“Remember when you were lying in bed, mentally torn apart, and I had to watch you suffer?” she interrupted. “When I spooned your morning coffee into your mouth because you couldn’t stop holding me?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Then you know exactly how it feels to be treated like a child, don’t you? To be so overprotected and cosseted, you feel like you can’t breathe.”
“Point to the little lady,” Zane smirked.
“What Cas is failing to explain,” Ko cleared his throat while giving me a pointed look, “is that we made decisions based on what we thought would protect you. But we’re learning that sometimes,protection isn’t what you need most. Try to understand, beloved. We’re still learning how to be your partners, your husbands.”
“Thank you for that.” She melted a little at his words. “That’s all I want, to be treated like a partner, not a project.”
“A partner who cries all over us,” Zane added with a fake shudder. “Just make sure to save some tears formyshirt later, snot pot!”
He gestured to today’s obscenity: “It’s not my middle finger. It’s my unicorn fist.”
Seri laughed, the sound more beautiful to me than she would ever know, then shook her head.
“I know you meant well. All of you. But I need you to trust that I can handle difficult things. I’ve been handling them for years.”
“In spectacularly bad ways, sometimes,” Zane smirked. “Remember when you tried to fight a monster crawfish with a stick?”
“It was all I had!”
“Astick,” Z continued deviling her. “You were going to swat it to death.”
“I thought hitting its antenna might confuse its sonar or something,” she mumbled, her cheeks turning pink.
“Crayfish don’t have sonar,” I informed her. “They rely on body hair to detect vibrations, although they are capable of making underwater sounds—”
“No one fucking cares, professor.” Zane rolled his eyes.
“What has she been sending?” Seri’s eyes brightened with curiosity. “You said my parents’ things?”
“Sometimes the ‘package’ is a rogue, sniffing around the estate’s perimeters,” Ko told her as I stood and moved to retrieve the items, “but the warded runestones hold.”
“Of course they do,” she said with pride. “You three activated them personally.”
Her faith in us sent a welcome warmth through me. She wasn’t wrong. The wards on those runestones had been activated with our blood and strengthened by our absolute commitment to keeping her safe within these walls.
“Foster intercepts anything truly dangerous or cursed before it ever reaches here,” Ko explained. “The rest are things you’d want, anyway.”
“Can I see them?”
“They might bring up difficult memories.”
“That only makes me more eager to see them.”
I recognized the set of her jaw, the quiet determination. The realization that we’d underestimated heragainmade me feel both proud and slightly foolish. With a nod, I placed the small collection on the coffee table before her.
She reached first for her father’s gold pocket watch, fingers tracing the inscription on the back.
“I thought this was lost. I have so few things connected to Mama.”
“Now you have this, too.” Ko reached out and took the stitch book, laying it in her lap and flipping it open to the wolf.
“Feather.” Her tears hit the linen, blooming dark. “Mama’s wolf.”
“Check out the last one.” Zane tightened his arm around her shoulders. “That’s some next-level skill, buttercup. Your mama was talented.”
