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She tilted her head back to look at him. His eyes were soft in the fading light, his jaw relaxed, and the smile on his face wasn't the cocky grin she'd met at the Griddle & Grind a lifetime ago. It was quiet. It was real. It belonged to her.

Later, when the dancing pulled them apart, she stood by the lake with Diana and watched Criss across the reception. He was talking to Kieran, gesturing with a drink in his hand, laughing at something his cousin said. He must have felt her watching because he looked up, found her across the crowd, and held her gaze.

The warmth that moved through her started in her chest and spread outward in slow waves, filling her arms, her hands, the space behind her ribs. Not the bond, though the bond carried it. It was the simple, devastating pleasure of being seen by someone who knew all of her and wanted every piece.

He raised his glass to her from across the reception. She raised hers back.

Diana leaned close. "You look happy."

Steph watched her husband across the fairy-lit clearing, his amber eyes still on her, his smile still hers, and the lake mirroring the first stars of evening behind him.

"Yeah," she said. "I really am."

CRISS

Seven months married, and Criss Holt had become a man who woke up early on purpose.

Not because he had to. Because the mornings were good. Steph sprawled across three-quarters of the bed with her leg thrown over his hip and her face buried in the pillow, the field journal she'd fallen asleep reading still open on the nightstand. Coffee in the kitchen that he'd learned to make properly because she'd threatened divorce over the old method. The walk across the yard to Kieran's house where Sage would be waiting at the window to wave at him, because that was their routine now and routines, it turned out, weren't cages. They were architecture.

He'd spent years running from structure. Now he built things. Ward markers for the council. Furniture for the cabin. A crib for Freya's second pregnancy that Kieran had mentioned once, casually, over coffee, and then gone silent for ten minutes with a look on his face that Criss recognized because he'd started wearing it too.

The dig was in its final phase. Steph had spent seven months translating every inscription in the chamber, cross-referencing the pictographic history with Rydan's recovered records, and building a document so comprehensive that three universities had already requested access. The council had approved a publication framework that protected living families while restoring the erased ones to the record. The Brennan name. The Volkov line. The Tanaka branch. All of them carved back into Hollow Oak's official history, present tense, as if they'd never been gone.

Because they hadn't been. The stone had remembered them when nobody else would.

Steph's work had been submitted to the International Council of Supernatural Archaeological Preservation two weeks ago. The peer review process would take months, but the preliminary response had been, in Steph's carefully understated words, "encouraging." She'd read the letter once, set it on the table, and gone back to her translations without comment. He'd found her grinning at the wall twenty minutes later when she thought he wasn't looking.

Tonight, though. Tonight was his.

They were on the cabin porch, the small guest cabin that had been temporary and was now just home, cramped and familiar and smelling like her herbs and his sawdust. The evening was warm, late autumn sliding toward the first cool edge of winter, the sky above the pines streaked with orange and purple. Steph sat cross-legged in the porch chair with a mug of tea balanced on her knee, her dark curls loose, the claiming scar visible above the collar of her flannel. His flannel. She'd stopped pretending her clothes and his clothes were separate categories around month three.

"I've been thinking," she said.

"Dangerous."

"About timing. For a family." She said it the way she said everything important: directly, without fanfare, eyes on the tree line like she was discussing soil composition. "Not now. The publication needs to clear review first, and I want to finish the lower chamber translations before I'm too pregnant to fit through the entrance. But soon. Maybe spring."

He took a sip of his coffee and let the word settle. Spring. A baby in spring, in Hollow Oak, with this woman who planned her life in geological timelines and field seasons and had just slotted a child into her schedule somewhere between peer review and a chamber she'd spent seven months decoding.

"Spring works," he said.

"You're not going to make a big deal about this?"

"You just told me you want to have my baby. What part of my face looks like I'm not making a big deal about it?"

She glanced at him. Whatever she saw made her smile. "You look like you’re trying very hard to be casual."

"I'm extremely casual. I'm the most casual person who's ever discussed reproduction on a porch."

"Your hands are shaking."

"It's cold."

"It's sixty-five degrees."

He set his coffee down and looked at her. Hazel eyes, gold flecks, the particular sharpness of a woman who knew exactly what she'd just said and was enjoying watching it land. She was smiling. Not the guarded, almost-smile he'd spent weeks earning at the beginning. A real one. Open, warm, belonging to a woman who'd stopped fighting the good things and started building with them.

"Spring," he said. "I'd like that."