Not all the way.
Not yet.
But enough.
Forty Eight
I Know, All The Fish You Want -Finn
When we stepped inside, warmth enveloped me.
It wasn’t just the temperature—though the wood stove heat, redolent with the smell of food and smoke, certainly permeated the walls. It was the very fact of the place itself: still here, still standing, intact in a world that had made a project of destroying everything I’d ever cared about.
Twenty miles of nothing—of hands, teeth, and cold—and then this: a kitchen, warmth, the smell of food. A world I’d already eulogized, somehow still present, waiting to be re-entered.
It nearly knocked me sideways.
Lock sat at the kitchen table, head bent over something spread across its surface. He looked up at the sound of the door opening, already half-turning in his chair, his expression carrying the automatic alertness of a man who’d spent months treating every unexpected noise as a potential threat.
He saw Callan first. Then his eyes moved past him and landed on me.
And froze.
His eyes found mine and simply stayed there. His right hand still held a pen, and I watched it slowly tip sideways between his fingers and drop onto the table. He didn’t look down at it. He didn’t blink. The wood stove popped once in the silence, and neither of us moved. Then something shifted in the set of his jaw—the muscles went slack in a way that made him look, just briefly, like someone I hadn’t met yet.
Then—
“Holy fuck!“
The chair scraped hard against the floor, legs shrieking across wood, as he shot to his feet so fast it nearly tipped over behind him. He crossed the room in three long, uneven strides—Lock never ran anywhere, never rushed, the most measured and deliberate man I’d ever known, and he ran across that kitchen—and before I could open my mouth, before I could get a single word out, he had me in a hug that damn near crushed what remained of my ribs.
His arms locked around my back, and he held on.
“You’re alive,” he said into my shoulder, his voice rough, carrying a tremor I’d never heard from Lock before and suspected I’d never hear again. Like he still didn’t entirely believe it. Like saying it out loud might make it less true, instead of more.
“Yeah,” I said, and my arms came up around him and held on just as hard, gripping the back of his shirt, pressing my forehead against his shoulder because my legs had started shaking again and I needed something solid to lean into. “Still here, brother. Still kicking.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me, hands still gripping my shoulders, eyes moving over my face the way a man reads a damage report.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Worse than hell,” I muttered. “Hell would’ve been an upgrade.”
He huffed a laugh.
“I knew you’d show up,” he said. “Told Callan. Told the girls. I knew you wouldn’t go down that easily. Not you.”
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat, fighting the burning pressure behind my eyes—a pressure I absolutely, categorically refused to give in to.
“Yeah,” I managed. “Well, I came closer than I’d like to admit.”
He pulled back, meeting my gaze. Something shifted in his expression—a slight tightening around the jaw, a question forming and then dissolving before it reached his mouth. He nodded once. I nodded back. That settled it.
“Fiona’s out,” he said, glancing over his shoulder toward the living room, his voice returning to its steady, practical tone. “She pushed herself too hard today—kept moving, kept holding it together for the girls, kept going until her body made the decision for her. She sat down in that chair about forty minutes ago and just… gone. Hasn’t moved since.”
I looked past him.
She sat slumped in the armchair near the window, her head tilted at an angle that would leave her neck aching in the morning. Her face was slack and pale in the lamplight, her hands still loosely gripping the armrests as if she’d fallen asleep mid-sentence. Completely worn out.
