“When?” Brenna asks. Her voice is calm. Commander mode, just like that. The switch so fast, I’d admire it if I weren’t standing in the fallout of the last thirty seconds.
“Arlen just noticed. We’ve got what’s in the storage tank. Maybe two days’ worth if we ration.”
“The river’s a quarter mile,” I say.
“The river’s a quarter mile downhill,” Greta counters. “Hauling water uphill for the pack, the garden, and the animals is a full-time job for four wolves. We don’t have four wolves to spare.”
She’s right. The pump wasn’t a convenience. It was infrastructure. Without it, the ranch’s daily operations grind to a halt within forty-eight hours.
“Can Dane fix it?” Brenna asks. She asks me, which is the first time she’s acknowledged my people as a resource without it being dragged out of her.
“Dane can fix anything with moving parts. But a seized motor might need replacement parts we don’t have. I’ll get him to look at it.” I turn to Arlen. “Show me the pump house?”
Arlen nods and starts down the trail. I follow.
Behind me, Greta says something to Brenna that I don’t catch. I glance back and see the old woman’s hand on Brenna’s arm, her face tilted up with amused patience. The look of a woman who’s been alive long enough to recognize what she just walked into and is choosing to say absolutely nothing about it.
Brenna doesn’t look at me. Of course she doesn’t.
The pump house is a concrete shed near the river, half sunk into the hillside. The motor is ancient; twenty years old, maybe more, patched and rewired so many times it looks like a medical experiment. Arlen shows me the seizure point and the cracked bladder and the collection of improvised fixes that have kept this thing limping along.
“Dane,” I say into the radio. “Need you at the pump house. Bring the heavy toolkit.”
“Copy,” Dane says. One word. Sufficient.
While I wait, I lean against the pump house wall and press my hand to the stitches in my side. They’re holding, but the skin around them is hot. Probably should have let Sienna check them before a five-mile hike.
The morning light comes through the trees in slats. The river runs below, silver and bubbling. Somewhere up on the ridge, Brenna is finishing the wards alone, and I’m standingin a concrete shed trying to figure out how to keep a small community in drinking water.
This is what reality actually looks like. Not the romance. Not the grand gestures. Not the dramatic confrontation in the forest where two ex-lovers almost… What? What were we about to do?
This is where the real work lies. Pumps and postholes and protein bars and the daily, grinding business of keeping people alive. And she asked me to handle it, which means something, even if she’d never admit it.
I hear Dane’s boots on the trail. He appears in the doorway, toolkit over one shoulder, assesses the dead motor in two seconds, and gets to work without a word.
I leave him to it and walk back toward the main house. The morning is getting warm.
On the eastern ridge, I can just make out a figure crouching, hands pressed to the earth, white light pulsing faint against the green.
She’s finishing the wards. Alone. The way she’s done everything for too long.
Not anymore. Whether she likes it or not.
I turn toward the house to figure out the water situation, and I carry the heat of that unfinished moment in the forest like a coal that I don’t know what to do with and can’t seem to put down.
Chapter 11
Brenna
The house is too full of people. I’m not used to it anymore. Countless nights of sleeping alone in the field—under rock shelves, in abandoned hunting cabins, once in a hollow log during a rainstorm that wouldn’t quit—and now there are bodies on every side. Breathing, moving, dreaming. Cameron asleep in the room next door, Willow down the hall, Greta below. The sounds of a full house, a living house, and my skin won’t stop crawling.
I lie in the dark until midnight. Then I give up, pull on my boots, and slip downstairs.
The kitchen is empty. I take a glass of water, drink it standing at the sink, and gaze out the window at the yard. The bunkhouse is dark. Dane’s silhouette has been replaced by one of the Ravenclaw wolves on prisoner watch. The purists are secured in the tool shed, bound and guarded, awaiting a decision I haven’t made yet about what to do with them.
The wards pulse at the property edge. Stronger than yesterday. Not strong enough.
I let myself out the back door and walk toward the river.
