Jim pulls back, enough to look at Dalton.
"I heard you laugh," Jim says. "And then the—" He makes the gesture. Thumb across nose.
Dalton laughs again — wet, broken, completely undone. "You always said I did that."
"You always did."
Dalton closes his eyes. Keeps his hands on Jim's face. Jim's hands are still in Dalton's jacket, still holding, still making sure.
I stay where I am.
The yard stays quiet around them, holding the space the way the common room held it — the same thing happening again, thepack gathering around something that needs to be witnessed to become real.
Jake moves first. One step, then another, until he's standing a few feet from them. Not intruding. Just close. Jim's hand finds his without looking, reaching back, and Jake takes it and holds on.
Three of them.
I press my palm flat against my wrist and feel the four mate bonds — warm and present.
Chapter twenty-one
Dalton
I've been in this facility for weeks.
I've walked past this man in corridors. Eaten in the same rooms. Filed reports that included his name — Jim, resident, mountain survivor, partial recovery, bond-adjacent status unclear. I've read Cal's assessments. I've stood in programming yards and common rooms and watched him the way I watch everyone — the professional assessment running underneath everything, noting what I see and filing it.
I've been looking for David Dalton for nine years.
I didn't know.
It starts the way things like this start — with something small.
Leo says something at the breakfast table, something wry about the movement restrictions, and I laugh. It comes out before I manage it — low, startled, a real one, the kind that stillsurprises me when it surfaces. And I do the thing I've always done, the thing that started when I was young and laughed so hard at something David did that snot came out of my nose in front of the whole family, and my mother laughed and my father laughed and David — David, who was four — laughed the hardest of all and pointed and never let me forget it. Every time I laugh too hard my thumb goes to my nose. A reflex. Family lore. The kind of thing only the people who were there would know.
I don't see it happen.
I hear it.
Across the yard. A stillness. And then a voice — Jim's voice, the one that uses words like they're rationed — saying something barely above a whisper.
Bilbo.
I go completely still.
The word hits me somewhere below thought. Not recognition — the word doesn't mean anything to me, it's a name from a book, it's nothing.
Then it means everything.Because there is only one person in the world who has ever called me that. One person who found it hilarious at three years old and never stopped finding it hilarious and who called me Billy first and Bilbo second and William almost never.
My little brother.
Who went to Frosthaven at eighteen and didn't come back.
Nine years. Nine years of cover stories and professional distance and becoming someone who could get close enough without it looking like looking, and it ends here, in a facility yard in Alaska, because I laughed and did the thing with my thumb.
I turn.
Jim is looking at me.
