“You factored in losing two years of cover.”
“I factored in everything.” Her eyes hold mine. Unflinching. Unreadable. “I made a choice about what mattered more.”
I take that in, chew on it. She’s talking about the ambush, about Cameron, about tactical necessity. She’s not talking about last night. But the sentence has a double edge, and we both feel it. For a moment, the kitchen is very quiet, and the space between us is doing that thing again—contracting, warming, pulling.
I break first. Look down at the map. “Where would you plan the meet?”
“The north boundary. Open ground, clear sight lines, far from the house and the main settlement. We control the approach and the exit. If things go bad, we’re not fighting in our own yard.”
“Your ward line runs along the north boundary. Can you reinforce that section before the meeting?”
“If I work on it today and tomorrow. Yes.”
“Then we do it. But I want Briar on the ridge during the parley, watching their rear positions. And I want Rook at the boundary with us.”
“Agreed.” She pauses. “I want Willow there, too. She’s been running this pack in my absence. Hatchett needs to see that Ravenclaw isn’t a handful of refugees. It’s a functioning pack with a chain of command.”
“Good.”
We stand there. The practical conversation is over. Everything that needs deciding has been decided. There’s no reason to stay in this kitchen, looking at each other across a map and two coffee cups and the ghost of a kiss that neither of us is going to mention.
“Brenna—”
“No.” Her voice isn’t sharp. It’s tired. “Not now.”
“I was going to ask about the wards. Whether you need help carrying supplies to the north line.”
A beat. The faintest color touches her cheeks. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
She looks away. Her throat works. And then—so fast I almost miss it—the corner of her mouth flickers. Not a smile. Not quite. But the hint of one, suppressed before it can fully form.
“I could use having the canteens filled,” she says. “And something to eat. Preferably not another goddamn protein bar.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Neither of us moves for a second too long. Then she picks up her pencil and goes back to the map, and I turn and leave the kitchen.
Outside, I breathe in the air like a man who’s been underwater.
Greta is on the porch, shelling beans into a bowl. She watches me come out of the kitchen with a look of supreme neutrality that somehow communicates more than a paragraph of commentary.
“The prisoner’s burns need redressing,” she says. “I’ve done what I can, but I’m not a healer. Cormac would have had those sealed in a day.”
“Cormac?”
“My mate.” She says it simply. No waver. “Pack healer for forty years. He died six months after Brenna disappeared. His heart, they said. I say his heart broke when the pack did, and the rest of him followed.”
I sit on the step below her. She keeps shelling beans, her weathered hands moving automatically.
“He kept the healing wards,” she continues. “The way Brenna keeps the protective lines. His magic was gentler; not fire, not force. He could lay his hands on a wound, and the skin would just… remember how to close. When he died, that part of the wards went dark. The protective lines held because they’re anchored to the land. But the healing magic was anchored to him.”
“And there’s nobody else who can do it?”
