"I am going to."
"All of you," I clarify.
His ice-blue eyes hold mine. "Even the one who is trying to send you away from him. Yes."
Dean rolls the cargo door down. The truck is closed. I stand in the cedar stand with my hand on the cold metal of the door. The hollow under my sternum is full in a way it has never been. Full and warm and aimed, with a man on the other side of that steel who used his recovered voice to ask me to go.
I want to say something through the cargo door. I do not know what.I am not abandoning you. I am sorry. Thank you for saying my name.I do not say any of it. I put my palm flat to the metal of the cargo door for one second. The hollow under my sternum pulses against my own hand from the inside.
Fen feels it. I do not know how. But the hollow pulses back. I take my hand off the door.
We climb into the work truck. Crew cab, smell of motor oil and pine and somebody's old coffee, two duffels in the back. Dean takes the wheel. Thaw the passenger seat. Harek folds into the back with me, his shoulder against mine, his hand finding mine again the second we are settled.
Behind us, the first truck's engine pulls away. Northbound. Gravel for ten seconds, fifteen, and then the cedar absorbs the sound. Dean starts our truck and we pull out.
Dean does not push the truck. He keeps it at a steady speed that puts the trees past the windows in a slow drift, and for a while nobody says anything. The hollow under my sternum starts to pull about a mile in.
It is small at first — a faint reaching, the way a held breath gets uncomfortable before you decide to let it out. I do not say anything yet because I do not want it to be true.
Dean's eyes find mine in the rearview anyway. The forming thread has gone careful in a way that means he is reading my pulse off the bond and does not need me to narrate.
"It’s started."
"What is it doing?" Dean asks.
"Stretching. Not breaking. Aching."
Thaw turns to meet my eyes, "It will hurt and it will not break."
The truck climbs and the trees go from cedar to fir. Thaw has stayed turned half in the passenger seat to watch my face. Harek's hand in mine has not moved.
The pull thins as we drive, which is the strangest part. It does not get heavier the further we go. It gets finer — the ache holding at the same volume but at a thinner gauge. My chest registers the rate of change before my head does.
Sometime past the fir line, the thinning stops.
The pull holds itself at a level my body decides it can carry. The ache is real but it does not climb.
"It plateaued," I say.
Dean lets out the breath he has been holding for what must be five minutes. Thaw lets out his. Even Harek's hand around mine eases a fraction — the whole truck has been holding for a snap that did not come.
Dean says. Quiet. "Your body is holding on at a level you can survive."
"Without him."
"Until he is ready."
I close my eyes. "He said my name."
"I heard him. He used the first word he has had in months to keep you safe from him."
I lean my head against Harek's shoulder.
After a while Dean reaches across the cab and pulls a travel mug from the cup-holder and hands it back to me over the seat without looking at me, eyes on the road.
I take it. It is warm.
I take the lid off.
