Danny shrugged. “You always seemed happy here, I guess. Everyone knew I wanted to leave.”
“I was,” Bron said. She stood up and grabbed his old backpack from the chair. It dangled from her hand as she shrugged at Danny. “You don’t have to be running from something to want to go somewhere else.”
“Did you read that in a fortune cookie?” Danny asked as he unfolded himself from the ground.
“You know I don’t read,” Bron said. “It’s bad for your eyes, and one of us being blind is bad enough.”
They hugged tightly, desperately for a moment. Danny pressed his scarred face to her curls and swallowed hard.
“You know I love you, right?” he said.
Bron tightened her grip on him, dug her fingers into the muscles of his back, and then shoved him away with a snort.
“You’ve spent too much time with humans,” she said. “You’ve gotten soft. Softer. We’re family. I don’t need to love you, just kill anyone who ever hurts you.”
Danny leaned in quickly and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “I love you anyhow.”
“Ugh.” Bron wiped her forehead ostentatiously with the back of her hand. Then she threw herself back into a hug and squeezed him tight enough to make him grunt. “Just try not to do anything stupid now I won’t be here to take care of you, okay? I’m leaving you with my kid and the other one. Don’t let me down.”
“I’ll try not to,” Danny said. “Mam would—”
Bron shook her head firmly and stepped back. She held up a hand to silence Danny and stepped back.
“No. Not yet,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and changed the topic. “Are you sure Jack is okay with taking the kids? Him and Gregor—”
She trailed off with a shrug, a lifetime of enmity and one bright, shining moment of sacrifice too complicated to put into words.
“It’s the last thing I do to piss him off,” Jack answered for himself as he prowled in from the kitchen. He was shirtless, an old pair of jeans dragged up over his hips, and had a brace of scrawny pheasants dangling from his fingers. He’d been looking for Greer, the little boy still lost in the Wild, but that didn’t stop him getting lunch too. “And thank him, which would also piss him off. He died to save us from what Rose or Lachlan would have made of Fenrir. The least I can do is feed his children.”
“Oneof them is his,” Bron corrected.
Jack shrugged as he dangled the pheasants over the babies. They crowed and groped with pudgy fingers at the brightly colored tail feathers. At the same moment, they shifted to puppies, fat and round and floppy-eared, and hopped on stumpy legs for a mouthful of down.
“They won’t know that,” he said. A grim expression narrowed his eye as he watched them, the other still empty and scarred. There was always a price, and the Wild didn’t indulge regret. “Not until they have to.”
He hung the pheasants from the fire and grabbed the pups by the scruff of their necks to pick them up. One got passed off to Danny, and they headed out into the street to see Bron off. It was still Winter, the Wolf Winter, whatever that meant now they knew the prophets had lied. Snow crunched underfoot and the cold had broken the streets and worked fissures into the walls. A black crackling storm brewed up in the mountains.
“What about the bird?” Bron asked. “Gregor’s mate. Maybe he should have a say in what happens to them?”
She tapped one of the pups on the nose. It wriggled and bit her finger with needle-sharp teeth.
“No,” Jack said flatly.
“No one’s seen Nick, or the bird, since the fight,” Danny said more diplomatically. “Without Gregor, maybe there was just nothing here for him. He’s not a wolf or a dog. The only reason he came up here with us was to be with Gregor.”
“He’s not missed.” Jack ignored Danny’s scowl. “If he comes back, he’s welcome for Gregor’s sake. But we don’t need any more reminders of Rose around here.”
At the mention of her, he absently touched the scarred edge of his eye.
Bron shrugged. “He helped get my kid back,” she said. “Whatever else he was, I’ll always be grateful for that.”
She stared at the two puppies and then shook her head.
“My kids,” she corrected herself. “What the hell. People will be impressed I threw twins, as long as they don’t ask too many questions.”
She didn’t hug Danny again, but she gripped his hand tightly.
“Be careful,” he told her.
