Chapter 22 - Caitlynn
The fire came when she called it now.
Caitlynn stood in the training clearing with her palms turned up and flame pooling in her hands like liquid gold.
She held it there—steady, controlled, the heat of it warming her face without burning—and then she shaped it.
A thread first, thin as a ribbon, winding between her fingers the way she’d wound dough at four in the morning in another life.
Then wider. A sheet of fire that hung in the air, rippling, casting amber and rose across the frozen ground.
“Left,” Kahn said from behind her.
She adjusted. The flame drifted right.
“You overcorrected.”
“I’m aware.”
“Six inches back left.”
“I don’t need a GPS.”
“You need something. Your aim has a political affiliation, and it leans.”
She threw the fire. It struck the stone dead center, exploding in sparks that scattered across the dirt and winked out like dying stars. The stone was scorched black. It had been scorched black for two weeks. At this rate, she’d need a new target by Thursday.
“Better,” he said.
“That was perfect.”
“It was six inches left of center.”
“It hit the stone.”
“The stone is two feet wide. Hitting it isn’t the achievement you think it is.”
She turned to face him. He was leaning against the garden wall with his arms crossed, dark hair falling into his eyes, the scar along his jaw catching the morning light.
Her teeth clenched around a retort that had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with the way his rolled sleeves sat against his forearms.
“Show me, then,” she said. “Since you’re the expert on magical fire accuracy. Oh, wait—you can’t. Because you turn into a dog.”
“Wolf.”
“Large dog.”
“I’m choosing not to engage with that.”
“Wise.”
He pushed off the wall and walked toward her, and her pulse kicked up hard beneath her ribs—a traitor, that pulse, every single time he closed the distance.
He stopped behind her. Close. His chest nearly touches her back.
He reached around to adjust the angle of her wrist, and his breath moved her hair.
“Here.” Lower, now. Quieter. “You’re releasing from the heel of your palm. It should come from the fingers. Like you’re throwing something, not dropping it.”
“I know how throwing works.”
“Then throw from the fingers.”
She threw from the fingers. The fire arced across the clearing and hit the stone dead center, no drift, the impact clean and sharp enough to crack the surface.
“There,” he said.
“I would have figured that out.”
“In another week, maybe.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
She turned back to the target stone, biting the inside of her cheek.
Hate wasn’t the word. The word was something closer to the heat crawling up her neck where his breath had been, and she wasn’t going to name it.
Not out loud, not here, not with him still standing close enough that she could smell cedar and woodsmoke on his skin.
He’d taken over her training three weeks ago—not by asking, because he didn’t ask, but by showing up one morning with the fourth Aldric volume bookmarked at combat applications and the expression of a man who’d made a decision.
She’d thrown a fireball at the garden wall in protest. He’d ducked, told her she was six inches left, and opened the book.
But he knew things Olivia didn’t. He knew the territory—every ridge and ravine, every approach vector, the exact distance between ward anchors.
He translated the Aldric texts from theory to practice with the pragmatism of a man who’d been fighting his whole life and understood that magic was only useful if you could deploy it under pressure.
She was fast now. Accurate, despite what he said about the leftward drift, which had corrected itself days ago, and he was bringing it up out of habit and spite.
Shields were harder—a different kind of focus, sustained and even, like holding a door closed against a storm.
She’d built her first one a week ago, a wall of golden light shimmering like heat off pavement.
Kahn had tested it by throwing a rock. Held.
A bigger rock. Held. Then he’d shifted into wolf form and charged it at full speed, two hundred and forty pounds of muscle and fury hitting the barrier like a truck, and the shield held, and he bounced off it with the rigid spine of a man pretending nothing hurt.
She’d laughed until her ribs ached. He’d shifted back, brushed dirt off his shoulder, and told her the shield had a structural weakness on the lower left quadrant, which she was fairly certain he’d invented to salvage his pride.
The wards were the most complex piece. She could feel them now—not just the boundary that wrapped the territory but the whole internal network, the web of magical infrastructure connecting anchor points and monitoring borders.
It spoke to her in a language that bypassed her ears and went straight to the base of her skull, telling her where the territory was strong and where it was thin.
She’d mapped the weak points. She’d told Kahn, and the muscle that jumped in his jaw had confirmed what she’d already suspected—she was sensing things the pack’s own magic users couldn’t.
The pregnancy made everything run hotter.
The fire came brighter each morning. The shields went up faster, held longer.
The ward-sensing sharpened until she could feel disturbances at the perimeter from the sitting room, her whole body tuning to the territory like a radio locking onto a frequency.
The bond amplified what the baby amplified—a feedback loop of power she measured by the week, each increment a little larger than the last.
She was showing now. The curve was unmistakable—not enormous, not yet, but present enough that her hand found it a dozen times a day without her deciding to reach.
She’d started wearing Kahn’s shirts because they were the only things that fit comfortably, and she’d caught him looking at her in his grey flannel three times this morning.
The third time, his gaze had dragged from the rolled sleeves down to the hem brushing her thighs, slow and deliberate, and he hadn’t bothered to look away when she’d raised an eyebrow.
“Take a picture,” she’d told him. “It’ll last longer.”
“I have an excellent memory,” he’d said, and gone back to his coffee with the ghost of something at the corner of his mouth that she refused to classify as a smirk.
The pack had figured it out. Nobody said anything directly.
They just started doing things. Elena left ginger tea outside the kitchen door on mornings when the nausea was bad.
The patrol shift that passed the Alpha house at dawn walked more quietly.
Dex, who had put her on the ground in the combat ring four times in five minutes and now treated her like she might detonate, had carved a small wooden wolf and left it on the kitchen counter without a note.
Now, in the clearing, Kahn was saying something about wards and perimeter maintenance that she was half listening to and half ignoring because the baby had shifted positions and was pressing directly on her bladder with the precision targeting of a Voss.
“Are you hearing me?” he said.
“Every riveting syllable.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
“My face is busy growing a human. Multitasking has limits.”
He opened his mouth—something cutting, she could see it forming—and then his head turned.
A beat later, she felt it too, a shift in the ward network, the particular vibration of someone familiar approaching from the main compound.
Not a threat. The wards didn’t tighten. They loosened, the way they did for people, the territory recognized and allowed.
“You have company,” Kahn said.
She heard him before she saw him—the unhurried rhythm of his walk, steady and even, the sound of a man who had never once in his life been in a rush.
Chris appeared at the edge of the clearing, hands in his pockets, and leaned against a tree with the easy posture of someone who intended to wait as long as it took to be noticed.
Kahn glanced at her, then at Chris, then back at her.
Something passed between the two men—a nod, brief and edged with the particular respect they’d built in the months since the bonding, the kind that existed between a wolf who’d earned his territory and a man who’d watched over the woman in it long before the wolf had any claim.
“I have patrol reports,” Kahn said.
“You have patrol reports,” she agreed.
He held her gaze for a second longer than necessary.
Then he crossed the clearing, paused beside Chris long enough to exchange a word she didn’t catch, and disappeared through the garden gate.
His footsteps faded toward the compound, and the bond between them stretched with the distance—not straining, not anymore.
Just present. A warm tether she carried everywhere, as constant as the second heartbeat nested inside it.
Chris waited until the gate closed before he pushed off the tree and walked toward her, his gaze doing the thing it always did—taking her apart and putting her back together, checking for cracks, cataloging every change since the last time he’d seen her.
He stopped a few feet away and looked at her for a long moment.
Really looked. The training-flushed cheeks and the oversized flannel and the unmistakable curve beneath it, the Aldric texts spread on the stone bench, and the target stone scorched black at the far end of the clearing.
“You’re glowing,” he said.
“It’s the magic.”
“It’s not the magic.” He closed the remaining distance, still studying her. “You look different, Cait.”
“I’m shaped differently. There’s a human growing in me. Tends to affect the silhouette.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He stopped in front of her. His eyes were warm—Chris-warm, the specific quality of attention he’d given her since they were fifteen, and he was the only person in the world who looked at her like she was worth the effort of looking. “You look like you belong somewhere.”