didn't I?" Monica hugged her. "Nice place. Whose rich uncle owns this?"

"Nobody's! Barrett booked it through a client rate. Don't ask questions, just enjoy the lake."

Monica intended to enjoy the lake very much, right up until she walked into the sunroom and saw a tall man in a linen shirt arranging place cards with the focus of a bomb tech.

"Tyler."

"Officer Samuels." He didn't look up. "You're late."

"It's two oh three. You want to frisk me, go ahead." She set her bags down. "Where's my seat?"

"Ah, see, that's the fun part." He finally looked up, and there it was, that amber color that made people assume he wore contacts. "Lulu left us the master list, and I've been reconciling it with the table sizes. Your aunt has a shellfish allergy, so she can't sit near the seafood station, and your cousin Xander talks exclusively about crypto, so I've quarantined him."

"Quarantined him where?"

"Table eight, with Barrett's college roommates. They deserve each other."

Monica picked up the chart and squinted at it. "You put me at table three. The singles table."

"Temporary seating only," he said, entirely too smooth about it. "Revisions pending."

Lulu drifted back in at exactly the wrong moment, saw the two of them hovering over the chart like rival generals, and made a noise like a kettle. "You two. Oh my god, you two. It's one weekend. One. Can you please not go to war over a seating chart?"

"We're not at war," Tyler said.

"We're at a stalemate," Monica corrected.

"See? Progress."

Barrett Kline wandered in from the kitchen with a plate of cheese, forty-two years old and radiating the calm of a man who had made peace with his fate. "Are we fighting? I was promised no fighting." He set the plate down between them as a gesture of peace. "Tyler, be nice. Monica, be nice. Lulu, breathe."

"I'm breathing," Lulu said, not breathing.

The rehearsal itself went fine, mostly. Everyone walked where the coordinator pointed, the readers took their jobs deadly seriously, and the officiant only flubbed the names twice. The trouble started when the coordinator explained the processional order and Tyler offered Monica his arm.

"Nope," she said.

"It's the processional order, Officer. There's a diagram."

"I know how a processional works. I can walk by myself."

"Of course you can." He held the arm out a little farther. "But this is Lulu's day, and Lulu's day has a diagram."

Monica glared at him, then took his arm, mostly because Lulu was watching with the eyes of a woman prepared to intervene. His arm was warm through the linen. Suspiciously warm. The man ran hot, which she had noticed before at Barrett's company picnic and had filed away as a quirk, along with the way he never seemed to eat his steak less than rare, and the way he once declined a date to a rooftop bar because, quote, the moon was wrong that night.

The moon. Who says no to a rooftop over the moon?

Dinner was on the terrace, candles and fireflies and a string quartet that Lulu had clearly overpaid for. The food was excellent. The company was fine. And then, toward the end of the main course, Barrett stood up, tapped his glass, and said the sentence Monica had been dreading since Tuesday.

"Now, before dessert, we've got a joint toast from our best man and maid of honor. Joint. On purpose. We're testing something."

"Testing what?" Monica hissed at Lulu as she stood.

"Compatibility," Lulu said sweetly, and raised her glass with the grin of a supervillain.

So there they were, side by side, facing thirty-odd guests in the golden dusk light. Tyler leaned toward the microphone first.

"Good evening, everyone. I'm Tyler Zhang, best man, business partner to the groom, and, as some of you know, owner of the finest security firm in the tri-county area."

"He is not," Monica said into the same microphone. "The sheriff's office holds that title, and we both know the tri-county award was a popularity contest."

"Best man, everyone," Tyler said over the laughter. "She's been like this since I met her. You get used to it. Some of us even come to enjoy it."

"Careful, Zhang. I know where you park."

"Please, everyone, relax. We're actually quite fond of each other." He said it looking straight at her, and his eyes did that thing again, that slow amber consideration that made her feel like she was being read for prints. "What can I say about Barrett? Twelve years ago he walked into my office with a business plan on a legal pad and the confidence of a man who had never met payroll. I said yes immediately. Best decision of my professional life, second only to whatever decision leads him to marry the woman at table one."

"See, that was actually sweet," Monica admitted, and the crowd murmured agreement. Then she took her turn. "And Lulu. I've known Lulu since she was eighteen, and in all that time I have watched her do many reckless things, but marrying Barrett Kline is the first one I'd cosign. He is patient, he is honest, and once he helped me change a tire in a thunderstorm without complaining once, which is the highest bar I know." She raised her glass. "To the happy couple."

"To the happy couple," Tyler echoed, and then, quieter, just for her as the applause went up, "You didn't mention the tire was on a date. With me."

"You weren't the date. You were the tow truck guy my date called."

"I was the rescue."

"You were the roadside assistance."

He laughed, a real one, low and warm, and Monica hated how much she noticed the warmth. "Same thing," he said. "Different branding."

Under the string quartet's restart, she caught herself smiling and shut it down fast. She was here for Lulu. She was here for the lake. She was absolutely not here for a private-sector rival with weird lunar scheduling issues and eyes like a traffic light that only ever turned yellow.

The dessert was a lemon thing that Barrett had strong opinions about. Tyler took one bite of his and excused himself from the table, murmuring something about a call. Monica watched him go, noted that the sky was already purpling over the water, and noted, with mild alarm, that the moon coming up over the lake was nearly full.

Huh, she thought, and ordered a second glass of wine.

Monica gave the second glass of wine twenty minutes to do its work, and then she went looking for him anyway. She told herself it was because he was her partner in seating-chart crime and she needed his sign-off on the aunt with the shellfish allergy. Nobody bought it, least of all her.

He was down on the dock, of course. Standing at the very end with his hands in his pockets, looking at the moon like it was a colleague he had a complicated relationship with. His jacket was off, draped over a post, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up.

"Stalking your guests, Zhang? Because as a cop, I have questions."

"Just enjoying the air." He didn't turn around. "You followed me, Samuels. Who's stalking who?"

"I came to talk about table assignments."

"At nine at night. On a dock." Now he turned, and the moonlight did something unfair to his face. "Sure. Table assignments."

She came out to the end anyway, because apparently she was the kind of person who did that now. The wood was warm under her flats and the lake was doing that black glass thing that lakes only do in summer.

"Fine," she said. "I came to ask what your deal is."

"My deal?"

"The moon thing. The rare steak. The fact that Barrett's college roommates asked me, very casually, if there'd be any 'outdoor activities after dark.' At a wedding, Tyler. What outdoor activity is happening after dark that requires advance notice?"

He laughed, but it was a careful laugh. "Team-building exercise."

"You're a terrible liar for someone who runs a security firm."

"You're a very good interrogator for someone off duty."

"I'm never off duty, that's the entire joke of me." She sat down on the edge of the dock and pulled her knees up. "Lulu says you're solid. Barrett would take a bullet for you, metaphorically, I assume. Twelve years of partnership. So why do I keep looking at you like you're a case file?"

Tyler was quiet for a moment. Out on the water, a fish did something, a single slap of sound.

"Because I can smell it," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"Your skepticism. It's got a scent. Most people's suspicion smells like fear, sharp and sour. Yours doesn't. Yours smells like somebody who checked the references and still wants to see the building." He sat down next to her, a careful arm's length away, and yes, she noticed the distance, and yes, she noticed that she noticed. "That's not an insult, Monica. It's the most flattering thing anyone's smelled like in years."

"That is the strangest compliment I've ever received, and I once got one from a hostage negotiator."

"You get them from me regularly. Better get used to it."

She looked at him sideways. He was watching the moon, not her, which somehow made it easier to ask the real question.

"Are you going to tell me what you are? Or is that a Saturday problem?"

"What do I smell like to you?"

"Warm. Like a dryer with a wood stove in it. And something under that, something I don't have a word for."

"Then you already know," he said softly. "I'm not going to say the word on a dock on a nearly full moon. That feels like tempting fate, and I have a very good relationship with fate right now. I'm best man at a wedding. Fate and I are square."

"A werewolf." She said it flat, testing it in her mouth. "You're a werewolf."

"See, now you've said the word, and I have to spend the rest of the night checking the tree line." But he was smiling, that real smile from dinner, and his knee was about four inches from hers and radiating heat like a small heater with excellent cheekbones.

"Why tell me at all?"

"Because you were going to figure it out anyway, and I'd rather you hear it from me than catch me curling my nails." He turned to look at her then, and his eyes had gone that amber again, unmistakably amber in the moonlight. "And because for two years you've looked at me like a rival, and somewhere in the last four hours you started looking at me like a mystery, and honestly? I like the second one better."

Monica's heart was doing something she chose not to narrate. "This doesn't mean I trust you."

"Of course not."

"It means I'm updating my file."

"That's all I can ask." He stood and offered her a hand up, and she took it, and his hand was so warm she almost said something about it. She didn't. She had some dignity left. Probably.

---

Saturday morning arrived golden and loud, the way wedding mornings do, all clattering dishes and Lulu's mother asking where the good hangers went. Monica was up at seven in her dress uniform of maid-of-honor emergencies: coffee in one hand, emergency kit in the other.

"Lulu. Sweetheart. Breathe."

"I can't breathe, the florist said peonies and these are GARDEN ROSES, Monica, do you understand the betrayal?"

"They're both round and pink. No one will know."

"Lulu, they're gorgeous," chimed in Joy, one of the bridesmaids, from the vanity.

"I will know. I'll be standing there making vows and thinking about the roses."

"Lulu Gibbons, we have known each other for twenty-one years," Monica said, sitting down next to her on the bed. "You have never once picked the wrong round pink flower for anything. You picked Barrett, didn't you? Solid work."

Lulu laughed wetly and swatted at her. "You're the worst maid of honor."