Chapter 28
Valen
There’s a bird somewhere down the valley that has been at the same three notes since it was light enough to see the ceiling.
Nyxiana is still asleep against my side, one arm across my chest, hair everywhere. I’ve been awake a while and I haven’t moved, because moving would wake her. I’ve been watching the light come up the wall a shade at a time with my hands doing nothing at all.
She stirs first. I get about a breath of her softness, her face loose with it, eyes not all the way open before she starts putting herself back together into the woman who walks into a debrief. By the time she sits up it’s all back in place. We dress. The third point goes into my pack.
We find Lachlan before we go and she thanks him properly.
Natalie says something to Nyxiana that makes her laugh.
Neither of us says one word about the last two nights.
Out in the yard she puts her hand in mine to take us home.
The dark comes down over both of us all at once.
No floor, no air, nothing anywhere to push against.
It holds on longer than it has any of the other times. There’s a drag in the middle of it, a stretch where we aren’t moving at all. That has never happened before on any crossing she’s made with me. Her grip closes on my hand partway through and keeps closing.
I’ve still got the print of her fingers in mine when we come out the other side. We land at the Ash Hollow treeline she goes sideways, hand hitting a trunk. She manages to stay up but it takes her a moment to get all the way.
“You okay?”
“Fine.” It comes slower than that word should.
I’ve learned what fine means out of her mouth.
I don’t push it, because whatever that took out of her, she isn’t going to have anything left for explaining it to me.
We walk in. She’s steadier by the time we clear the last of the pines.
Dane comes out on the lodge steps to meet us.
She has an easy answer ready for him about the trip, good enough that I nearly take it myself.
The stone goes to Lyanna. Then the debrief, with the leadership. It’s a real one. What Doria was like. Whether the welcome heldanything came at us while we were in it.
“How did the crown take you?” Dane asks.
“Better than Briarstone,” she says. “Briarstone had a reason to.”
“And the wilds?”
“Worse than anybody there wanted to admit to us. Their own escort said so.”
Nova wants the court laid out - who holds what - whether Lachlan’s word actually carries past his own gates.
Nyxiana gives her all of it, name by name and it’s all true.
Nova doesn’t write any of it down and I’d bet the pack she has every word.
Nyxiana has stood in front of this pack a dozen times, the same way every time, relaxed, chin up enough to take the room.
There’s still no color in her face and nobody in here but me and her brother is close enough to see it.
There’s a gap in it anyway. I’ve watched her work rooms since the first day I came in off that ridge.
There’s a difference between a woman lying to her Alpha and a woman answering exactly the question she was asked.
She isn’t lying to anybody in here. She’s leaving one thing out, and I’ve got no idea or how big it is.
I put it down as hers to bring up when she wants to.
After the questions she reads the marks, the same way she has after every realm.
Nova, Harper, and Kari stand where she puts them.
She goes still with both hands out. The sound in the room drops until it’s quiet enough to hear the horses moving out in the paddock.
It takes longer than it has before. Then she says the name.
“Blood Moon.”
Her eyes come up off Kari’s hand and don’t land anywhere. Nobody else in the room is looking at her face. They’re looking at Kari’s right hand.
The last realm on that map is her own.
Kaspian is in the yard when we come out, Scarlett with him.
He hasn’t been here since the night Nyxiana went down to the quarter to feed.
He comes across to his sister. Up close she’s gray under the eyes and her mouth is set in a way I’ve only seen on her twice.
His face changes when he gets a proper look at her, then it’s back.
She hasn’t had any color in her since we landed and he saw it before he’d finished crossing the yard.
Scarlett says something to Nyxiana about how long it’s been.
My head is somewhere else. I let it stay there. Her hand shook when we landed. I’ve thought about it all afternoon and I’m still thinking about it at dusk. There’s nothing I can do about any of it and I keep coming back to it anyway.
By evening the compound has gone back into its ordinary rhythm.
There’s a fire going in the pit at the west edge and somebody’s cooking on it.
Kids are still out. Two of the younger wolves are arguing about something on the lodge steps.
The air’s gone cool the way it does out here once the sun drops behind the ridge, warm still where the light was on the stone an hour ago.
I cross the compound toward her cabin with no reason ready if anybody stops me and asks for one.
That’s new. I’ve always gone where the work was. Perimeters, borders, whatever needed a man who could stand out all night. I’ve never walked across anything toward a person for no reason except to be near them. I’m doing it now with my hands empty and no idea what I’ll say when I get there.
Her door stands open. That slows me. An open door means she’s expecting somebody or she’s just come in, and either one means I should come back later. Kaspian’s voice comes out through it first, low. Then hers, lower. I stop short of the doorway instead of putting my hand on it.
“Nyxi.” Kaspian isn’t raising his voice at all. “You can’t keep carrying this on your own. Not forever.”
Nothing for a moment. Then she replies.
“I’ve known since the first time I saw him.” She doesn’t stop for breath. “Since the ridge. Months, Kaspian. Months. And I let him stand out there believing he was nothing but a wolf who couldn’t shift.”
My hands go cold on the doorframe before I’ve worked out the meaning of what she said.
Every night out on that treeline. Every hour I spent up there working out how to come in, what it would take, whether they’d have.
She was inside the perimeter the with the answer already in her hands.
She keeps talking. She isn’t working it out while she says it.
She’s had it worked out for a long time.
Kaspian’s voice comes back gentler than it was. I don’t catch any of it. There’s a sound in my own head loud enough to cover the both of them. It doesn’t matter what she knows. It’s that she’s known since the beginning, has chosen, every day, all of them, one after another, to keep it.
I hold on to the doorframe so I don’t do anything else.
The wood gives under my fingers, a little, along the grain.
I stop before it does anything I’d have to explain to a carpenter.
Then I go still. It’s the stillness I go into when there’s something moving in the trees and I haven’t worked out what it is yet.
It’s kept me alive in country that wanted me dead.
There’s nothing out here, there’s just a woman’s voice through an open door, and my body has gone ready for a fight anyway.
Whatever’s coming up in me doesn’t come up hot.
It comes up quiet. It narrows to one thing, and I let it stay one thing.
She’s known. That’s as far as I take it.
I’ve got a choice standing here on this porch, it takes me no time to work it out.
I could go through that door. Both of them would have to tell me to my face.
Right now, with her brother sitting there, me walking into the middle of a conversation nobody invited me to, in her own cabin, in the state I’m in.
I’d get an answer. It would be the wrong one, taken the wrong way, and after that I’d never get another shot at the right one.
So, I leave but I don’t go back to my cabin.
The training yard is empty at this hour.
The heavy bag on the end chain is the one they built to take a wolf coming through it at full strength, reinforced up the whole length, hung off steel.
I hit it, keep hitting it long past anything anybody would call training.
The chain goes hard against its mount every time I put my weight through it.
The whole frame takes it and hands it back.
Sand shifts inside the bag and settles wrong.
My knuckles split at some point, I don’t stop for that either.
Still, it isn’t doing what I need it to do.
The bag doesn’t hit back. I can go at it all night and I’d still be the only thing out here moving.
“Somebody piss in your Cheerios?” Callum’s at the edge of the mat with his arms folded.
I don’t answer him. I keep working the bag, same rhythm, same weight. He watches that for a while. Then the easy goes out of his voice completely.
“All right,” he says. He steps up onto the mat and starts pulling his shirt over his head. “Take it out on me instead. I can hit back.”
I look at him.
“Come on,” he says.
We go. He doesn’t hold anything back. He comes in low and fast the first time, taking my legs out before I’ve got my weight sorted.
The mat comes up and hits me in the back of the head.
I get up. He puts me down once more - I keep putting him down.
Every time, he gets back up without a word and comes at me again.
My hands stop bleeding somewhere in the middle of it.
Neither of us says a word for a long time.
He never asks me what this is about, doesn’t stop when it stops being friendly.
It runs longer than it should and I’m the one who calls it.
Tonight, it’s me who puts a hand up. Callum straightens, breathing hard, blood at the corner of his mouth.
“You good?” He asks me.
“Fine.”
He looks at me for a while. He knows what that word is worth coming out of a man standing where I’m standing, because a man doesn’t get as good as he is at this without having been there himself at some point.
He doesn’t ask, simply picks his shirt up off the mat and lets the whole thing go.
Nobody has ever done that much for me at the end of a fight.
I walk to my cabin with the compound going quiet around me.
It’s not until I’m inside with the door shut that I let myself look at how big it is.
Every day since the ridge. Every debrief, realm, hour on the road with her, every time she put her hand in mine to take us across, every meal at a long table where she leaned over and told me who in the room was worth watching.
Two nights in that castle. Her knocking on my door and coming in with nothing to say.
Her on the floor of my room with her teeth on my throat and both of us holding still.
Her asleep against my chest with my arm over her.
All of it with this sitting inside her while she decided, over and over, that I didn’t get to have it.
She doesn’t know I was at her door. So now there’s something I’m keeping from her, too.
That I know. I don’t have all of it. What she knows about me is still hers.
How big, how bad, how long she meant to sit on it, whether she was ever going to hand it over at all.
Those are questions I will ask her eventually.
Tonight, there’s only one and only one person alive who can answer it.