26. Still Getting Started
Still Getting Started
LENA—ONE YEAR LATER
The morning ritual had become habit now.
Cold coffee. Window. Eastern tree line. The same position I'd claimed the morning after the ruling, the same stillness I'd learned to build into my body as something other than bracing.
The mark on my shoulder was a year old now. Jace refreshed it every month, the same ritual—teeth and blood and the bond flaring gold between us—and every time it felt less like claiming and more like coming home.
I pressed my palm against the window and felt the wards hum in response. The farmhouse had changed in a year, though not in the ways I would have predicted when I first crossed its threshold with a duffel bag and twelve years of hidden magic crackling under my skin.
Maddox had built a second anchor ring around the north pasture because Delaney needed somewhere to practice that wasn't load-bearing.
Tara had claimed the back room as a training space and filled it with diagrams I was finally fluent enough to read on sight.
Gideon worked from the kitchen table most days now.
Which meant the coffee was always on. The conversation was always half intelligence briefing, half something closer to family.
I'd stopped counting the days since the ruling.
I'd started counting something else instead. The mornings I woke up and didn't have to decide whether to be afraid.
Jace found me at the window the way he always did.
I caught his scent before I heard him—cedar, and under it now, something settled and permanent that hadn't been there in the early days, the smell of a wolf who'd stopped bracing for loss.
His hand settled at my waist before I'd finished hearing his footsteps.
I'd stopped being surprised by that. The bond didn't startle me anymore.
It just was. Steady. Low. A second pulse I would have missed if it ever stopped.
The mark I'd left on his throat showed at his collar when he leaned past me to look out the glass. I still felt the small proprietary warmth of seeing it there. The way I felt his on my shoulder—a matched pair of permanent facts. His and mine. Given and returned.
"Delaney wants to show you something," he said. "She's been working on it for a week and wouldn't let me see it first."
"That's because you'd tell her it was good before she finished it."
"I would not."
"You absolutely would."
His mouth did the rare thing. The almost-smile I'd been collecting for a year now. I still felt it the same way I had the first time. Like something small and necessary clicking into place.
We found Delaney in the north pasture with her sleeves pushed up.
Gold-adjacent light—softer than mine, a different bloodline note entirely, something she was still learning the shape of—moving careful and slow between her palms. Jace's wolf pressed close to the surface as we crossed the grass, alert the way it always was around new magic, curious rather than wary now—it had learned, this year, which threats were real and which were just family testing new edges of themselves.
She'd asked Tara eight months ago whether an emotional discharge could be taught into something deliberate the way mine had been. Tara's answer had been an even yes, if you do the work.
Delaney had done the work.
She held the anchor for eleven seconds. Then twelve. Then let it go and turned to us with an expression I recognized. Because it had been mine once. In this same field. Under Tara's clinical attention and Jace's quiet watching.
"That's longer than last week," I said.
"That's longer than I thought I could do."
"Those are different statements," I told her. The way Tara would have. Delaney laughed. Something in my chest settled the way it always did when I watched my sister choose this life instead of having one chosen for her.
"Does it get easier?" Delaney asked, wiping her palms on her jeans. "The holding?"
"The holding gets easier. The choosing to hold it gets harder, some days, and easier other days. You don't get to pick which kind of day it is in advance."
"That's not encouraging."
"It's not supposed to be encouraging. It's supposed to be true." I caught Jace's eye and saw him almost smile at hearing his own line, a year old now, still living in my mouth. "Encouraging gets you through one bad afternoon. True gets you through the next nine years."
Delaney considered that, then nodded slowly, like she was filing it away somewhere permanent.
That evening, the farmhouse did the thing it did now most evenings.
Filled slowly with the easy noise of people who had chosen to be in the same rooms as each other.
Maddox cooking without being asked. Tara correcting someone's form across the table with the same brisk affection she'd once corrected mine.
Roan arriving later than everyone else, the way he always did, carrying intelligence updates like other people carried wine, his changed hand doing the work of setting the table one-handed with the same practiced ease it always did now—a year in, nobody watched it anymore, least of all him.
Gideon's update, when it came, was quiet enough that only I caught the weight under it.
"The fifth case," he said. Setting his laptop down across from me. "Registry access cleared this afternoon."
I felt Jace's attention sharpen beside me. The bond carrying his focus the way it always did when something mattered.
"And?"
"And it's going to take longer than the other four.
" Gideon's expression was the careful neutral he wore when he respected a problem enough not to undersell it.
"She buried it well. Whoever she is, she understood exactly how the Council's own systems worked.
And she used it against itself. The thread doesn't stay inside the Council.
It runs out into the Conclave's diplomatic registry.
Which is sealed deeper than anything I've pulled yet. "
"Smart," I said.
"Extremely."
"How much longer?" Jace asked.
"Weeks, if I'm lucky. Months, if I'm not.
" Gideon shrugged, unbothered by his own uncertainty in a way that had taken me most of the year to understand wasn't carelessness—it was just honesty about what he could and couldn't promise.
"I'll take either. I don't quit cases. You know that about me by now. "
"We do," I said.
I looked at the registry number still pinned to the corkboard by the door. Twelve digits. Council-standard formatting. A woman's name I still didn't know attached to a thread I had not stopped pulling since the morning Gideon first showed it to me.
Four cases closed. One still waiting. Patient as a carved crescent in old bark. Waiting for someone willing to find it. And beyond it, a whole second institution full of people who didn't yet know the Council had a name for them.
I was not in a hurry. I had learned, this year, the difference between urgency and patience. And I had learned which one actually got things done.
"We'll get there," I said. And meant it the way I meant most things now—plainly, without performance, because performance had never once kept me safe and the truth, lately, had kept me safer than anything else I'd tried.
Jace's hand found mine under the table. I turned it over and held on. The same gesture from the eastern property line. From a year of mornings just like this one.
Later, after the kitchen had emptied and the wards had settled into their nighttime hum, I stood on the porch where Jace had first told me what the bond actually was. Not the careful version. The true one.
I felt the cold the same way I had that night. Bracing. Honest. Under it, Jace's scent wrapped around me, solid despite the cold, cedar and certainty the way it always was now.
"You're thinking about the fifth case," Jace said. He didn't ask. He'd stopped needing to.
"I'm thinking about all of it." I leaned into the solid warmth of him.
His arm coming around my shoulders. His palm settling over the mark on my shoulder while my own hand found the one I'd left at his throat—both of them warm under my fingers, both of them ours.
"The Council. My father. The woman who recused herself and left us a door to walk through.
The Conclave behind her. Bigger than any of it. It's not finished."
"No."
"Does that scare you?"
He was quiet for a moment. Not performing the answer.
Just finding it. "No," he said finally. "I spent five years building a life around not attaching to anything because attachment meant something to lose.
Then I met a woman who threw me against a car and decided I was worth the risk anyway.
" His thumb traced the same slow circle against my wrist that it had a year ago.
In a kitchen. In the dark. Before either of us had said anything true out loud.
"I'm not scared of what's unfinished. I'm just glad I get to be here when it isn't anymore. "
I looked up at him. This man who had been sent to bring me back and had become instead the first thing I'd ever chosen entirely for myself.
"Good," I said. "Because I'm not done yet."
"I know."
"You're not going to try to talk me into taking it slower? Being more careful?"
"I stopped trying to talk you into careful the day you threw a plate at a wall," he said. "I learned. Slowly. But I learned."
"Good wolf."
"Don't push it."
I laughed, and felt the sound of it settle into the bond the way everything did now—shared, doubled, no longer just mine to carry alone.
The bond settled warm between us. Steady as it had ever been. And somewhere beyond the tree line the wards held their quiet watch over a farmhouse that had become, against every odd I'd been handed at birth, exactly mine.
There would be more to fight. I had stopped pretending otherwise. And stopped being afraid of what that meant.
But tonight, there was only this: his arm around me. The cold clean air. And the hard-won quiet of a woman who had finally stopped hiding and found, on the other side of it, somewhere worth staying.