That’s the part that stops me. Not the closeness. Not the efficiency of her hands. The fact that he’s motionless. That something in his body trusts her enough to let her work without resistance, without the restless, stubborn refusal to be tended that I remember as fundamental to who he is.
He changed. Or she changed him. Or time did what it does and wore away the edges that used to make him impossible to reach,and she was the one standing close enough to step into the space that opened up.
I watch her tie off a stitch. Watch him turn his head slightly, toward her voice, I think, though I can’t hear what she’s saying. I watch the ease of it. Two people who’ve been through enough together that the distance between them has been closed.
She was there. For the years I wasn’t. For the mornings and the injuries and the conversations after hard days, she was there. And being there is its own kind of claim.
The thought arrives without drama. That’s the worst of it. Not a wound, just a fact, filed alongside everything else I’ve been carrying.
She was enough when I wasn’t.
I turn away from the window.
Cameron is in the kitchen doorway. He’s been watching me. I don’t know for how long, and I don’t know what my face was doing while I watched the bunkhouse porch. I decide not to think about it.
“They’re ready,” he says. “Everyone’s in.”
I look at my son. His serious eyes. The set of his shoulders—carrying tension from the fight, from the reunion, from the sheer overwhelming weight of a day that started with his mother dead and is ending with her standing in the kitchen.
“Okay,” I say.
I walk past him. Through the hallway. Into the front room, where thirty wolves are waiting for a dead woman to explain herself.
Cormac’s chair by the window is empty. Greta has set a cup of tea on the table beside it, as though he might come in from the garden and sit down.
I stand in front of the cold hearth and look at my pack.
“I know you have questions,” I say. “I owe you some answers.”
Chapter 8
Merric
Sienna stitches my side on the bunkhouse porch while the Ravenclaw wolves file into the main house. She works fast, no anaesthetic, and I bite down on the pain because I deserve worse and we both know it.
“That’s Brenna,” Sienna says. She’s threading a needle through the torn edge of my skin with the same firm hands she uses for everything. “Cameron’s mother. The one you—”
“Yeah.”
“The dead one.”
“Apparently not.”
She ties off a stitch. Pulls it tight. I don’t flinch, but it’s a near thing. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Good answer.” She cuts the thread. “Lying would have worried me more.”
I pull on the shirt Rook brought from the bunkhouse. It’s his, too big in the chest, and it smells like his aftershave and gun oil. The jeans are mine, grabbed in the scramble after the fight. My flank screams when I raise my arms. The leg wound Sienna butterflied shut with tape and a muttered opinion about men who won’t sit down.
From inside the house, I hear voices. Brenna’s, low and even. Willow’s cutting in. The murmur of wolves trying to make sense of a resurrection.
“You don’t have to go in there,” Sienna says. “Give yourself twenty minutes.”
“I don’t have twenty minutes. She’s briefing them now, and I need to hear it.”
Sienna stands up, wipes her hands on a rag, and studies me with that look she gets when she’s deciding how much honesty I can survive. “Merric. That woman in there just walked back from the dead, and you haven’t said a single word about what that means to you.”
