“Deal.”
We walk out of the building. His hand in mine. Willow and Conner behind us with Mia asleep on Conner’s shoulder. Brenna and Merric talking low, already strategizing. The delegates dispersing. Bern’s chair empty. The hearing room settling into the quiet of a space where something enormous just happened, and the walls are still absorbing the impact.
The drive back is three hours. Garrett holds my hand the whole way. He keeps his mouth shut. Mostly.
“Briar.”
“You’re talking.”
“One thing.”
“What?”
“The baby. Is it—? Are you—?”
“Fine. We’re fine.”
His hand tightens on mine. I feel his pulse jump.
“Good,” he says. “Good.”
He doesn’t say anything else. His thumb traces a circle on my knuckle. Small. Steady. The gesture that started everything, translated from my belly to my hand.
I let him do it. I look out the window at the hills going past, and I let him trace his circles. I don’t pull away.
My wolf is quiet. Settled. Content in a way that isn’t the urgent, demanding pull from before. Deeper. Steadier. The contentment of an animal that has found what she was looking for and is holding it and knows it isn’t going anywhere.
I take in a long, steadying breath. Three hours to Ravenclaw.
My hand in his.
Chapter 34
Garrett
Ravenclaw mornings start before dawn. I’ve learned this over the past week. The compound wakes in layers. Greta first, always, the stove going before the light. Then Merric, who runs the fence line in wolf form, is back before anyone else is up. Then the children, then the fighters, then everyone else, the compound filling with sound and motion.
I’ve started waking with Greta. Not because she needs help; she’s made it clear that her kitchen operates on a closed-door policy, and I’m tolerated, not welcomed. But I can haul water, split wood for the stove, carry the heavy things that she’s been carrying herself for decades because nobody thought to offer. She lets me do it because refusing would be more effort than allowing it, and because Greta is practical above all things.
“You’re not earning points with me,” she says this morning, watching me stack the split wood beside the stove. “If that’s what you think you’re doing.”
“I’m not trying to earn points.”
“Good. Because I don’t keep score.” She tests the heat on the stove with the back of her hand. “But if I did, you’d be running a deficit that firewood won’t cover.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She gives me a look that goes through the skin and into whatever’s underneath. “You’re the man who sent our wolves into that place. You know that every morning when you stack my wood?”
“Every morning.”
“Good. Keep knowing it.” She turns back to the stove. “The oats are in the upper cabinet. Make yourself useful.”
I make oats. It’s a strange skill for an alpha — or a former alpha, or whatever I am now — but the compound needs feeding, and I know how to cook because ranch wolves learn to cook or they starve. The oats go into the pot Greta points at. Water, salt, the dried berries she keeps in jars on the shelf. I stir while she works around me. Two people in a kitchen who haven’t figured out what they are to each other, except that one of them carries guilt the other has every right to weaponize, and the other hasn’t weaponized it.
Briar comes in at six. She’s been running, I can tell from the flush on her skin, the way her hair is pulled back, the slight breathlessness she’s carrying. She runs every morning. The south ridge, twice, because the south ridge doesn’t take her past my cabin, and she thinks I don’t know she’s avoiding the route.
I do know. I track her every moment of every day without even thinking about it. The sense of her is like a second heartbeat.