I look away. My heart is hammering. Willow’s hand is still in mine. I’m squeezing hard enough to hurt her, and she’s letting me.
On Conner’s lap, Mia is asleep. The rubber ball clutched in her fist. The broadcast spent. Conner’s hand is on her head. His eyes are wet. He’s not wiping them.
Brenna catches my eye from the front of the room. The look she gives me is complicated — pride, exasperation, the expression of an alpha whose operative just detonated a political bomb in the middle of a formal hearing without clearing it first.
I give her a small shrug.
She almost smiles.
The hearing continues. The council votes. Bern’s suspension is unanimous. Garrett’s case is deferred pending review of the intelligence he provided and the circumstances of his Syndicate captivity. It’s not exoneration. It’s not forgiveness. It’s the system doing what systems do — slowly, imperfectly, grinding toward something that might eventually resemble justice.
After, in the corridor outside the hearing room, Garrett finds me.
He doesn’t speak. He stands in front of me with Conner’s too-tight shirt and the scars on his wrists and the look on his facethat I put there by standing up in a room full of wolves and calling him the father of my child.
He takes my hand. Puts it flat against his chest. His heartbeat under my palm. Fast. Hard.
“You said it,” he says.
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“You said it in front of every wolf in the southern territories.”
“I said what was true. That’s all.”
“Briar.”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
I pull my hand back. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do it for you. I did it because that wolf was trying to bury you under Bern’s mess, and you’ve already been buried enough.”
“You called me the father of your child.”
“Youarethe father of my child.”
“You saidmate.”
“No, I didn’t.Yousaid mate. I said father.”
His mouth twitches. The split lip is healed now, nothing but a faint line. The almost-smile does the thing it did last night, the crooked, real expression that makes him look like a person instead of an alpha.
“You’re going to say it eventually,” he says.
“Keep dreaming.”
“I will.” He reaches for my hand again. I let him take it. “I’ll keep dreaming until you say it.”
“Then you’ll be dreaming a long time.”
“I’ve got time.”
I look at him. This man. This impossible, infuriating, scarred-up, borrowed-clothes-wearing, stall-mucking, rubber-ball-keeping man who walked into a deathtrap and came out with a map and upended the southern territories with his testimony…
I think I might just love him.
“Come on,” I say. “We’re driving back to Ravenclaw. You can hold my hand in the car if you keep your mouth shut.”