I catch her chin, gentle but unyielding, and tilt her face up. “You don’t get to give your life,” I murmur, my voice low and stripped to the truth. “Not for anyone. Do you hear me?”
Her breath wavers. My pulse does too.
“I wouldn’t survive losing you again. Never again.”
I press the words into her mouth with a kiss, slow and lingering, like I can force the truth of them into her bones. She melts against me for a moment, her fingers curling tighter into my shirt. I feel the faint tremor in her breathing, the exhaustion she’s been hiding behind sharp edges and sarcasm.
I cup the back of her head and hold her as if I’m anchoring both of us.
That’s when movement shifts in the doorway.
Rowan.
He stands with his shoulders squared, posture solid, but his eyes betray him. He thinks he hides it—the guilt that never sleeps, the quiet conviction that he takes too much or offers too little, the fear that he’ll always hover at the edge of whatever happiness we manage to build.
He’s wrong. But guilt is a parasite; it gnaws at reason until even truth sounds like a lie.
He watches us with that familiar, tight stare. The one I know by heart—the look of someone who wants to step forward, who aches to close the distance, but is held in place by a heavier fear.
I kiss Berk again, slower, lingering, making sure she feels everything I cannot say with words. Then I pull back and tapher ass lightly with a smirk I don’t quite feel, but it gets her attention.
“Go give Ro some love,” I whisper. “He looks like he’s drifting.”
Her head turns at once—her instincts honed sharper than any blade she carries. The second her eyes meet Rowan’s, she softens. Not weakness. Recognition. Understanding. That part of her that always reaches for the hurt in the room without stopping to ask why.
She slips out of my arms and toward him, and Rowan’s whole damn face cracks open, relief and longing flickering through the cracks like light through broken glass.
My chest tightens—not with jealousy, but with a pull far deeper. Belonging. The kind that steadies and terrifies in equal measure.
Watching her move toward him reminds me why I said what I said. Why I’ll fight anyone who tries to take her again.
And why losing her would be a death I wouldn’t survive.
None of us would.
When she reaches Rowan, she doesn’t hesitate—she never does with us. She steps straight into his space like she belongs there, like her body recognizes his before her mind does, and she tucks herself into his chest. His breath stutters, caught between surprise and need, and his arms come around her on instinct. He holds her tight, as if he’s afraid she might vanish if he doesn’t anchor her.
He always pretends he doesn’t need comfort. Like we’re the ones who cling while he stands untouched and solid. But I know better. We both do. Rowan’s kept his pain buried—quiet, airless—the way a man hides a knife beneath a coat: close, rigid, dangerous if handled wrong. And yet, with her pressed against him, whispering into the fabric of his shirt, the tension drains from his shoulders like poison finally leaving a wound.
I can’t hear the words she’s giving him, but I see what they do. His jaw softens. His fingers dig into her hips, pulling her closer, like each inhale might take her from him if he doesn’t hold tight enough. The look on his face—fuck. It’s the look he wore when we were kids, and she used to hug him out of nowhere. Shock first. Then that private, desperate relief. Like touch is something he never learned to ask for but always needed.
This is who she is to us.
The girl we hurt. The girl we lost. The girl we weren’t strong enough to save back then. And somehow—against every reason—she forgave us anyway. She came back and placed her heart in our hands as if we hadn’t failed her in a hundred quiet, unforgivable ways. She lets us touch her. Love her. Hold her. And instead of shrinking from the darkness we carry, she steps into it and sets the whole place alight.
Now she reaches up, fingers brushing along Rowan’s jaw, murmuring something against his skin that makes his eyes fall shut. She kisses beneath his ear, then the corner of his mouth, and I watch him fracture and reform in the space of a single breath. Silent. Internal. Complete. All because of her.
She calms him in ways no one else ever has. Pulls him from the places he disappears into. Reminds him he’s more than what they made us. More than the violence waiting under his ribs and the guilt that carved him hollow.
She’s our little pixie. Our bright-haired chaos. Our shield and our knife. And watching her melt Rowan—the same Rowan who stares down grown men without blinking—makes my chest ache. Makes something warm spread through me, fierce and reverent and terrifying.
Because we’re forged from iron and blood.
But in her hands?
We soften.
We shift.