Chapter 20 The Seam That Burns #2
“Smart man,” Mason corrected, already moving back under the truck. “Now can we please finish this transmission before Evan gets here and realizes we've been gossiping instead of working?”
Ronan was still looking at me. “You really offering me a job?”
“Yeah. If you want it.”
“Yeah. Okay. I want it.”
“Good.” I tried to ignore the way Cal was practically vibrating with glee. “You start officially Monday.”
“Congrats, Ronan,” Cal said. “Welcome to the team. Try not to reorganize anything else without asking first.”
“Or do,” Mason added. “Place could use better organization.”
“My organization is fine.”
“Your organization is chaos pretending to be a system,” Cal said cheerfully. “But we love you anyway.”
“You're both fired.”
“Can't fire us. We're too useful.” Cal went back to work, still grinning. “Plus who else would provide quality entertainment while fixing transmissions?”
“Literally anyone,” I muttered, but Ronan was smiling.
Which was either the best or worst idea I'd had all week.
Probably both.
Evan walked in wiping his hands on a rag, grease already on his shirt from whatever he'd been working on in the other bay.
“How's it looking?” he asked, leaning over to check our progress.
“Torque converter's toast,” I said. “Should have it sorted by tomorrow.”
“Good. Dad's gonna need it.” Evan grabbed a wrench from my bench without asking. “Can't run patrols if the truck won't start.”
“We're on it.”
He worked alongside us for a minute, checking bolts we'd already loosened, then snorted. “How long's he been ignoring the noise?”
“Based on the wear pattern? Month. Maybe six weeks.”
“Sounds about right.” Evan shook his head. “Man will rebuild an entire engine block for fun but won't bring his own truck in till it's practically dead.”
Cal laughed from where he was working on the pan bolts. “Remember when the alternator went out and he just kept jump-starting it for two weeks?”
“Said it was fine,” Mason added. “Just needed a good run to charge the battery.”
“He drove it to the grocery store,” Evan said. “Three blocks. That's not a run, that's denial.”
“Your dad's got a very specific relationship with vehicle maintenance,” I said diplomatically.
“My dad pretends things aren't broken till they catastrophically fail,” Evan corrected. “It's a whole philosophy. If it still moves, it's not broken yet.”
Ronan made a sound that might've been agreement. “Explains why he kept driving on that rear tire last month.”
“The bald one?” Cal asked.
“The one that was more air than rubber,” Ronan confirmed.
Evan pinched the bridge of his nose. “I told him to replace those.”
“He said they had another thousand miles in them,” I offered.
“They had maybe fifty miles. Optimistically.” Evan looked at the transmission pan like it personally offended him. “How much is this gonna cost him?”
“Parts and labor? Probably four hundred.”
“Which he'll complain about for a week while driving a truck that actually shifts properly.” Evan wiped his hands again. “I'm telling him it was eight hundred. Make him suffer a little.”
“That's just cruel,” Mason said, grinning.
“That's payment for two decades of him refusing to do basic maintenance and then acting surprised when things break.”
Cal was trying not to laugh. “You gonna tell him the torque converter didn't just spontaneously fail?”
“I'm gonna tell him it's a miracle the whole transmission didn't grenade on the highway. Which is true. This thing's been screaming for help.”
“Could've been worse,” I said. “Could've been the clutch.”
“Don't even say that. He'll take it as a challenge.” Evan paused, shifting gears. “Speaking of the highway. Dad told me about the attack on the way back.”
The shop went quiet.
“To be fair,” I said carefully, “Silas hit us before the transmission could give out. Constructs, shadow work, the whole arsenal. Your dad drove through most of it while Michael and I kept them off the truck.”
“I know. He told me.” Evan's voice went flat. Not angry at us, angry at the situation. “I should've been there.”
“You were holding the pack together,” I said. “Someone had to. That mattered more than one extra set of hands in a fight.”
“Doesn't change the fact that my family was getting attacked and I was here.” Evan gripped the wrench harder. “Dad said the windshield's gone. The roof's caved in. You burned through half your reserves just keeping Ronan human.”
“We survived,” I said simply.
“Barely.” Evan's Alpha instincts were clearly at war with his frustration. “Next time something like that happens, I'm there. I don't care what else is going on. You call me.”
“Next time we'll try to schedule the ambush around your availability,” Ronan said dryly.
Evan's mouth twitched despite himself. “Smart ass.”
“Learned from the best.”
The tension broke slightly, though Evan stayed serious. “Training tomorrow. Dawn. Don't be late.”
“I'll be there.”
“Good. Bring coffee. The real stuff, not whatever Gideon's brewing in the back that could probably fuel the truck.”
“My coffee's fine,” I protested.
“Your coffee's a biohazard,” Evan said, already heading back toward his bay. “There's a reason people bring their own.”
Cal waited until Evan was gone to grin at us. “He's not wrong.”
“Nobody asked you,” I muttered.
“Didn't have to. It's a known fact. Scientific consensus.”
Mason snorted. “Pretty sure the EPA would classify it as toxic waste.”
“You're all terrible,” I said, but Ronan was smiling and that made the ribbing almost worth it.
Late afternoon bled into evening, the sky going bruised with purple and gold as the sun sank behind the treeline.
Cal and Mason had finished their projects and headed home.
The shop was quiet except for the ambient sounds of a building settling, and I was trying to finish the last of the paperwork while Ronan cleaned grease off tools with the methodical attention he brought to tasks that didn't require thinking.
We'd been working in comfortable silence for the better part of an hour when he set down the wrench he'd been cleaning.
“So what are we doing here?”
I glanced up from the invoice I'd been pretending to focus on. “Paperwork. Tool maintenance. The thrilling life of—”
“Gideon.” He wasn't smiling. “You know what I'm asking.”
I set down my pen. “Yeah. I do.”
“I don't have a good answer,” I admitted. “Never done this before. The relationship thing. The letting someone in thing. Not sure I know how to do it without screwing it up.”
“That makes two of us.” Ronan moved around the workbench, closing the distance until he was leaning against it beside me.
“We're a mess,” I said.
“We really are.” He almost smiled. “But I'm all in anyway. If you are.”
The certainty in his voice made my chest tight. “You should think about that. I've got a curse eating me alive, a father who wants us both dead, and approximately zero experience with functional relationships. This is a terrible investment.”
“Good thing I'm not looking for returns.” He reached out and took my hand, his fingers warm and calloused and steady. “I'm looking for you. However that works. Whatever that looks like.”
I stared at our joined hands and tried to find words for the panic and hope warring in my chest. “I thought I'd be alone for the rest of my life.
Told myself that solitude was safer, that attachment meant vulnerability, that I was better off keeping everyone at arm's length where they couldn't be used against me.”
“And then?”
“And then you came back from the dead and turned everything upside down.” I laughed, rough and quiet.
“Walked into my shop covered in blood and trauma and somehow became the person my soul decided to anchor itself to.
Didn't get a vote. Didn't get to opt out.
Just woke up one day and realized you were the north I'd been missing my entire life.”
Ronan was quiet for a moment. “That what the tether feels like to you? North?”
“Yeah. Direction. Gravity. The thing that keeps me from drifting into places I can't come back from.” I turned my hand in his, pressing our palms together. “Which means we can't really separate even if we wanted to. You're stuck with me. Literally. Magically stuck.”
“Terrible fate.” But his mouth was pulling into a smile now. “Bound to a witch who makes coffee that could strip paint and thinks sleep is optional.”
“Bound to a dire wolf who reorganizes my tool wall without asking and brings me fancy coffee like I deserve it.”
“You do deserve it.”
“I really don't.”
“We're gonna disagree on that.” He squeezed my hand. “So. Taking it slow. One day at a time. Figuring this out as we go.”
“That's the plan?”
“That's the plan. Unless you've got a better one.”
I thought about it. About the curse and the tether and the impossible situation we were navigating.
About Silas coming and the war we were preparing for and all the ways this could go catastrophically wrong.
About the fact that I'd never wanted someone like this, never let myself want someone like this, and now that I had him I was terrified of losing him.
“One day at a time sounds good,” I said finally. “Though fair warning, I'm gonna be terrible at this. The relationship thing. I'll overthink everything, I'll try to fix problems before they're actually problems, I'll probably push you away when I should be pulling you closer.”
“And I'll run when things get hard, I'll close down instead of talking, I'll probably try to protect you by doing stupid self-sacrificing things.” Ronan's smile was wry. “We're gonna drive each other crazy.”
“Probably.”
“Worth it though.”
“Yeah.” I pulled him closer. “Yeah, it is.”
He kissed me then. Soft and deliberate, a promise rather than a demand. When he pulled back his eyes were warm, the fever-brightness finally gone, replaced by something steadier.
“For what it's worth,” he said quietly, “I'm glad your soul picked me. Even if neither of us got a vote.”
“Me too.”
Pain ripped through my chest with enough force to double me over behind the counter, my breath tearing out of me like I'd been hooked from the inside.
I gripped the workbench with both hands, knuckles going white, fighting not to scream because if I screamed the pack would hear and I refused to be seen breaking.
My magic flared reflexively.
I felt it clearly now.
My father pushing on the curse with deliberate intent, using it like a lever to destabilize me, to crack my defenses, to prepare the ground for whatever assault was coming.
And underneath that immediate pain, I sensed the protections around town beginning to dissolve.
Not failing naturally. Not wearing down from age or neglect.
Melting. Unraveling deliberately. The wards I'd helped build, the barriers Nate had woven through the forest, the layered defenses that had kept Hollow Pines safe for months, all of it being dismantled with surgical care by someone who understood exactly how they'd been constructed.
Silas wasn't testing anymore.
He was coming.
Tonight. Soon. Now.
The realization hit like ice water.
I forced myself upright through shaking limbs and staggered toward the door, needing air, needing to see the sky, needing to confirm that the wrongness I was sensing was real and not just my curse-addled perception lying to me.
The evening looked normal. Too normal. Calm sitting on top of violence like oil on water, separate and waiting to ignite.
I pulled out my phone with hands that trembled and called Evan.
He answered on the second ring. “Gideon?”
“Get ready.” My voice came out strained but controlled, each word carefully shaped despite the pain trying to tear them apart. “Fortify. Alert the pack. Move civilians to secondary positions.”
“What's happening?” Evan's tone sharpened immediately, Alpha command bleeding through. “Are we under attack?”
I swallowed pain like broken glass and forced the truth through my teeth. “He's here. I can feel him pulling the seams apart. The wards are failing. The protections are dissolving. He's been working on them for hours and I didn't—” I stopped. Breathed. “He's coming. Maybe minutes. Maybe less.”
“Stay where you are. We're mobilizing.”
The line went dead.
The calm was over.
The week of pretending we had time, of rebuilding trust and fixing trucks and existing in the illusion of normalcy, all of it was finished.
Silas was coming to Hollow Pines.
And I was standing in my shop doorway with a curse tearing me apart from the inside, watching the sky darken and knowing that the storm was about to hit.
The only question was whether we'd survive it.