There is an anger that rolls off of her in waves.
This is the moment I’d dreaded since Sabina. Since Vanessa.
Her long dark hair is now cropped short. Tattoos lick at her arms. The sigils burned into her skin pulse faintly, alive with magic I can feel from here, magic that wasn’t there the last time I saw her. I wasn’t there when she learned to do that either.
Whispers murmur somewhere behind me. My eyes stay on Pepper.
“Get out,” she says.
“Pepper, please.”
“No, fuck you,” she spits and it’s the harshest anyone has ever spoken to me.
I deserve it.
“I’m not leaving.” I hold her gaze. Barely.
“You fucking can’t leave.” She huffs and begins to wipe down the bar. Anything to keep her hands busy. “Can you?”
I take in the bar.
The popcorn garland is gone. So are the tangled Christmas lights she dug out of the attic that year, the ones Donovan and Nikko wrestled into submission while Jasper threatened to murder Santa Claus. I remember sitting beside her on that sofa, threading popcorn through a needle, and she asked me if I remembered doing it during our sleepovers.
I said I did. Sabina always ate half the popcorn.
She laughed.
I want to cry at the memory.
That laugh doesn’t live here anymore.
The bar itself looks the same, and somehow that makes it worse. The bones are still Pepper’s, the worn wood, the skeleton key locks, Garrett’s ridiculous stool at the end. But it feels like a place that armored itself after being left open too long. Like she did.
“You cut your hair,” I say, and I hate myself for it.
Pepper doesn’t move. Barely looks up from her endless wiping.
It’s a barrier.
Those hands used to grab mine. She’d link her elbow in mine and drag me through the streets, into the web, through magical doors that led to cobblestone alleys and dusty bookshops. I never had to ask Pepper for closeness. She gave it so freely I didn’t realize how rare it was until I stopped deserving it.
“You look good, Baby Bear.” The nickname slips out before I can stop it, and I watch it land like a slap.
Her jaw tightens. A muscle feathers beneath the sharp cut of her cheekbone, and those grey eyes narrow into something that could gut me cleaner than any blade Jasper ever wielded.
She hasn’t called me anything yet. Not Ash. Not even Ashlynne, which she never used because no one does, except Hecate, who smirked at me like she already knew I’d end up here. Artemis blessed Ashlynne Haynes. The huntress. The one who runs.
Not Ashlyn Morgan.
Because she didn’t know that name. No one did.
I used that blessing to do exactly what Artemis would. I disappeared into the wild and told myself it was purpose, not cowardice. Teaching. Training. Moving from post to post. Telling myself Pepper had five mates and a newborn and Lucinda watching from beyond the veil and she didn’t need me, too.
Except Pepper spent eighteen years of her life convinced she didn’t belong. Her mother had to beg her to let us in. She tried to be friends with the Burke twins at ten years old, and they told her they couldn’t. She carried that rejection like a stone in her chest until we became her tribe, until I became someone she trusted enough to fall apart in front of.
And I left.
Not all at once. That would have been kinder. I just thinned. Missed a call. Then two. Sent a gift for Lucinda Elspeth’s first birthday instead of showing up. Told myself I’d visit next month.
