Yes. But I can’t say that yet. Not when the truth is uglier than that.
“Of showing up and realizing you didn’t need me anymore,” I whisper. “And that maybe you never did.”
Pepper’s laugh is hollow. It fills the bar like smoke, curling into every corner, and it is nothing like the laugh I carry in my memory. That laugh was unguarded and messy. This one is all bite and repressed rage.
“Didn’t need you.” She rolls the words around in her mouth like she’s tasting them for the first time and finding them rotten. “You think I didn’t need you?”
She steps closer, and I hold my ground even though every instinct screams at me to step back. The sigils on her arms pulse brighter, reacting to whatever is building inside her. The whispers surge behind her, and I swear I catch fragments, voices that sound like the bar on a full night, like laughter and clinking glasses and music, ghosts of a life I walked away from.
“I needed you when Lucy died in my arms.” Each word lands like a closed fist punching through my chest. “I needed you when I went to trial pregnant and terrified. I needed you when my daughter’s magic started manifesting and she blew out every window in the house before she could walk.” Pepper’s hands grip the edge of the cracked bar top, and the wood groans beneath her fingers. “I needed you at three in the morning when Lucinda Elspeth wouldn’t stop screaming, and I sat on the kitchen floor crying because my best friend was dead, my body wasn’t my own anymore, and the one person I wanted to call, the person who was supposed to be my wolf pack—” Her voice splinters on that, just for a breath. “Had a disconnected number.”
I feel the burn behind my eyes, and I blink hard against it because I don’t deserve to cry. Not here. Not in front of her.
“You don’t get to make this about your fear, Ash.” Pepper straightens, and the vulnerability vanishes like a door slamming shut. Her eyes go flat and cold. The grey of a winter sky with nothing behind it. “You were afraid I didn’t need you? That’s a coward’s excuse, and we both know it.”
The word coward tears through me because she’s right. She’s absolutely right.
“The truth is you couldn’t handle it.” She picks up the rag again, starts wiping the bar like I’m not even standing here, like this conversation is already over and she’s just waiting for me to figure it out. “You watched Sabina get her mates, her babies, her pack. You watched Nessa find her mates and rebuild Hades. And then I got five mates and a daughter, and you—” She tosses the rag into the sink without looking. “You got a kitten from Jasper and a job you won’t talk about.”
The fucking kitten.
I forgot about her, left her at my mom’s maybe four missions ago.
I forgot a living thing.
“You didn’t leave because you thought I didn’t need you. You left because watching all of us get what you wanted reminded you of what you didn’t have. And instead of letting us love you through that, you ran.”
I open my mouth.
The defense is right there.
That’s not true, I had orders. I had a mission. I was protecting?—
Nothing comes out.
She’s not wrong. Not entirely. But the parts that are true are the parts that matter.
I knew.
I knew when I sealed that envelope. I knew every time I let a call ring out.
I just kept moving anyway.
“Pepper—”
“We’re done.” She turns her back to me, reaching for a clean glass. Her shoulders are rigid, a wall of muscle and ink and magic that I used to know better than my own. “You wanted to know if I’d forgive you. There’s your answer.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Yeah, it is.” She sets the glass down like she’s deciding not to throw it. “You just don’t like it.”
The dream shudders around us. The edges of the bar blur and darken, and I feel the pull of waking tugging at the seams. My time here is running out, and she knows it.
“I’ll fix this,” I tell her, my voice cracking in a way I haven’t allowed since I was a teenager. “I will. I’ll come to the bar. I’ll leave Faerie. Just leave the light on.”
Pepper doesn’t turn around. She just keeps polishing that glass, her back a fortress, her silence louder than any scream she could give me.
“Don’t bother,” she says as the dream begins to dissolve. “I stopped leaving the light on for you a long time ago.”
