Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lucas
The clearing behind the estate has held the Silvercrest dead for four generations.
I know every stone in it. The first one I learned to read was my grandfather’s. The second was my mother’s. My father’s stone is set at the head of the eastern row, polished granite catching the afternoon sun, and I keep my eyes off it as I walk past because today is not about him.
Today is about Terrance.
His family is at the front. His mother is a small woman with gray at her temples, her hands knotted in a black handkerchief.
She has not lifted her face since she arrived.
His sister stands beside her with one arm wrapped around their mother’s shoulders, her jaw clenched as if that is the only sensation she can feel right now.
Two younger brothers are behind them. A grandfather in a wheelchair, an old soldier who fought beside my father once, his hand resting on his knee.
I take my place at the head of the gravesite.
The other men from Bauer’s section are remembered with him.
Fourteen names spoken into the air over an empty stretch of moss.
Their bodies are still out there in the western buffer, still under whatever cover the squadron will have to fight through to bring them home, the absence of them in the ground its own wound.
We bury what we have. We say what they were.
We commit our brothers to the earth, the moon, the long memory of the pack.
I speak the rites.
My voice carries as an alpha’s voice should, and I’m grateful for the training my father drilled into me from the time I could read.
The cadence comes without effort; the old words find their order.
I look at each face in the family group as I name their son or brother or grandson. I do not let my voice waver.
I read the eulogy I wrote at five o’clock this morning.
Terrance was twenty-eight. He’d been with the task force for three years.
He carried his sister on his shoulders at every pack festival until she grew too tall for it.
He brought his mother flowers on the first Sunday of every month without fail.
He volunteered for the worst patrol routes because he said the new recruits should not have to take them, and his commanding officers had stopped trying to argue with him about it.
These are the things his family wants spoken. I speak them. I let his name sit in the air, with the other fourteen names beside it, and I do not rush any of them.
Sienna is at my left shoulder for all of it.
I can feel her there without turning my head.
The bond hums, quiet and close. She’s wearing a black dress I have not seen before, high at the throat, long sleeved, her hair twisted back at the nape of her neck.
When my voice catches once on a word near the end of the eulogy, her hand comes up to the small of my back.
She leaves it there. She does not press.
She does not stroke. She is a steady, warm pressure through the wool of my jacket.
My voice settles, and I finish the speech without breaking.
When I turn to commit Terrance to the earth, her hand drops away. When I turn back, it is there again. I do not know if she is aware she’s doing it. I think she is.
Terrance’s mother accepts the folded pack pennant from me. Her fingers are very cold. I cover her hand with mine and tell her quietly that her son was a good man and a good wolf. Her eyes lift to mine for the first time, and they fill. She nods once and takes the pennant against her chest.
I move to his sister.
Then to his brothers.
Then to the grandfather. I crouch down in front of the wheelchair to be level with him, and the old man takes my hand in both of his, gripping it hard enough to bruise.
“Your father would be proud of you, Lucas,” he murmurs, his voice cracking while the rest of him refuses to.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You did right by my boy.”
I cannot respond to that. I press his hands with my free one and stand up. He releases me.
The reception in the main hall lasts three hours.
I do what an alpha does at a soldier’s funeral.
I move through the room. I find every family member of every wolf whose name was spoken at the graveside.
I shake hands. I ask after mates, children, elderly parents.
I remember the small things from personnel files I made myself memorize the moment the casualty list came in.
The mother who was ill last winter. The brother who just qualified as a healer.
The cousin training as a tracker who’d been hoping to be assigned to her uncle’s section next year.
I make the families feel seen.
This is the part of being alpha that has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with attention.
My father taught me without ever sitting me down to explain it.
I watched how he moved through rooms after losses.
I watched how he turned his whole body toward each person he spoke to.
I learned that grief is a thing that has to be witnessed by the man who sent the order, and you do the witnessing or you do not deserve the seat.
Sienna stays at my elbow the entire time.
She does not insert herself. She does not try to be luna; she lets me do the work, standing one step back, and when a wife collapses sobbing into her husband’s shoulder, Sienna is the one who gets the woman a chair and a glass of water before I have even registered the need.
A young pack member in his early twenties pulls me aside near the windows and tells me, his voice rough, that Terrance had been his mentor since he was fifteen.
He cannot finish what he came to say. I rest my hand on his shoulder and tell him I understand.
He nods and walks away to be alone with his grief for a while.
Sienna watches him go without comment. She squeezes my arm briefly and then lets go.
By the time the last of the family groups have left the hall, the sun has gone down behind the western trees.
The staff quietly clear the long tables with Lydia supervising from the doorway.
Monroe is at the front entrance seeing the wheelchair down the ramp.
The household is moving as it always does after a funeral reception: soft-footed, with low voices, tiredly.
I find Sienna near the windows. She has a glass of water in her hand she has not drunk from. The hem of her dress is damp from the grass at the interment.
“I’m going to my office for a while,” I tell her.
She looks up at me. “Alright.”
“I just need some time.”
“I know.”
She doesn’t ask if she can come. She doesn’t tell me to take care of myself. She lifts her free hand and rests it briefly against the front of my jacket, two fingers smoothing a wrinkle that isn’t there, her eyes holding mine, and that is all she does.
I cross the entrance hall. I climb the stairs. I close my office door behind me without turning on the lamp.
The last light of the day is fading as I sit. I lower myself into the chair behind the desk. I sit with my back against the leather, my hands resting on the wood, and I let the quiet press in.
My father told me once that grief was a tax.
I was nineteen. We had buried a young pack member who had drowned in the river during training.
I had returned from the service shaking and gone to my father’s office to tell him I did not know how he sat through ceremonies like that without falling apart.
He set down his pen and looked at me across the same desk I am sitting at now, and he said, “Grief is a tax, son. The alpha pays it in private. He pays it in full. He does not take it out of the people he serves.”
I nodded. I was young. I did not understand what it meant to pay it in full.
I understand now.
I signed the deployment order. I shook Terrance’s hand on the gravel three days before the ambush and asked him how his back was, an old training injury. He told me it was holding up fine, sir. I clapped his shoulder. I told him to be careful. I sent him out.
He didn’t come back.
The chair creaks once when I shift my weight. Somewhere down a corridor, a clock chimes the half hour. I have not wept since I was eight years old, in my father’s hospital room the night before he died. I learned then that an alpha does not weep. The lesson stuck.
This is the tax. I pay it.
The door to my office opens quietly.
I do not look up. I know her step before she has fully crossed the threshold. The bond brightens slightly in my chest, a quiet pulse of her. The door closes behind her with the same care she opened it with.
She does not speak.
She comes around the side of the desk, her bare feet making almost no sound on the rug.
She rotates my chair a quarter turn so that I am facing her.
Then, she’s lowering herself to the floor in front of my chair and settling between my knees, her arms resting at my waist. Her cheek finds my thigh.
Her dress is soft against my hand when I drop it onto her shoulder.
I leave it there.
She does not say anything. She does not try to coax me to talk. She does not tell me it’s not my fault. She simply sits at my feet with her head in my lap, her breathing finding a slow, steady rhythm under my hand, and she stays.
My fingers move to her hair. The pin has slipped slightly, and a loose strand has come down at her nape. I tuck it behind her ear without thinking. She makes a soft, contented sound against my thigh that goes through me like warmth into cold ground.
I close my eyes.
The grief is still there. It has not lifted. But there is something else now, too—under my hand, against my leg, something alive and breathing and patient, and the weight of it does not crush me as the weight of the office alone was beginning to.
I do not know how long we stay there. The light from the window is long gone.
The room settles into a deeper darkness.
Somewhere far off, a door closes, and the house goes quieter still.
My hand is in her hair, she is pressed against my legs, and the bond between us hums low and evenly, asking nothing of either of us.
After a long time, my hand on the back of her head moves, a small pressure, a question.
She comes up, rising off the floor and into my lap without a word.
I draw her in, both arms circling her, and she relaxes across my thighs, tucking her legs up against the arm of the chair.
One of her hands finds the back of my neck; the other comes up to my shoulder.
I press my face into the curve where her throat meets her shoulder, and I breathe her in.
Jasmine. Citrus. Her warm, clean skin under all of it.
The part of my chest that has been held tight all day loosens by a single degree.
Her hand strokes the back of my head. The pad of her thumb moves at the base of my skull where the tension lives, and my breath escapes me in a long, ragged exhale against her throat that I would not have allowed any other living person to hear.
She does not flinch. She does not stop. Her thumb keeps moving.
Her other hand has slid up into my hair, and she holds my head against her like I am hers to hold.
“I sent them out there,” I murmur against her skin. I did not mean to speak.
Her hand does not pause. “I know.”
“Fifteen wolves.”
“I know.”
“Terrance’s mother held my hand and thanked me.”
“Lucas.”
I do not lift my head.
“Stop.”
Her thumb keeps moving at the base of my skull. Her other hand stays in my hair. She does not soften it. She does not explain it. She does not give me a way out of it. Just “stop.”
My eyes close. “Sienna.”
Her fingers trace along my hairline.
“I don’t know how my father did this for thirty years.”
Her hand at the back of my neck goes still. Then, it resumes.
“He had his moments alone, too,” she breathes. “I’d bet on it.”
“He had no one to hold him.”
The hand in my hair tightens, just for a heartbeat. Her cheek lowers to the top of my head. She presses her lips to my hair without making a sound—just a long, warm contact, her breath stirring against my scalp.
“You have me,” she whispers. “For as long as I have.”
Her words land in a wound that is already gaping, and they open it further.
I turn my face deeper into her throat. My arms close around her ribs, and I hold her against my chest hard enough that she would tell me if it hurt.
She doesn’t. Her fingers move slowly and steadily at the back of my neck.
I let myself be held by her and think about the day I shoved her in a hallway and pretended I did not know what she was to me.
Soft sounds reach us from the estate. A clock chimes the hour and is answered by another clock two seconds behind. The window across the room has gone fully dark, and the only light in the office is the dim gray of the moon through the glass, falling across the desk in a long, pale rectangle.
The squadron is a week from coming back. There is a black mark crawling up my mate’s collarbone. There is a witch I have not yet found.
None of it has gone away.
But Sienna’s heartbeat is against my ear, slow and even.
Her hand is in my hair, and her other arm is around my shoulders now.
She has put herself between me and the dark for all this time without asking anything of me, and I am, for the first time today, breathing all the way in and all the way out.
I tighten my arms around her. She tightens hers around me.
We stay there a long time.