“You knew him once.”
“A long time ago. People change.”
Cameron studies me. He’s too perceptive for my comfort, always has been, even as a small child. He’d watch people with those intense eyes and see things they didn’t want seen.
“He didn’t change the way you think,” Cameron says. “He’s just quiet about who he is. Like you.”
I don’t have a response that doesn’t open a door I need to keep shut, so I don’t respond.
“I’m still angry,” he says after a moment. “I need you to know that.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad you’re alive. But I’m angry. And I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
“As long as it needs to. I’m not going anywhere.”
He nods. Stands. Walks to the door. Pauses with his hand on the frame. For a second, he looks young again. Not the scarred, sharp-eyed survivor, but the boy who used to linger in doorways at bedtime, stretching the day out because he didn’t want to let go of it yet.
“Goodnight, Ma.”
“Goodnight, baby.”
“I’m not a baby.” He leaves. The door clicks shut.
I sit in the chair for a while. The house creaks around me, settling as night falls. Through the floor, I can hear Greta moving in the kitchen below, the soft sounds of a woman putting a household to bed the way she’s done every night for decades.
I stand and cross to the window. The yard is dark below, lit only by the glow from the bunkhouse and the thin wedge of porch light. I scan the outskirts out of habit—the tree line, the fence posts, the angles where the hills meet the cleared ground. Then I push my awareness outward, feeling for the ward lines the way my mother taught me and her mother taught her. They hum at the edge of my senses, faint blue threads woven through the earth along the property boundary. Intact. Holding. But thin. Thinner than they should be, thinned by years without a strong magic-user to feed them.
Something else to fix. Something else to carry.
My eyes drift back to the yard, and I see him.
A shape on the bunkhouse steps. Elbows on knees. Head bowed. I’d know that silhouette in pitch dark, in a crowd of a thousand, from a mile away. The width of the shoulders. The line of his neck where it meets his back, exposed now, with his head bent forward, vulnerable in a way he’d never allow if he knew someone was watching. I remember pressing my mouth to that exact spot. The skin was always warmer there. He’d go still whenI touched it, the way a man goes still when he’s concentrating on not losing control.
My body heats at the memory. Faint. Persistent. A warmth that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t respond to logic.
I clamp down on it. Hard.
A figure emerges from the bunkhouse behind him. The auburn-haired woman—Sienna. She sits beside him on the steps. Says something. He lifts his head. In the thin light, I can see the exhaustion in the line of his back, the way he leans slightly toward the sound of her voice.
I pull the curtain shut.
I stand in the dark room, one hand on the fabric, my heart doing something I don’t like at all. Not jealousy. I refuse to give it that word. I don’t have the right, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want it.
She’s his pack. She sits with him when the day is done. She stitched his wounds, brought him coffee, and handled the hard conversations. That’s loyalty. That’s what you build over time.
I didn’t have time. That was taken from us. But I got through it. Got stronger. Got to the point where I didn’t care.
So why does the image of a woman on a porch step feel like a verdict?
I lie down on the bed. Press my hands against the mattress where Cameron’s warmth is already fading.
My son is alive and angry. My pack is broken and wary. There’s a man in my yard whom I haven’t spoken to properly, and I’m going to have to. Soon. There are things between us that can’t be handled through briefings and assessments, no matter how much I’d prefer it.
But not tonight.
Tonight I lie in the dark, listen to the old house breathe, and try to remember the last time I slept somewhere that felt like mine.
