Chapter 28 - Caitlynn
Sleep pulled at Caitlynn the way the tide pulled at sand—slow and relentless and not remotely interested in her opinion about it.
She tried to hold on. There were things she wanted to keep watching: the way the low light caught the planes of Kahn’s face when he finally stopped carrying two days of terror in his jaw.
The way Elianna had gone still inside her, satisfied, as though she’d been waiting for them to sort themselves out before she’d agree to settle.
The smell of the room—herbs and warmth and him—which Caitlynn had decided she was going to memorize properly, instead of cataloging it the way she cataloged everything, the way a woman cataloged things she expected to lose.
But her body had been scraped hollow and refilled with wet concrete, and her eyelids had ideas, and eventually the tide won.
The dark behind her eyes was not the dark of before. That dark had been deep and close and humming, the dark of a body working very hard on something that required all available resources. This dark had room in it. Light somewhere at its edges.
She followed the light.
She knew she was dreaming before she arrived anywhere.
The knowledge sat in her chest like a fact she’d swallowed—present, inert, not particularly useful.
Her feet found ground that felt like warm stone, smooth under bare soles, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and something green, something that grew after rain. Not pine. Something older.
The gold came next.
It moved across the ground in slow, branching patterns like sunlight through water, like something alive that hadn’t decided what shape to be yet.
Not the gold she’d thrown through her hands at Marcus’s rogues—that gold had been sharp and purposeful, angry the way only a frightened person’s anger could be, compressed and focused and a little out of control.
This was nothing like that. This was the gold inside the thing. The original.
Her mother was sitting on a low flat stone at the center of it.
Not the photograph. Not the woman with the careful posture and the smile that had been holding something back for so long it had become part of the smile itself.
Not the mother frozen at forty in paper and glass, sealed in the past like an insect in amber, too flat to touch and too far away to reach.
This woman was twenty-six. Maybe twenty-seven.
Young enough that Caitlynn could see herself in her face without the intervening seventeen years softening the resemblance—the same jaw, the same mouth, the wide green eyes that three different foster mothers had called unusual and that Caitlynn had spent most of her childhood thinking made her look like something slightly feral.
Her hair was the same auburn, drifting loose around her shoulders in the gold-thick air as though gravity had decided to take a personal day.
She was watching Caitlynn the way you watch a person you’d been waiting for. Patient. Happy. Without any of the worry or apology Caitlynn had always imagined would be on her face if she could have just one conversation—just one—with the person whose absence had shaped everything.
“Sit down,” her mother said. Her voice was Caitlynn’s but lower. Settled. “You look like you’re about to run.”
“I’m not going to run.”
She smiled. The unguarded kind—the one that happened before a person remembered they were being looked at. “You’ve been running since you were seven.”
Caitlynn sat. The stone was warm beneath her, and the gold moved around their feet like a tide around rocks.
“I’m not criticizing,” her mother said, before Caitlynn could get a word in edgewise.
She reached out and touched Caitlynn’s hand, and where she touched her, the gold brightened, the way a coal brightened when you blew on it.
“You learned what you needed to learn to stay alive. It’s not the same as running. ”
Caitlynn looked at the hand over hers. Her mother’s hand. Her mother’s fingers, which she had inherited to the knuckle, the same length, the same tendency to fidget when trying to hold still.
She had 117 questions filed under 'things I’ll never know'. She’d been adding to that file since she was seven, standing in the rubble of a kitchen while a neighbor wrapped something around her shoulders and said words she hadn’t understood yet.
She’d been adding to it since she was fifteen, sitting on a metal cot in the Millers’ spare room while Chris knocked on the doorframe and said you don’t have to be okay, which was the first time anyone had said that to her, and she hadn’t known what to do with it.
She’d been adding to it for twenty-four years.
But when she opened her mouth, none of the hundred and seventeen came out.
“I’m scared,” she said.
Her mother’s thumb moved across the back of her hand. Not asking her to continue. Not asking her to explain. Just there, doing what hands did when they were trying to say I hear you, and I’m not going anywhere at the same time.
“I know Kahn loves me,” Caitlynn said. “And I told him I love him, and I meant it—every word, I meant it.” She stopped. Tried again. “But what if I’m the kind of mother who—what if she wakes up one day and the person she needed wasn’t there? What if I don’t know how? I never had—I never saw—”
The gold rippled outward from them like a stone dropped in still water, then came back.
“I was afraid of the same thing,” her mother said. Her voice didn’t change. Steady, steady—the voice of a woman who had been afraid a long time and had figured out how to carry it without letting it drive. “I was terrified of you before you were born.”
Caitlynn looked at her face.
“I’d had exactly the same life you’d had,” she said.
“Different details. Same shape. Nobody stayed. Nobody picked me first. I didn’t know how to be someone’s home because I’d never been allowed to stay anywhere long enough to understand what one felt like.
” A pause. “And then there was you. And you were so small. And you needed everything, all the time, and there were nights I sat on the floor of that apartment and just shook, because what did I know—what did I possibly know—”
“But you did it,” Caitlynn said. It came out like an accusation and a question at the same time.
“I showed up,” her mother said. “That’s what I knew how to do. I showed up the next morning and the morning after that. I didn’t do everything right.” Her fingers tightened. “But I never stopped showing up.”
The gold moved around their feet. Warm. Unhurried.
“I burned the house down.” The words felt scraped out—not accusation, not grief, just the raw shape of the thing that had lived inside Caitlynn for seventeen years. “I don’t remember it, but I know I did. The fire came from me.”
“Yes.”
“You died because—”
“No.” Quiet and absolute, the voice of a person who had thought about this for a long time and arrived somewhere on the other side of it.
“I died because the people who wanted what we carried decided that destroying it was easier than allowing it. You didn’t burn the house.
They did—and your fire woke up because it was trying to protect you.
” Those green eyes, Caitlynn’s green eyes, a face she’d borrowed without permission.
“It protected you. That’s what it does. That’s what you do. ”
The thing behind Caitlynn’s ribs—the stone she’d been swallowing and re-swallowing for twenty-four years—shifted. Not dissolved. Shifted. Moved to a different part of her, some part with more room.
“She’s going to have the fire,” Caitlynn said. “Elianna.”
“Almost certainly.” Something crossed her mother’s face—warm, with a shadow of humor in it that Caitlynn recognized because she’d worn it herself, the look that happened when something was both terrifying and deeply unsurprising.
“Half wolf, half witch, entirely stubborn from the sound of it. She’s going to give you a fantastic time. ”
The laugh that came out of Caitlynn surprised them both.
Her mother’s eyes lit up, the green brightening.
For one fractured second, Caitlynn could see them sitting like this in a real kitchen in a real world—the two of them at a table with tea going cold and too many years between them and both of them laughing anyway.
Then the gold went softer. The edges of her mother began to blur the way candle flames blurred when you looked at them too long—still shaped like fire, just less bounded by it.
“Don’t go,” Caitlynn said. She was seven, and she was twenty-four, both at once.
“I’m not going.” Her mother pressed her hand once, firm and deliberate.
“I’m here the same way I’ve always been here.
In the fire. In you. In the granddaughter who’s going to be absolutely intolerable and perfect.
” The blur deepened. Her voice arrived the way it had at the very beginning—pressure against Caitlynn’s ribs, against the place below the sternum where things too big for words went to live.
You already know how to show up. You’ve been doing it your whole life.
You just haven’t let yourself count it yet.
The gold went quiet.
***
Caitlynn surfaced with her face against Kahn’s shoulder and his hand in her hair.
He hadn’t moved. She knew this the way she knew everything about him now—through the bond, through the months of sleeping close enough to memorize his breathing, through the three inches of space between them that he’d never quite managed to stop closing.
He was awake. He’d been awake for a while.
She could tell by the particular quality of his stillness, the kind that required actual effort.
“You could have gone to sleep,” she said.
“I know.”
“You’ve been awake the whole time.”
A pause—the pause of a man choosing not to lie, which was different from the pause of a man preparing one. “Mostly.”
She tilted her head back. His face was still a wreck—the shadows, the cut along his cheekbone, the jaw that had apparently decided tension was its permanent address.
But his eyes, when they met hers, were something else.
The ice-blue had gone warm in the low light, or maybe that was just what happened when a person looked at you without trying to hide anything.
She had not let many people look at her that way. The last person who had was Chris, at fifteen, in a metal-cot bedroom, who had knocked on a doorframe and told her she didn’t have to be okay.
“She told me I already know how to show up,” Caitlynn said.
He didn’t ask who. He just looked at her, his thumb moving slow through her hair. Waiting.
“I’ve been doing it for twenty-four years and calling it something else.” Her voice came out plain and unprepared, without the usual scaffolding. “Surviving. Running. Making do.”
His jaw moved—that familiar tick beneath the scar. He swallowed whatever came first and said, very carefully, “And now?”
“Now I think I’d like to try calling it something more accurate.”
His chest rose under her cheek. Fell. The hand in her hair stilled.
“Terrifying,” he said quietly, “coming from the woman who held a wall of fire between two armies.”
“That was considerably easier than this.”
“Obviously.” His mouth found the top of her head. Stayed there. “For what it’s worth.”
“It’s worth a lot,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Elianna kicked—enthusiastic, right on schedule, deeply uninterested in subtlety. Exactly like her father, Caitlynn thought, and filed that observation away for the rest of their lives.
“Still complaining,” Kahn observed.
“Still yours when she behaves.”
“She doesn’t behave.”
“Then she’s still mine.” Caitlynn settled her cheek back against his shoulder. “I’ve decided I don’t mind.”
He laughed—low and real, the laugh he’d been keeping at the back of his throat the entire time she’d known him, the one that had been waiting for somewhere safe enough to land. She felt it move through his chest.
She closed her eyes.
The gold was still there, somewhere below the dark. Warm and quiet and patient.
Not going anywhere.
Neither was she.