And then this—this room full of women and blankets and mugs and too-sweet brownies pressed into my hands whether I wanted them or not.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I saw.”
Natalie leaned forward, forearms on her knees, fingers loosely laced. “You’re allowed to be furious at what happened,” she said. “At your father. At whoever strapped that vest onto him. At the universe, if you’re into that. And you’re allowed to berelieved he can’t hurt you anymore. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. Trust me, I’ve moderated enough public meetings to know humans are one big contradiction.”
“You’re not alone,” Claire said. “None of us just … married a Dane after meeting him at Whole Foods. There was always something. Danger, secrets, some shadow-whatever breathing down our necks.”
“Now, it’s The Vanguard,” Camille said quietly. The word rolled off her tongue with French edges. “We can say it. It doesn’t summon them like demons.”
A chill ripple tiptoed down my spine at the name.
“Point is,” Isabel cut in, giving Camille a brief nod of thanks before focusing on me again, “every woman in this room has had her life turned inside out by the Danes and the mess around them. We’ve all stood where you are—at the edge of something we didn’t choose, deciding if we’re in or out.”
“In or out of what?” I asked, even though I thought I knew.
Portia tipped her head towards the windows, toward the looming bulk of Dominion Hall reflected in the glass. “This,” she said simply. “The family. The fight. The … collective delusion that we can build something good out of all this chaos and money and blood.”
Lexi huffed out a breath, smiling crookedly. “When Lucas first dragged me here, I thought it was a cult,” she admitted. “Like, capital C. Secret rooms, weird security, too many handsome emotionally unavailable men in one place.”
“Hey,” Sloane objected faintly.
“I stand by it,” Lexi said. “But then I watched them. The way they circle each other. The way they circle us. And I realized … It's not a cult. It’s a pack. A very dysfunctional, heavily armed pack. And I wanted in, anyway.”
“They’re not easy,” Anna said. “Any of them. They are … intense. Possessive.” Her mouth twisted like the word tasted complicated.
I looked from face to face. They were all so different. Different backgrounds, accents, careers. A hotelier, a podcaster, a musician, a preacher’s daughter, a ballet dancer, an influencer, a wedding planner, a chef, a scientist, a mayor, an actress.
And yet their eyes held the same thing when they looked at me—recognition. Like they were seeing an earlier version of themselves.
“How many are there?” I asked quietly. “Brothers, I mean. Gideon said some things earlier, but then … everything happened.”
“Fourteen,” Natalie said. “Seven from Charleston. Seven from Montana. All with the same father, two different mothers. You’ve met most of them now.”
“Most?” My stomach flipped.
Sloane ticked names off on her fingers. “Charleston: Ryker, Marcus, Atlas, Noah, Elias, Charlie, Silas. Montana: Gideon, Caleb, Jacob, Ethan, Lucas. That leaves two Montana ghosts still out there.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry. Not ghosts. Ghost-adjacent. Alive. Probably brooding somewhere picturesque.”
“We’ll bring them in,” Isabel said, like she was promising a weather forecast. “That’s what this whole … thing is now. Collect the lost brothers, keep them alive, keep them from breaking anything too expensive.”
“Gideon’s been on his own a long time,” Meghan added. “He’ll pretend he likes it that way. He doesn’t. None of them actually do. They’re all just very committed to the bit.”
My chest pulled tight. I thought of Gideon alone in that little room at my inn, counting my breaths. Alone on that porch, watching the sensors. Alone with his ghosts long before any of this.
“And you?” Claire asked softly. “What do you want, Hazel? Not in some big, abstract ‘what’s your five-year plan’ way. Tonight. Sitting here in this ridiculous leather museum with a bunch of strangers who won’t be strangers for long, if you let them.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The truth bumped around inside me, big and unwieldy.
“I want to go home,” I said finally.
Meghan’s brows drew together. “To the inn?”
“Yes,” I said, and the word rang clear in me. “To the inn. To my ridiculous creaky house with its new porch and its cursed dining room and its will-mandated year. I want to finish what my grandmother asked me to do. I want to repaint the rooms and fix the roof and learn how to make breakfast without burning the biscuits.” My throat thickened. “I want that life. That quiet. That choice.”
“And?” Claire prompted gently.
“And,” I whispered, “I don’t want to do it alone.”
The sentence hung there, vibrating in the space between us.
