"And after that?"
"After that, you show me what a normal day looks like in your world, one without corrupted monsters ruining the mood." I almost smiled. "If that's a thing."
"It isn't." His mouth twitched. "But we'll figure something out."
EPILOGUE: HAVEN
BLADE
TWO MONTHS LATER
The axe hit the log and the wood split clean.
Two halves falling away from the stump in opposite directions, the pale inner grain catching the low November sun. The sound was sharp and satisfying—the crack of dry pine giving way, followed by the thud of the pieces landing in the frozen grass. I set another log on the stump. Lifted the axe. Let the weight of the head do most of the work on the downswing. Crack. Thud. Two more halves.
My breath came out in white clouds. The morning was cold—properly cold, the kind Montana dealt out once summer's memory had fully burned off. Frost on the fence posts. Ice in the water troughs that Danny had cracked before dawn. The mountains to the west carried the first real snow on their peaks, a white line across the ridges that hadn't been there a week ago and wouldn't leave until April.
I was wearing one of Logan's flannels. It was too wide in the shoulders and too long in the sleeves and smelled like him—cedar and hay and the faint trace of the soap he bought in bulk from a store in town. I'd rolled the sleeves past my forearms, and the cold bit at the exposed skin where the geometric tattoos ran, but the work kept me warm. The rhythm of it. Lift, swing, cut.
My arms and shoulders worked in a rotation that was different from knifework but not entirely foreign. The axe was heavier. The target was bigger. But the principle was the same: find the grain, read the weakness, let the edge do what edges do.
I'd been at the ranch for nine days. Part of the arrangement Logan and I had worked out during the first weeks after the Whitfield operation, when the adrenaline had drained and the question ofwhat nowhad become impossible to ignore. The answer was imperfect and practical and ours: two weeks at the compound, two weeks at the ranch. A rotation. Half my life in the desert with my brothers, half in the Montana grassland with the man who'd rearranged every plan I'd ever made for how my life would go.
Hawk had approved it without hesitation. Told me the club's Montana business—supply routes, contacts, the relationships we'd been building in the northern corridor since the Holt war—needed someone local. That the two weeks I spent at the ranch weren't vacation. They were operational. I'd appreciated the framing even though we both knew it was a kindness.
I set another log. Swung. The crack echoed across the yard and scattered a group of sparrows from the fence line. Compass, the one-eared heeler, lifted her head from her spot on the porch, decided the sound wasn't a threat, and put it back down.
Logan came around the corner of the barn.
He was carrying a thermos in one hand and two tin mugs hooked through the fingers of the other, his boots crunching on the frosted grass. He'd been in the south pasture since sunrise,checking on the new fence line Danny had been running all week. His cheeks were red from the cold. His hair pushed back under a wool cap that he claimed was warm and I maintained was the ugliest piece of clothing in the state. The stitches on his left shoulder had come out six weeks ago, leaving a scar that sat alongside the bruises that had long since faded from his throat. He moved easier now. The stiffness from the graze was gone. His body had done what bodies did when given time, food, and the medicine of sleeping beside someone who made the nightmares quieter.
He stopped at the woodpile. Looked at the split logs stacked beside the stump. Looked at me, standing there in his flannel with the axe resting on my shoulder and my breath clouding the cold air.
"You've been at this since I left."
"You left three hours ago."
"And you've been splitting wood the entire time." He set the thermos on the fence post. Poured. The coffee steamed in the cold. "Diego, we have enough firewood for two winters."
"Good. Then we won't run out."
He handed me a mug. Our fingers overlapped on the tin. He didn't pull away. Neither did I. We stood there in the cold, drinking coffee, the silence between us filled with the sounds of the ranch—Compass's tail thumping on the porch, the distant low of cattle in the south pasture, the wind moving through the bare cottonwoods along the creek.
"Danny's finishing the south fence today." Logan leaned against the fence post. The steam from his mug rising past his face. "Kid's gotten fast. Another month and he won't need me looking over his shoulder."
"He never needed you looking over his shoulder. You just couldn't stop."
The corner of his mouth lifted. "Fair."
Danny had been hired full-time two weeks after we'd returned. The kid had earned it—holding the ranch alone during the worst of it, facing down seven Iron Wolves with a tire iron and a flashlight and a stubbornness that no one could have taught him. Logan paid him well. Gave him the foreman's cabin that had been sitting empty. Danny had moved in with a duffel bag and hadn't looked back.
I drank the coffee. Watched the sun sitting low over the western mountains, the light stretched long and gold across the fields. The grass was brown and stiff with frost, the pastures gone dormant for the winter. Rio stood in the near paddock, his reddish-brown coat thickened against the cold, his breath pluming. I was still learning the ranch's rhythms. Nine days in, and the differences between this place in November versus August were still catching me off guard. Everything quieter. Everything slower. The green I'd seen on my first visit replaced by brown and frost, the land doing something Logan probably had a word for that I didn't.
"I talked to Hawk last night." I turned the mug in my hands. The tin warming my palms.
"How is he?"
"Busy." "He's rebuilding. Hard. New training protocols, updated security, the whole compound getting an overhaul. He wants the Phoenixes ready for whatever comes next."
