The council chamber is our last stop.
Not the old one—not the Council of Five with their ancient thrones and power plays. This is something Bree built. A round room off the main hall, added six months ago when the sanctuary’s population selected leaders outgrew informal kitchen-table decisions.
It’s not what I expected when she first proposed it. More seats than I can count, arranged in concentric circles. Feeders and shifters and seers and elementals, all of them present. All of them watching Bree with something that isn’t fear.
She doesn’t speak much. Listens while they report—supply lines, ward maintenance, a territorial dispute between two shifter families that got resolved without bloodshed. Routine stuff. The machinery of a community running itself.
When it’s over, she stands. Nods once.
That’s it.
No speeches. No grand proclamations. She just walks out, and the council keeps meeting without her.
I follow, something settling in my chest.
This place doesn’t need her anymore. Not to survive.
And that’s exactly why she can leave.
The cars are loaded by the time we make it outside. Two vehicles—Thane, Stellan, Seth and Theo taking one; the rest of us piling into the other.
Jace is already bitching about seating arrangements.
“I’m not sitting in the middle again. I have long legs. It’s a medical condition.”
“Your medical condition is being a pain in the ass,” Wes says, shoving him toward the back seat.
“That’s not a recognized diagnosis.”
“I’ll recognize my fist in your face.”
“Kinky.”
Rhett claims the driver’s seat without discussion. His car, his grandmother’s house we’re driving to. None of us argue.
“Give me a minute.” I say and Rhett nods.
I do a final perimeter sweep. Not because I think anything’s wrong. Just because that’s what I do.
The sanctuary hums under my feet. Steady. Alive. Safe.
I mark it in my mind.This is secure. This will be here when we come back.
Then I get in the car—back seat, Bree in the middle, Jace crammed against the other window despite his complaints. Wes rides shotgun.
The drive is quiet at first. The kind of silence that happens when no one knows what to say.
I felt the magic thin the moment we crossed the sanctuary boundary—that familiar ache of the world going flat and ordinary. We’ve been driving through nothing for hours now. Just highway, just asphalt, just the kind of mundane landscape that has no idea magic exists.
Bree stares out the window, watching it pass.
Her heartbeat is steady through the bond. Not calm, exactly. But not panicked either.
She’s not afraid.
She’s bracing.
Different thing.
