“And if I can't? If I'm too broken, too—” Rafe stopped, jaw tight. “What if I'm not capable of being what you need me to be?”
“Then you try anyway,” I said.
Rafe looked at me, and for just a moment, I saw past the masks and the charm and the carefully constructed vulnerability. Saw someone young and scared and desperatelylonely, someone who'd learned to survive by being whatever people needed him to be.
Someone who'd forgotten, maybe, how to just be himself.
“I want to believe that,” he said quietly. “I want to believe it so badly it hurts.”
“Then believe it,” Michael said. “And prove us right.”
Emmy's shriek cut through the moment. “Mr. Rafe! You have to come be the dragon again! Lily says the princess escaped!”
“I'm not a princess!” Sam's outraged voice carried across the meadow.
Rafe's mouth twitched. The tension in his shoulders eased slightly. “Duty calls.”
“Apparently.”
He started back toward the cubs, then paused. Turned. “Daniel. Michael. For what it's worth—” He stopped, seemed to struggle with the words. “I haven't felt this safe in a very long time. And I know that probably sounds like manipulation, because everything I say sounds like manipulation at this point. But it's true.”
He walked away before I could respond, before I could decide whether I believed him.
The cubs swarmed him immediately, Lily reclaiming her perch on his shoulders, Theo presenting him with a new crown he'd apparently been weaving while we talked. Rafe accepted both with what looked like genuine delight, and within moments he was galloping across the meadow making dragon noises while four small warriors tried to bring him down.
“What do you think?” Michael asked quietly.
I watched Rafe pretend to be slain, collapsing dramatically while the cubs cheered their victory. Watched Theo carefully adjust the new crown on his head. Watched Emmy show him her bandaged knee with pride, clearly considering him her personal hero for the day.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that he's either exactly what he appears to be—a broken man looking for somewhere to belong—or he's the most dangerous person I've ever let into my pack.”
“Can't it be both?”
I looked at Michael. At the man who'd lost his wife and found his way to me anyway. At the man who saw good in people because he chose to, not because he was naive.
“Yeah,” I said. “It probably can.”
11
THE SPACES WHERE LONELINESS LIVES
DANIEL
The forest pressed closer than it should have, shadows pooling in ways that suggested depth beyond what existed. The air tasted wrong. Copper and ozone threaded through pine, like a storm building just beyond sight.
Alaric walked on my left, silent and watchful in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of his father. Twenty-six years old and already carrying himself like he had something to prove to the world. Which he did, constantly, to everyone who would listen.
Rafe walked on my right, still favoring his left side slightly, breathing easy despite the pace I'd set. I'd brought him along partly to test his healing, partly because he'd asked and I was still weighing whether that eagerness was genuine or something else.
“You didn't have to come,” Alaric said to Rafe, not bothering to hide the edge in his voice. “Perimeter checks are pack business.”
“I know.” Rafe's tone stayed mild, unbothered. “But I'm trying to be useful. Sitting in that room makes me feel like a prisoner.”
“You're a guest.”
Rafe glanced at me, something flickering in his amber eyes that I couldn't quite read. “Feels about the same from where I'm standing.”
Alaric made a sound that wasn't quite a growl. He'd been against taking Rafe in from the start. Made his position clear in the pack meeting, said we were bringing a liability into our territory when we could barely handle the threats we already had.
