David on a mountain for nine years, dreaming about a dog he didn't know he had.
"Hopper," I say.
I get it back together.
The room holds us. Lumi quiet beside Stone. Jake moving from the wall to the chair nearest David, close without intruding. David reaching out and gripping Jake's forearm without looking, Jake letting him.
I find Alex again across the room.
I read what's in her face properly now. She's been sitting here watching David get his name back, his before back, his brother back — and she doesn't have an equivalent.
She has what she's building.
I've been documenting it in reports that don't capture what's actually happening — the bonds, the pack forming, a woman who gathers broken people with a gravity she doesn't seem to know she has. I've watched her for weeks and the distance has been getting harder and tonight it isn't manageable at all.
The bond pointing toward her. It's been doing that since the lodge hallway and I'm done pretending I'm going to make it smaller than it is.
I hold her gaze. Let her see what's in my face — what I don't have the capacity to manage right now. Then I turn back because my brother needs me and everything else can wait.
The common room empties slowly. Eventually it's just us. David. Jim. Both.
We talk until the building settles into its late sounds. I tell him things. He receives them. Water finding cracks, slow and patient. A name here, a detail there. Not a flood — he isn't ready for a flood and I'm not going to rush it. I have nine years of information and all the time in the world now that I've found what I was looking for.
"Tomorrow," David says finally.
"I'll be here," I say.
He stands. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder — brief, certain, the gesture of a man who has decided the years don't change the fact of the thing — and goes.
***
I stand in the empty common room.
I pick up my notepad from the table where I left it hours ago. Habit. I look at it.
I don't open it.
Nine years of becoming this — security consultant, cover story, the patient architecture of someone who could get close to Frosthaven — to find my little brother, and he's down the hall. That was the whole plan. That was everything I came here for.
He recognized me from a snot story.
Not my face. Not my name. A childhood embarrassment that became family lore, a reflex I've had since I was little, and his brain — the part that survived nine years of feral and mountain and forgetting — kept that. Kept the laugh and the thumb across the nose and the word that came from it.
Bilbo.
Some things don't go away even when everything else does.
I came here for my brother. I found him.
I also found — the bond running quiet toward the west corridor, toward a woman who sat in this room all night watching someone else get their before back and didn't ask for anything and stayed until the room was ready to let them go. A woman who saidwatch mein a corridor weeks ago with a certainty I didn't fully believe at the time.
I've been watching.
I told myself the bond was a complication. I told myself I had reasons, the brother, the cover story. All of that was true. None of it is the reason I'm standing here in the dark holding anotepad I'm not going to open, thinking about what it means to have arrived at the thing I planned for and found it was only part of what's here.
Chapter twenty-two
Alex
