“That’s one of the things I’m thinking.”
“Want me to pull the communication logs from Frostbourne? See who contacted who after we left?”
“Yeah. Quietly.”
Rook nods and slips out. That’s why he’s my second. I don’t have to draw him a map.
The room empties. Greta goes to the kitchen. Cameron finally stands and follows his mother and Willow into the back of the house. He hasn’t let his mother out of his sight since her return.
I’m the last one in the room. Sitting in a borrowed chair in a house that isn’t mine, listening to the floorboards creak overhead where a woman I once loved is putting her family back together.
My back throbs. My leg aches. I’m wearing a filthy shirt, and I smell like blood and antiseptic and the brand of exhaustion that comes from having the ground shift under your feet and not knowing where it’s going to settle.
She’s alive. She’s been running a one-woman intelligence operation across four states. She knows about a leak, a surveillance network, the systematic targeting of her people. She came back, not because of me, but because the situation demanded it.
And she looked through me like I was furniture.
Don’t be a dick, Rourke. Why would she come back for you?
I sit in the empty room for a long time. The house settles around me. Through the window, I can see Dane’s silhouette by the barn guarding the prisoners. The evening star is out.
And I think about the wasted years. Years of carrying the weight of a woman I knew I’d failed, telling myself if I’d been braver, if I’d fought harder, if I’d turned my back on the council and their fucking ideals…
She’s alive. And she doesn’t need my remorse. Doesn’t want it. Looked at me like a complication to be managed rather than a man she once had feelings for.
Maybe that’s what I am. Maybe that’s what I earned.
I shake my head, dismissing the unwanted emotions that walk beside all of these notions. Then I get up, because there’s work to do, and sitting here feeling sorry for myself isn’t going to keep anyone alive.
I walk out the door. And put thoughts of Brenna Corvus behind me. Where they belong.
Chapter 9
Brenna
Cameron waits until Willow leaves. He’s patient about it—sits on the edge of the bed in my old room, hands between his knees, watching Willow and me finish a conversation that was more ceasefire negotiation than family reunion. When my niece finally goes, pulling the door shut behind her with a firmness that communicates everything she’s holding back, Cameron lifts his head and looks at me.
I know that expression. I raised it. The rigid shoulders and the level gaze and the careful control that means something’s about to break loose underneath.
“Okay,” I say. I pull the wooden chair from the corner and sit facing him, close enough to touch if he wants it, but not so close he feels cornered. “Go ahead.”
“Go ahead, what?”
“Whatever you need to say. I can take it.”
His hands grip each other between his knees, knuckles white. He’s working up to something, building it brick by brick the way he’s always done—Cameron doesn’t erupt, he constructs—and I wait because this is his to build.
“They told me you burned.” His voice is controlled. “The night of the fire. Greta held me back. I could see the outbuilding, the whole thing going up, and I was screaming, and she had her arms around me, and she kept saying,‘She’s gone, baby, she’s gone.’”
I don’t look away. I owe him that. But his words gut me.
“Cam…” My voice abandons me, but it doesn’t matter. He’s still talking.
“I tried to go in. Did you know that? I shifted and tried to get through the fire, and Arlen tackled me. Pinned me in the dirt while I howled.” He swallows. “I was fifteen.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I need to make sure you actually know what that was like. Not the rational version. Not theI made a hard choice for the greater goodversion. I need you to know what it was like to be fifteen and watch your mother burn and smell the smoke for weeks afterward in your own hair and wake up every morning forgetting she was dead and then remembering.”
