“She knows.” Simple and certain.
There’s a beat of quiet between us, the sounds of the evening carrying softly from across the yard.
“Are you happy here, Sophia?” His voice is careful with it. “Really?”
Considering the question honestly, the way it deserves, I look down at the T-shirt in my hands for a moment before answering, “I think so. More than I expected to be.” I pause while I find the right words. “It’s not what I thought it would be. Vegas. Tate’s house.” Another pause. “He’s not what I thought he would be.”
“No.” Quill’s voice drops low. “He’s not.”
Something in his tone makes me look up at him.
“He’s a good man.” His blue eyes are steady on mine. “One of the best I know, and I don’t say that easily. Tracker knew that. That’s exactly why he asked him.”
The tears threaten again, and blinking them back, I look across the yard, the way I’d been doing all evening without fully realizing it, and immediately find Tate, the way I always seem to. He’s standing near the far table with Hawke, beer in hand, the desert night stretching out behind him.
As if he feels something, he looks up.
Our eyes connect across the yard and hold, and something moves through me that I don’t have a name for, warm, complicated, slightly frightening, and not entirely unwelcome. Looking away first and back down at the T-shirt in my hands, I tell myself very firmly that whatever that was is simply gratitude, and the comfort of someone familiar in a world that is still finding its shape around me.
That is all it is.
That is all it can be.
“You’ll always have a home with us.” Quill’s voice is quiet beside me. “Whatever comes next, whatever changes, the Blood Brothers are your family. That doesn’t go away.”
Pressing the T-shirt against my chest, I feel the truth of it land somewhere deep and certain.
“I know. I know that.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders briefly, warm, brotherly, and completely safe, and steers me gently back toward the group, back toward the light, the noise, and the evening.
We get closer to Tate, he turns when he hears us coming, or maybe he’d been watching, and his eyes go to me first with that quick, automatic check he always does.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” And I mean it.
He briefly looks at the T-shirt in my hands, just long enough to understand what it is and what it means, and something moves across his face that he immediately puts away. Then his arm comes up and settles around my shoulders, warm, solid, and completely instinctive, the way it sometimes is with him, as if his body makes decisions his brain hasn’t gotten around to approving yet. He smells of cedar and something warmer underneath it, that combination I’d stopped pretending I hadn’t memorized, and he makes me feel safe, and for just a second, I let myself stay exactly where I am.
Then I feel him stiffen slightly at the exact moment he registers what he’s done, and he glances sideways.
Quill is standing right there, those knowing eyes taking in everything with the efficiency of a man who never misses anything and never needs to make a production of it.
Tate’s arm drops.
Quill looks between the two of us and says absolutely nothing. He just smiles slowly, quietly, and entirely too knowing. He takes a long sip of his beer like he hasn’t just seen every single thing.
Tate’s jaw tightens.
Pressing my lips together very hard and looking down at the T-shirt in my hands, I say nothing, which feels like the only reasonable response available to us.
RAVEN
I’m laughing at something Torch said, a real laugh, the kind that surprises me, the kind I don’t always let happen, when I catch it.
That arm.
That completely instinctive, unthinking movement of Tate pulling Sophia close, the ease of it, the way his body moved before his brain caught up with what it was doing.
