We come out of the trees into the pasture. The ranch lights glow ahead. Figures on the porch. Willow, Greta, Rook. Waiting.
Bern’s campsite is dark, empty. His SUVs are gone.
“He left,” Rook says when we reach the yard. “Packed up an hour ago. Said he’d gotten what he came for and would be in touch.”
Gotten what he came for.
I file that away with everything else. The pieces are accumulating: the observer at the parley, Bern’s systematic tour, his aide’s tablet, the way he looked at Cameron. I don’t have the picture yet. But the frame is taking shape, and I don’t like what it’s going to hold.
Cameron is handed off to Greta, who steers him into the kitchen with the authority of a woman who’s been putting broken boys back together for sixty years. Soup. Blankets. The wordless care that doesn’t ask questions or demand explanations.
Willow grabs Brenna’s arm as she passes. “Is he—?”
“He knows,” Brenna says. “About Merric. He heard us talking.”
Willow closes her eyes. Opens them. Nods. “Okay. We deal with it.”
“Yeah,” Brenna says. “We deal with it.”
She goes inside. The screen door closes behind her.
I stand in the yard. The night is warm. Somewhere in the kitchen, my son is eating soup and processing the fact that his whole life has been rewritten. The woman I love is standing on the other side of a screen door, trying to hold it all together. And Nathan Bern has driven away with whatever he came here to collect.
Rook appears at my shoulder. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Good answer.” He pauses. “Bern took notes on everything. Every wolf, every structure, every defensive position.”
“I noticed.”
“Whatever he’s planning, he’s got the blueprint now.”
“I know.”
Rook nods. Heads for the bunkhouse. Stops. “For what it’s worth, the kid’s going to be all right. He’s got both of you now. That’s more than he had a week ago.”
He goes inside. I stay in the yard for another minute, feeling the dynamic settle into something new. Two people who’ve survived a crisis together and haven’t had time to figure out what that means.
I go inside.
Chapter 21
Brenna
Cameron is asleep. At last. Greta worked her magic: soup, comfort, the low hum of a woman who doesn’t ask questions but somehow gets answers to all of them anyway. By nine o’clock, Cameron was on the couch with his head on a pillow and eyes finally closed, and the house exhaled.
I stand in the kitchen doorway and watch him sleep. His face is slack, young, all the sharp edges softened. The scars on his arms are visible above the blanket’s edge. My boy. My complicated, furious, perceptive boy, who learned the truth about his father today and handled it with more grace than either of his parents deserved.
Willow went to bed an hour ago. Greta retreated to her room with a book and a pointed look that said,“Sort yourselves out.”Rook and Dane are on watch. Briar is somewhere in the hills, because Briar is always somewhere in the hills.
I turn toward the kitchen to make tea and nearly collide with Sienna.
She’s coming from the pantry with a jar of honey, and we do that awkward two-step shuffle of people trying to occupy the same narrow space. She steps back. I step back. We look at each other.
The last time I saw this woman properly, she was standing in a bunkhouse doorway with a dinner plate and a look of horror while I was half-naked in her alpha’s lap.
“Sorry,” I say. The word comes out before I’ve planned it. “I mean, about… the other night. In the bunkhouse. I shouldn’t have… You didn’t deserve to walk into that.”
