Chapter 19
Ash
“I know why you’re here.”
Power pulses just under the surface. Like the hum from a transformer.
I’m in the same spot I was with Vanessa. In the bar. Only it’s Pepper’s bar.
It’s always been her bar. And right now she’s standing behind it, her arms wide, those steel grey eyes unforgiving and cold.
There is an anger that rolls off of her in waves.
This is the moment I’d dreaded since Sabina. Since Vanessa.
Her long dark hair is now cropped short. Tattoos lick at her arms. The sigils burned into her skin pulse faintly, alive with magic I can feel from here, magic that wasn’t there the last time I saw her. I wasn’t there when she learned to do that either.
Whispers murmur somewhere behind me. My eyes stay on Pepper.
“Get out,” she says.
“Pepper, please.”
“No, fuck you,” she spits and it’s the harshest anyone has ever spoken to me.
I deserve it.
“I’m not leaving.” I hold her gaze. Barely.
“You fucking can’t leave.” She huffs and begins to wipe down the bar. Anything to keep her hands busy. “Can you?”
I take in the bar.
The popcorn garland is gone. So are the tangled Christmas lights she dug out of the attic that year, the ones Donovan and Nikko wrestled into submission while Jasper threatened to murder Santa Claus.
I remember sitting beside her on that sofa, threading popcorn through a needle, and she asked me if I remembered doing it during our sleepovers.
I said I did. Sabina always ate half the popcorn.
She laughed.
I want to cry at the memory.
That laugh doesn’t live here anymore.
The bar itself looks the same, and somehow that makes it worse. The bones are still Pepper’s, the worn wood, the skeleton key locks, Garrett’s ridiculous stool at the end. But it feels like a place that armored itself after being left open too long. Like she did.
“You cut your hair,” I say, and I hate myself for it.
Pepper doesn’t move. Barely looks up from her endless wiping.
It’s a barrier.
Those hands used to grab mine. She’d link her elbow in mine and drag me through the streets, into the web, through magical doors that led to cobblestone alleys and dusty bookshops.
I never had to ask Pepper for closeness.
She gave it so freely I didn’t realize how rare it was until I stopped deserving it.
“You look good, Baby Bear.” The nickname slips out before I can stop it, and I watch it land like a slap.
Her jaw tightens. A muscle feathers beneath the sharp cut of her cheekbone, and those grey eyes narrow into something that could gut me cleaner than any blade Jasper ever wielded.
She hasn’t called me anything yet. Not Ash. Not even Ashlynne, which she never used because no one does, except Hecate, who smirked at me like she already knew I’d end up here. Artemis blessed Ashlynne Haynes. The huntress. The one who runs.
Not Ashlyn Morgan.
Because she didn’t know that name. No one did.
I used that blessing to do exactly what Artemis would. I disappeared into the wild and told myself it was purpose, not cowardice. Teaching. Training. Moving from post to post. Telling myself Pepper had five mates and a newborn and Lucinda watching from beyond the veil and she didn’t need me, too.
Except Pepper spent eighteen years of her life convinced she didn’t belong.
Her mother had to beg her to let us in. She tried to be friends with the Burke twins at ten years old, and they told her they couldn’t.
She carried that rejection like a stone in her chest until we became her tribe, until I became someone she trusted enough to fall apart in front of.
And I left.
Not all at once. That would have been kinder. I just thinned. Missed a call. Then two. Sent a gift for Lucinda Elspeth’s first birthday instead of showing up. Told myself I’d visit next month.
Next month became next season.
Next season became next year.
I named it duty. I named it Artemis. I named it everything except what it was.
“You named her after Lucy,” I say, barely above a whisper, because it’s the thing I never said to her face.
The thing I should have been there for, should have held her hand for, because naming your daughter after the best friend who died for you isn’t something you celebrate with a card in the mail.
“I did.” Two words. Flat. Final.
The silence between us grows teeth.
I’ve faced Fae who wanted me dead. I’ve trained soldiers who could kill me in my sleep. I walked into Hecate’s shop without flinching and stared down immortal courtrooms.
None of it compares to standing on the wrong side of Pepper O’Malley’s bar while she decides whether I’m worth the breath it takes to scream at me.
Part of me hopes she does. Screaming means she still cares enough to be angry.
It’s the silence that will kill me.
“They’re staging a rescue mission.” Pepper begins to clean a glass.
“That’s what Vanessa said.” Right here on this stool.
“You don’t look like you need a rescue.” She sets the glass down a little too hard. “You look just fine from where I’m standing. Besides, would you even want us to show up?”
“I deserved that.”
“Yeah, you did,” Pepper snaps, her magic shooting out like a whip. The crack of it splits the bar top clean down the center. Bottles rattle. A glass falls and shatters somewhere behind her, and she doesn’t even flinch.
The Pepper I knew would have cursed and scrambled to save the liquor. This Pepper lets it bleed across the floor like it means nothing.
“How is Lucy?”
“You don’t get to come in here and say her name.
” Her voice is low now, controlled, and that’s worse than the shouting.
Pepper’s rage I can take. It’s her composure that terrifies me.
“You don’t get to say Baby Bear. You don’t get to look at my bar and feel nostalgic.
You lost that when you stopped answering your phone. ”
I grip the edge of the stool because my hands are shaking. “I know.”
“Do you?” She rounds the bar, and the energy shifts.
The whispers in the background grow louder, voices I can’t place, murmuring things I can’t catch.
This is her dream, her domain, and the power here answers to her.
“Because from where I stood, holding a newborn I named after my dead best friend, waiting for my cousin to walk through that door—” Her voice cracks, just barely, like a fracture in glass that hasn’t shattered yet. She swallows it back. “You never came.”
“I sent—”
“A gift.” She spits the word like it’s poison on her tongue. “You sent a stuffed bear with a card that said, ‘Congratulations, Baby Bear.’ Three words in your handwriting and a toy from a woman who used to sleep on my floor in a Care Bear onesie.”
I remember writing that card. I remember standing in a shop somewhere overseas, picking out that bear, and telling myself it was enough. Telling myself she had five mates, a house that literally moved walls for her, and a daughter with chaos magic already humming under her skin.
She didn’t need me.
Except I knew that was a lie even as I sealed the envelope.
“Lucinda Elspeth took her first steps, and I called you.” Pepper’s jaw works, the muscle ticking, and I watch her fight to keep the cracks from spreading.
“She said Tita before she said Mama, and I don’t even know who the hell she was talking to, but I wanted to tell you.
I called, and it rang, and it rang.” She holds my gaze, and those grey eyes are drowning.
“And then it stopped ringing altogether.”
I changed my number. I told myself it was protocol, new assignment, new location, security measures. All of it true. None of it the reason.
“I was afraid.”
Pepper goes still. Completely, unnervingly still, the way she does right before her magic detonates. The whispers in the background hush, as though even the ghosts of this dream know better than to speak.
“Afraid,” she repeats, tasting the word. “Afraid of what, Ash? Of me? Of showing up and seeing that I built a life without you?”
Yes. But I can’t say that yet. Not when the truth is uglier than that.
“Of showing up and realizing you didn’t need me anymore,” I whisper. “And that maybe you never did.”
Pepper’s laugh is hollow. It fills the bar like smoke, curling into every corner, and it is nothing like the laugh I carry in my memory. That laugh was unguarded and messy. This one is all bite and repressed rage.
“Didn’t need you.” She rolls the words around in her mouth like she’s tasting them for the first time and finding them rotten. “You think I didn’t need you?”
She steps closer, and I hold my ground even though every instinct screams at me to step back.
The sigils on her arms pulse brighter, reacting to whatever is building inside her.
The whispers surge behind her, and I swear I catch fragments, voices that sound like the bar on a full night, like laughter and clinking glasses and music, ghosts of a life I walked away from.
“I needed you when Lucy died in my arms.” Each word lands like a closed fist punching through my chest. “I needed you when I went to trial pregnant and terrified. I needed you when my daughter’s magic started manifesting and she blew out every window in the house before she could walk.
” Pepper’s hands grip the edge of the cracked bar top, and the wood groans beneath her fingers.
“I needed you at three in the morning when Lucinda Elspeth wouldn’t stop screaming, and I sat on the kitchen floor crying because my best friend was dead, my body wasn’t my own anymore, and the one person I wanted to call, the person who was supposed to be my wolf pack—” Her voice splinters on that, just for a breath. “Had a disconnected number.”
I feel the burn behind my eyes, and I blink hard against it because I don’t deserve to cry. Not here. Not in front of her.
“You don’t get to make this about your fear, Ash.” Pepper straightens, and the vulnerability vanishes like a door slamming shut. Her eyes go flat and cold. The grey of a winter sky with nothing behind it. “You were afraid I didn’t need you? That’s a coward’s excuse, and we both know it.”
The word coward tears through me because she’s right. She’s absolutely right.
“The truth is you couldn’t handle it.” She picks up the rag again, starts wiping the bar like I’m not even standing here, like this conversation is already over and she’s just waiting for me to figure it out.
“You watched Sabina get her mates, her babies, her pack. You watched Nessa find her mates and rebuild Hades. And then I got five mates and a daughter, and you—” She tosses the rag into the sink without looking.
“You got a kitten from Jasper and a job you won’t talk about. ”
The fucking kitten.
I forgot about her, left her at my mom’s maybe four missions ago.
I forgot a living thing.
“You didn’t leave because you thought I didn’t need you. You left because watching all of us get what you wanted reminded you of what you didn’t have. And instead of letting us love you through that, you ran.”
I open my mouth.
The defense is right there.
That’s not true, I had orders. I had a mission. I was protecting—
Nothing comes out.
She’s not wrong. Not entirely. But the parts that are true are the parts that matter.
I knew.
I knew when I sealed that envelope. I knew every time I let a call ring out.
I just kept moving anyway.
“Pepper—”
“We’re done.” She turns her back to me, reaching for a clean glass. Her shoulders are rigid, a wall of muscle and ink and magic that I used to know better than my own. “You wanted to know if I’d forgive you. There’s your answer.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Yeah, it is.” She sets the glass down like she’s deciding not to throw it. “You just don’t like it.”
The dream shudders around us. The edges of the bar blur and darken, and I feel the pull of waking tugging at the seams. My time here is running out, and she knows it.
“I’ll fix this,” I tell her, my voice cracking in a way I haven’t allowed since I was a teenager. “I will. I’ll come to the bar. I’ll leave Faerie. Just leave the light on.”
Pepper doesn’t turn around. She just keeps polishing that glass, her back a fortress, her silence louder than any scream she could give me.
“Don’t bother,” she says as the dream begins to dissolve. “I stopped leaving the light on for you a long time ago.”
The bar collapses. The whispers go silent.