Next month became next season.
Next season became next year.
I named it duty. I named it Artemis. I named it everything except what it was.
“You named her after Lucy,” I say, barely above a whisper, because it’s the thing I never said to her face. The thing I should have been there for, should have held her hand for, because naming your daughter after the best friend who died for you isn’t something you celebrate with a card in the mail.
“I did.” Two words. Flat. Final.
The silence between us grows teeth.
I’ve faced Fae who wanted me dead. I’ve trained soldiers who could kill me in my sleep. I walked into Hecate’s shop without flinching and stared down immortal courtrooms.
None of it compares to standing on the wrong side of Pepper O’Malley’s bar while she decides whether I’m worth the breath it takes to scream at me.
Part of me hopes she does. Screaming means she still cares enough to be angry.
It’s the silence that will kill me.
“They’re staging a rescue mission.” Pepper begins to clean a glass.
“That’s what Vanessa said.” Right here on this stool.
“You don’t look like you need a rescue.” She sets the glass down a little too hard. “You look just fine from where I’m standing. Besides, would you even want us to show up?”
“I deserved that.”
“Yeah, you did,” Pepper snaps, her magic shooting out like a whip. The crack of it splits the bar top clean down the center. Bottles rattle. A glass falls and shatters somewhere behind her, and she doesn’t even flinch.
The Pepper I knew would have cursed and scrambled to save the liquor. This Pepper lets it bleed across the floor like it means nothing.
“How is Lucy?”
“You don’t get to come in here and say her name.” Her voice is low now, controlled, and that’s worse than the shouting. Pepper’s rage I can take. It’s her composure that terrifies me. “You don’t get to say Baby Bear. You don’t get to look at my bar and feel nostalgic. You lost that when you stopped answering your phone.”
I grip the edge of the stool because my hands are shaking. “I know.”
“Do you?” She rounds the bar, and the energy shifts. The whispers in the background grow louder, voices I can’t place, murmuring things I can’t catch. This is her dream, her domain, and the power here answers to her. “Because from where I stood, holding a newborn I named after my dead best friend, waiting for my cousin to walk through that door—” Her voice cracks, just barely, like a fracture in glass that hasn’t shattered yet. She swallows it back. “You never came.”
“I sent?—”
“A gift.” She spits the word like it’s poison on her tongue. “You sent a stuffed bear with a card that said, ‘Congratulations, Baby Bear.’ Three words in your handwriting and a toy from a woman who used to sleep on my floor in a Care Bear onesie.”
I remember writing that card. I remember standing in a shop somewhere overseas, picking out that bear, and telling myself it was enough. Telling myself she had five mates, a house that literally moved walls for her, and a daughter with chaos magic already humming under her skin.
She didn’t need me.
Except I knew that was a lie even as I sealed the envelope.
“Lucinda Elspeth took her first steps, and I called you.” Pepper’s jaw works, the muscle ticking, and I watch her fight to keep the cracks from spreading. “She said Tita before she said Mama, and I don’t even know who the hell she was talking to, but I wanted to tell you. I called, and it rang, and it rang.” She holds my gaze, and those grey eyes are drowning. “And then it stopped ringing altogether.”
I changed my number. I told myself it was protocol, new assignment, new location, security measures. All of it true. None of it the reason.
“I was afraid.”
Pepper goes still. Completely, unnervingly still, the way she does right before her magic detonates. The whispers in thebackground hush, as though even the ghosts of this dream know better than to speak.
“Afraid,” she repeats, tasting the word. “Afraid of what, Ash? Of me? Of showing up and seeing that I built a life without you?”
