“Oats,” I say, tilting the pot toward her.
She takes a bowl and sits at the table. Eats without speaking, her eyes on the window, the spoon moving in the automatic rhythm of a woman fueling her body because her body needs fuel. Though she’s beginning to eat differently now. Morecarefully. More deliberately. Not for herself. For what she’s carrying.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking at me.
“You’ve got a berry on your chin.”
She wipes her chin. There’s no berry. She gives me a look that could strip paint.
“Funny.”
“I thought so.”
Greta snorts from the stove. Briar’s eyes narrow at me, but her mouth does something it’s been doing more often lately… a twitch that isn’t a smile but is related to one. The tiny expression of a woman who is reluctantly, furiously, against her own judgment, starting to find me amusing.
I’ll take it.
The morning moves. I finish in the kitchen and go to the barn because the barn is the one place in this compound where nobody questions my presence. The horses don’t know what the corridor was. The horses accept me at face value, which is more than most of the wolves here do.
Martin is at the well when I cross the yard.
He’s been watching me for a week. Same position every morning. Same distance. The fury in his face hasn’t changed, but something else has. The distance has shortened. Yesterday, he was at the far fence. Today he’s at the well. Tomorrow, maybe, he’ll be at the porch. The man is approaching me in increments, cautiously.
I stop walking and look at him.
“Martin.”
He looks at me but says nothing.
“I owe you a conversation,” I say. “Whenever you’re ready for it. No conditions. No time limit. Just… whenever you’re ready.”
He holds my gaze for a while. Then he nods. Once. Short. And goes back to the well.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not acceptance. It’s a man acknowledging that the conversation exists and will eventually happen. I take that, too.
The barn is quiet. I muck stalls because Briar was right, I’m not fixing their fences, I’m not running their patrols, I’m not inserting myself into the operation of a compound that isn’t mine. But I can clean stalls. I can haul water. I can make oats and stack wood and do the invisible labor that keeps a compound breathing while the visible labor — the politics, the security, the aftermath of Bern’s destruction — happens around me.
I’m shoveling the third stall when Conner comes in.
He leans on the stall door and watches me work. The silence between us has changed since the extraction. No longer the loaded, painful silence of two brothers who can’t look at each other. Something quieter. Two men standing on opposite sides of a thing they both built, trying to figure out how to talk across it.
“I need to ask you something,” he says.
I set the pitchfork down. “Ask.”
“Mia’s parents.”
My stomach tightens. I knew this was coming. Conner has been searching since the rescue — quietly, methodically, using Willow’s thread-sense and Arden’s intelligence and every available channel to trace the family that Mia was taken from. The parents who were separated from their daughter on intake day were processed into a system that either held them or consumed them.
“You kept records,” Conner says. “Schedules. Intake numbers.”
“Yes.”
“You’d have transferred Mia’s family. She came through the Forrester corridor — the code on her box was F-7.”
“I transferred a lot of families, Conner.”
“A couple with a toddler. Three years ago, maybe a little more. The timeline matches the facility’s intake records.”