He keeps working. The ratchet clicks. A bolt drops into a pan with a metallic ring. His boots shift as he repositions under the truck.
Five minutes pass. Ten. Fifteen.
The silence between brothers carries weight that silence between strangers doesn't. Knox and I have done this since I followed him off the mountain—sat in the same room and let the quiet do the heavy lifting. Sometimes it works. Sometimes itfesters. Today it hovers in the middle, neither comfortable nor hostile, waiting for one of us to tip it.
Knox slides out on the creeper. Grease streaks his jaw and both forearms. He sits up, grabs a rag from the workbench, and meets my eyes for the first time in a week.
"I'm sorry I burned the clan gifts without asking you."
No preamble. Knox doesn't circle anything; he drives through it headfirst, and when he's wrong, the apology arrives the same way—blunt and unpolished and difficult to argue with.
I pull the necklace from my pocket and hold it up. The twin peaks pendant catches the light from the open bay door, throwing a faint amber glow across my knuckles.
Knox stares at it. His hands go still on the rag. His throat works once, twice, a swallow that costs him more than he'd admit.
His voice drops to gravel. "She'd want you to have it."
The pendant swings between us. Two mountain peaks joined at the base, the Bloodstone range where we grew up, where our mother planted a garden outside the royal quarters and sang songs from the border territories while the warlords sharpened their axes.
"Do you think he deserves us going back?"
Knox drags the rag across his knuckles. Doesn't look at me. "I think he's a manipulative old bastard who'd say anything to get what he wants. And I think the lung rot's been eating at him for years. So maybe."
"If he dies and we never—"
"Then that's his choice." Knox folds the rag into a square, precise and controlled, the way he handles everything thatthreatens to crack him open. "He had twenty years to be a father instead of a warlord. He chose the throne."
He's not wrong. Our father chose power over his sons, and the cost of that choice belongs to him. But the cost of never looking back—that one's ours.
"I'm not saying go back." I keep my voice level. "I'm saying maybe we don't have to burn everything that reminds us where we came from."
Knox meets my eyes. Holds them long enough that the hard certainty in his face gives an inch, the lines around his mouth loosening.
"You're right." He drops the rag on the bench. "I'm sorry."
The apology isn't perfect. It doesn't coverthe war axe that belonged to our grandfather, or the armor etched with sigils older than the clan wars,all of it turned to smoke and ash in a fire pit while the brothers watched. But Knox standing in the gap between his pride and my pain, handing me two words that didn't come easy—that's enough.
For now, it's enough.
I find him in the office two hours later.
The clubhouse is half-repaired after the storm, tarps covering the section of roof the wind stripped, tools and lumber stacked against the far wall. Knox hunches over his desk, paperworkspread across the surface, a mug of coffee pushed to one side. Sarah's cardigan hangs on the back of his chair, and the sight of it, that small domestic detail in a room built for club business, reminds me how far we've come from the mountain.
He opens a drawer before I ask.
A small box rests in his palm. Dark wood, carved with orc symbols I recognize from the royal quarters. The craftsmanship is old—pre-war, maybe older, mountain smith work from before the clan wars turned every forge toward blades and armor. He sets it on the desk between us.
I lift the lid.
A ring. Dark stone set in carved metal, the band etched with a pattern that mirrors the twin peaks pendant: the Bloodstone range, stylized, reduced to a circle small enough to fit a woman's finger. Our mother wore it. Her mother before that, and her mother before that, back through generations of Stone women who married into the clan and carried the mountain in their blood.
Knox holds it out. His face gives me nothing, but his eyes hold steady.
"You sure?" The question scrapes past a lump I didn't expect.
"Mom pressed it into my hand the year before she died. Told me to carry it until my brother needed it." His voice stays even. "It was never mine to give Sarah. It was always yours, Finn. Mom meant it for your mate."
The words land in my chest and lodge there.
