My heart picks up as if it knows the answer before my head will dare. I taste the iron tang of fear and the sweet heat of want in the same breath.
I lift the leather strip to my face. It smells like him. It smells like safety and danger braided together.
"Tell me," I say. "If I take it, will it change us? Will it change Leo's life?"
He doesn't hesitate. "It will change everything. But not the things you fear most. It won't sign you over to anyone. It won't replace your voice. It will make me your person. In front of the pack it will be me who answers for you, not the other way around."
The room holds its breath with me. Outside, a distant news van starts its engine like an old animal rousing. The echo sounds like possible trouble.
My palm sweats against the leather. The men I stand with have already given up a lot. They kept my son. They offered terms that are mine alone to hold.
I open my mouth to speak. The answer hovers on my tongue like a coin waiting to drop. The night presses in. Fear and hope thump against my ribs.
My phone buzzes on the table. A new text. Unknown number.
My thumb shakes as I reach for it. The preview is a picture: the same singed token from before, close enough to see the burned edges and the same ink symbol. Someone knows where Leo sleeps.
The breath leaves me. The decision slides from being about belonging to a choice between two kinds of danger.
I do not answer. I look up at Caleb. His face hardens into a shield I have no right to ask for and desperately need.
My mouth opens again. The words line up, jagged and true. "I?—"
I don't finish.
10
MIA TORRES
My fingers hover over the deadbolt like it’s the line between the life I built and the one I’m about to choose. The lock is colder than I remember. The hallway smells of old carpet and bleach. Leo’s sneakers are gone from the doormat. The apartment feels too small to hold everything that’s changed—too small for my fear and the small, fierce heat that’s been growing for months.
I slide the key, close my eyes, and pull the door shut.
It clicks, ordinary and final. My chest unclenches a fraction. I shove the last box of papers into the trunk—custody orders, transcripts, the signed guardianship agreement with Caleb’s handwriting slanting steady across the page. I touch the leather strip folded in my palm, the one he gave me the night after the rescue: nothing ceremonial, just a smooth, personal thing he said was “yours to keep until you decide.” The leather smells like him—rain and smoke and saddle oil. Calm. Dangerous. Home.
“Ready?” Caleb’s voice is right behind me.
He’s in jeans that have seen real work, a jacket slung over one broad shoulder, and that scar along his hand that always makes something shift under my skin. He’s quieter now than the first morning he showed up at my door. There’s no packarmor tonight, just the soft, guarded look he saves for Leo and—sometimes—for me. For a moment the city noise blurs and the only things that exist are the strip of leather and the curve of his mouth when he smiles like he knows how much rests on this small, ordinary act.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
I want to say yes like it’s a fact, like a court order. Instead I say the truth. “I’m terrified.” The words taste like metal. “I’m terrified of losing him if I make the wrong choice. I’m terrified of losing myself if I don’t let someone in.”
He reaches and takes my hand. His fingers close over mine—not a grip that claims, but one that offers. “You won’t lose him,” he says. “Not while I breathe.” His thumb brushes the leather in my palm. “Not while I have anything to say.”
We stand in that thin doorway and it’s both mundane and everything: the crossing of an ordinary threshold and the slow, private surrender of a woman who has learned to hold steady against abandonment and calculation. I tuck the leather into my pocket instead of tying it to anything. I need time. He nods and doesn’t push.
“I’ll lock up,” I tell him, because the act of locking is how I buy a little more time to breathe. “You take Leo to the ranch tonight. Just the weeknights. The plan.” It’s the script Ana helped write—city weekends, ranch weeknights, clear legal limits. I say it like I’m reciting a vow to a judge.
“City weekends. Weeknights at the ranch. No rituals without your say-so. Veto is everything,” he replies.
“That’s in writing,” I say. “I signed it.”
“And you have my word.” He steps closer. Heat hums between us. For a beat I forget to be practical. I picture Leo asleep at the ranch, Mateo humming a bass lullaby, moonlight on the corral—safe. Then my mind darts to the burned token, the folded note that showed up the night the emissary came, theanonymous photo of charred leather that arrived two nights ago. Someone knows where Leo sleeps. Someone didn’t need to be told.
Caleb’s jaw tightens when my eyes flick to the phone in my hand. He reads worry the way he reads a room—without words. “I’ll make the calls,” he says. “No leaks. No surprises.”
“I’d like to walk out with him tonight,” I tell him, because saying it makes it real. “For Leo. For me. For—” I stop. For us. For the tiny family we’ve cobbled together from contracts and midnight pancakes and stolen kisses.
