Her eyes are wet. Her teeth are clenched. And there it is: the anger arriving, right on schedule.
“Two years.” Her voice shakes. “Two goddamn years, Brenna.”
“I know.”
“We buried you. We held a ceremony. Cameron—” She looks at him, standing behind me with his hand locked around my wrist. “He cried for a month. Amonth. He was fifteen, and he cried himself sick every night. And I held him, and I told him you were gone… but you weren’t!”
“Willow.”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare tell me it was necessary. Don’t you dare tell me you had a plan.”
“I had a plan.”
She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh and entirely a wound. “Of course you did. You always have a goddamn plan. And it’s always a plan that involves you disappearing and everyone else picking up the pieces.”
She’s right. Not about always. But about this time, she’s right. I won’t insult her by arguing.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It doesn’t cover it. But I’m saying it anyway.”
Willow glares at me. Her chin is trembling, and she’s biting down to stop it. The knives hang at her sides, forgotten.
“Are you staying?” she asks. “Or is this another stop on the Brenna Corvus Save Everyone Alone Tour?”
“I’m staying.”
Something shifts in her face. Not forgiveness. We’re a long way from that. But the faintest release of a tension she’s beencarrying. The possibility that she might not have to hold all of this by herself anymore.
“Good,” she says. “Because your ranch is falling apart and your people are eating squirrel, and I amtired, Brenna. I am so goddamn tired.”
I reach out and grip her arm. Firm. Stable. The way I used to when she was ten, and the world was too big for her.
“I know you are. And I’m going to fix it. But right now we need to get out of this field and behind the wards, because Cameron just sent up a flare that every hostile within fifty miles could have picked up.”
Willow registers the reality of our situation. The anger doesn’t leave her face, but it rearranges itself around something more functional. She straightens. Nods. Turns to her fighters and starts issuing orders.
There she is. The leader who held Ravenclaw together without me. Hurting and furious, and still the first one to flip from emotion to action when the situation demands it.
She’s magnificent. And I will spend the rest of my life making this up to her.
We move as a group back toward the ranch. Cameron walks beside me, close enough that our arms brush. Willow takes point with her fighters. Behind us, Merric’s pack handles the prisoners—the males hauling the bound purists, the redhead collecting scattered weapons, the dark-haired scout appearing from somewhere with a silent efficiency that makes me nervous in a professional way.
Merric walks behind me. I don’t look back at him. I can hear his breathing—uneven, the flank wound making itself known—and the unsteady cadence of his stride where the torn leg is holding but only just.
He doesn’t ask for help. Doesn’t slow down. Just keeps pace with blood on his skin and questions in his mouth that he’s too smart—or too stubborn—to ask while we’re in the open.
Good. Let him hold those questions. Let him carry them the way I’ve been carrying mine.
We reach the ranch yard, and the Ravenclaw wolves come out to meet us.
They see the blood first. Then the prisoners. Then Cameron, walking upright with his hand locked around mine.
Then me.
The silence that falls over the yard is crushing. Thirty faces, some I know and some I don’t, staring at a dead woman walking through their gate.
Greta is the first to move. She steps off the porch with her hand pressed to her mouth, white hair bright in the afternoon sun. She doesn’t speak. She just walks toward me with the slow, deliberate pace of a woman who’s lived long enough to know that miracles are often just delayed disasters.
She stops in front of me. Looks me up and down. Reaches out and touches my face, one weathered hand against my cheek, feeling for real.
