"What brought you back?" I asked, my eyes still on my line, giving him the privacy of not being watched.
He let out a long breath, his shoulders dropping. "My father got sick. Three years ago. Cancer." He rubbed the back of his neck, fingers digging into the muscle there. "Jean-Pierre called me—first time we'd talked in almost a decade. Said Papa was asking for me. Said I should come home if I wanted to say goodbye." His hand dropped back to the rod, gripping it like a lifeline.
"Did you?" I kept my voice neutral, though I already knew the answer. A man didn't carry guilt like that if he hadn't shown up.
"Yeah." The word came out rough, scraped raw. "Drove all night. Got there expecting him to be on his deathbed, expecting some big reconciliation scene like in the movies." He laughed, bitter and sharp, shaking his head at the memory. "Instead he looked at me and said, 'Took you long enough, boy. Now sit down and stop looking so dramatic.'" Despite everything, a ghost of real affection flickered across his face.
I made a sound that might have been a laugh, surprising myself. The rusty feeling of it caught in my chest. "He recovered?"
"Remission. Stubborn old bastard refused to die just to spite the doctors." He shook his head, almost smiling now, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly. "I stayed. Told myself it was temporary, just until he was back on his feet. But thenweeks turned into months, and months turned into years, and I realized..." He trailed off, staring at the darkening surface, the sky bleeding orange and purple above us.
"Running wasn't working." I finished the thought, barely above a murmur. I knew about that firsthand—the way you could travel a thousand miles and still end up right where you started.
"No." He met my eyes, and I saw the surprise there when he found understanding instead of judgment. His shoulders dropped, tension bleeding out of him like water from a cracked dam. "It wasn't." Something shifted between us, a wall coming down that neither of us had meant to build in the first place.
We sat in the quiet for a while, lines in the water, the evening settling around us. His scent had shifted—less performance, more real. Honey and whiskey and grief, sharp-edged but honest. I breathed it in without meaning to.
The words came before I could stop them.
"I had four brothers." My voice sounded strange to my own ears, rusty from disuse on this particular subject. "Not blood. Unit." The words felt like stones being dislodged from somewhere deep.
Remy went very still beside me, his line forgotten in the water. He didn't say anything, didn't push—just waited, giving me the same space I'd given him.
"Marcus. Jonesy. DeShawn. Tommy." Each name felt like a stone in my mouth, heavy and precious, names I'd carried alone for too long. "Best men I ever knew. We went through hell together—training, deployment, things I can't talk about." My jaw tightened until my teeth ached. "Then one bad mission. Bad intel. Ambush." The words came out clipped, military-brief, because anything more would break me.
"Silas—" Remy's voice was soft, almost a warning, like he wasn't sure I should keep going. His hand twitched toward me, then stopped.
"I was the only one who made it out." My hands had gone white-knuckled on the fishing rod, the plastic creaking under the pressure. "Three days through hostile territory, carrying their dog tags and wondering why I was still breathing when they weren't." I could still feel the weight of those tags against my chest, four sets of metal that had burned like brands.
I didn't know why I was telling him this. I'd told Artemis because she'd asked, because her stillness had pulled it out of me. But Remy—I barely knew him. We'd circled each other for weeks, two Alphas competing for the same Omega, and now here I was spilling my guts on his houseboat like we were old friends.
He didn't say anything. Just reached into the cooler, pulled out two beers, and handed me one without a word. I took it. Our fingers brushed, and I caught his scent again—raw now, grief-sharp and real. The same way he'd probably smelled at his brother's grave.
We drank without talking, watching the sun sink toward the tree line. The bayou turned gold, then orange, then deep purple. Somewhere in the distance, an owl called.
"Harper leads." I said it like a fact, because it was one. No question, no hesitation. The words felt right in my mouth, a truth I'd known since the storm.
"Yeah." The word came easy from him, true and certain, no performance in it. He set down his beer and turned to face me properly. "He does." He nodded slowly, like he was confirming something to himself, the last light catching the gold in his eyes.
"Good." I took another drink, the beer cold against my palm, condensation dripping down my wrist. "Wouldn't follow someone who didn't know how to lead." I'd followed badleaders before—men who got people killed through ego or incompetence. Never again. Harper wasn't like that.
"You follow him because you trust him?" Remy asked, fingers drumming against his thigh in that restless way of his, amber eyes curious in the fading light.
"I follow him because he earned it." I set down my beer on the arm of the chair, staring out at the darkening water where the first stars were starting to reflect like scattered diamonds. "He sees us. All of us. Not just her—us too. What we need. What we're afraid of." A pause, the words harder to say, scraping against something tender in my chest. "That's rare." Men like Harper didn't come along often. I'd learned to recognize them—and to hold on when I found one.
Remy was quiet for a moment, processing that, his fingers finally still on his thigh. Then: "We're really doing this, aren't we? Pack. All four of us." His voice was softer now, stripped of performance, real in a way I was starting to crave from him. He turned to look at me, and in the dying light his face was open, vulnerable, nothing like the charming mask he wore for everyone else.
I thought about Artemis, about the way she looked at all three of us like we mattered. About Harper, steady and sure, leading without demanding. About Remy, hiding his broken pieces behind a smile but letting them show anyway. I reached over and clapped a hand on his shoulder—brief, solid. The most physical contact we'd ever had.
"Yeah." My voice came out rough but sure, the word settling into my chest like it belonged there. I squeezed his shoulder once before letting go, feeling the warmth of him through his shirt. "We are."
His line jerked hard, bending the rod nearly double, and he scrambled to reel it in—a catfish, maybe three pounds, fighting hard against the pull. I grabbed the net without being asked,moving in sync with him like we'd done this a hundred times, scooping the fish out as he brought it alongside the boat.
"Nice one." I held it up, examining the whiskers, the dark speckled skin, water dripping from its tail onto the deck. Solid fish. Good eating. "You cook?"
"Cajun style." He grinned, and for once it reached his eyes, crinkling the corners, transforming his whole face into something bright and warm. He held up the fish like a trophy, water still dripping from its whiskers. "You staying for dinner?" The invitation was casual, but I heard the hope underneath—the same hope I'd heard in my own voice when I'd shown up on his dock with a six-pack and no real excuse.
I looked at the fish, then at him, then at the stars just starting to appear above the cypress trees, diamond-bright against the darkening sky. "Yeah." I almost smiled, feeling the unfamiliar pull of it at the corners of my mouth. My face had nearly forgotten how. "I'm staying."
