18. Chapter 18
She had spent the morning in her own cabin with the door closed.
He had told her at the kitchen table over coffee. The letter, briefly. The name Sera. The two years. Roman walking out clean. He had told her the substance, kissed the top of her head, gone to find Theo.
When she'd been alone she sat on her bed with her palms resting on her knees and let herself feel it.
Fury came up through her chest in a hot wave she didn't try to argue with.
Fury at Roman, who had sat at the lodge table three nights ago and eaten Elena's bread and asked Jace a thoughtful question about the patrol rota and gone home and made the call.
Fury at the math of it, that her own hands going numb in a zip tie had been a number in the column for Sera's release.
Fury at Roman for not coming to Jace, because Jace would have said yes.
She had been watching Jace since the night he came into Jenny's. She knew.
Maren was angrier at Roman than Jace was going to let himself be.
She also knew Jace had paid for letting Roman live.
He had paid in his office with the door closed.
He had paid sitting in the chair the night before in the dark.
He would pay again the rest of his life every time he did the count of who had been at the long table and had chosen against them.
She was furious at Roman for making Jace pay it too.
She got off the bed and put two pieces of wood in the stove.
She let herself stand there a minute and did not cry.
Out her window the pack was moving carefully.
Theo crossing toward the equipment shed at half pace.
Freya's ops-room door opened but the chairs around her desk sat empty.
The pack carried a betrayal without naming it.
By afternoon the fury had gone to a low place inside her, and she knew it was going to stay there if she let it. She was not going to carry this one alone in a cabin the way she had carried everything else for three years. She put on her boots and walked across the clearing to say it to his face.
Jace was on the porch when she came across the clearing.
One shoulder against the post. He'd felt her coming before she cleared her own door; she could see it in the way he didn't come down the steps to meet her.
He let her come up them at her own speed, the way he let her do everything at her own speed.
She stopped on the top step. Close to level with him.
“Say it,” he said. Not a question. He'd been holding the shape of this all day, same as she had.
“He sold me.” Her voice came out flat, which was worse than loud would have been.
“He sat at your table and ate Elena's bread and asked you about the patrol rota, and then he went home and told them where I'd be. My hands went numb in a zip tie because Roman wanted his Sera back. That was the trade. Me. And you—” The word caught.
She made it come. “You opened the gate and let him drive out through it.”
Jace didn't flinch off it. “Yes.”
“Don't. Don't just give it to me.”
“It's true.” His jaw was tight. “All of it's true. Say the rest.”
So she said the rest.
“You let him go. You knew what he did and you stood in your office and decided he gets to keep her and drive south and start over, and the man who handed me to Bastian gets a life. You could have hunted him. You wanted to. I felt it.” She pressed her palm flat to her own sternum, to the warm low pull that hadn't gone quiet once all day.
“I felt you want it. And you put it down.”
“I did.”
“Why.”
He didn't answer fast. That was the thing about him she'd learned first and trusted most: he didn't answer fast, and the answers that came slow were the ones that cost him.
“Because hunting Roman meant taking Sera,” he said.
“He traded everything he had for two years to get her loose.
I take her back, I'm Garrett. I'm a man who culls a thing because it cost him.
I told myself a long time ago I'd never be that man, and I've spent thirty years being sure of it, and I'm not sure of it tonight.
I'm standing here not sure.” His voice dropped.
“I don't know if I was right, Maren. I'd do it again and I don't know that's the same as right. That's the truth, and you're owed it.”
It wasn't what she'd come to hear. She'd come braced for him to be sure, the way he was sure of everything, the way being sure was the thing he handed her instead of safety, because safety wasn't a thing he could give. She didn't have a wall ready for him being unsure.
“I'm allowed to hate him,” she said. Quieter.
“Yeah.”
“You don't get to talk me out of it. You don't get to be the bigger one and fold me into the mercy with you. I'm not there. I might never be there.”
“I'm not going to take it away from you.” He said it the way he'd said the thing on the porch a week ago, the thing about choice; the same low certainty, in the one place tonight he had any. “It's yours. You keep it as long as you need it. I'm not going to make my peace your job.”
Her eyes stung. She let them. She'd stopped, somewhere in the last two weeks, being a person who fought that in front of him.
“He'll be a name I don't say,” she said. “For a long time.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe always.”
“Okay.”
They stood with it. The cold came up off the snow between them and neither of them moved to close the steps.
The thing that had cracked open in the warehouse, that she'd carried up the porch to set down on him, was on the boards between them now where they could both look at it.
He hadn't fixed it. He'd only refused to stand on his side of it while she stood alone on hers.
She breathed out. Long. White in the porch light.
“I have to get something from my cabin,” she said.
He understood it wasn't leaving. He'd learned the difference between her walking away and her walking toward in the same two weeks she'd learned the step of his feet on her porch.
“I'll keep the fire up,” he said.
The fire in Jace's cabin had been going for an hour by the time she came back from her own cabin with the one thing she'd gone back for.
A loose sweatshirt her father had bought for her first winter in college.
Tonight she wanted one thing on her body that was neither his nor hers-as-Luna. Something hers-as-Maren.
The pack had given the cabin a wide circle all day. An unspoken understanding that the alpha and his mate had earned the time, only a day past the warehouse where they'd nearly lost each other.
Jace was in the armchair by the fire when she came in. No book. Not on his phone. Just sitting, watching the door patiently, for her to come on her own time.
He got up when she closed it behind her.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
They didn't cross the room at the same speed. She crossed it at her speed. He met her in the middle.
Jace's palm came up to the side of her face first. He had done it this way since the day at the bay door and he was going to do it this way for the rest of her life.
Thumb to the cheekbone, the rest of his fingers against her jaw, him waiting to see what her breath did before he committed the rest of him.
Maren's breath held steady.
She set her palm on his chest. Right over the sternum. She could feel the bond there on her side of it, a warm low pull in the middle of her body. She could feel it on his side of it through his shirt, steadier than his heart.
“I want to,” she said. “Tonight.”
“Okay.”
He didn't ask her if she was sure. She was a woman who came back to his cabin with a sweatshirt she'd gone to get. The asking had been in the going.
He kissed her.
Slow.
His mouth opened on hers. His hand stayed where it was. His other came up to the small of her back, fingers spread, not moving her.
Maren moved herself against him.
He made a sound in his chest she hadn't heard before.
She pulled back a half-inch.
“Say that again.”
“That wasn't a word.”
“Say it again anyway.”
He made the sound again. Low. In his chest. The kind of sound that came out of a man when the wolf in him was pacing just under the surface but denied the chance to be released.
She put her forehead against his and breathed the sound in.
The sweatshirt came off first.
She took it off herself because she wanted him to watch her take it off. He watched. His eyes went gold at the edges the way gold went the day he'd shown her his wolf in the clearing.
Her t-shirt came off after. His hands worked it up over her arms, one sleeve then the other, slow, as if she were something he wanted to remember the sequence of.
“Jace.”
“Yeah.”
“You're going too slow.”
“I'm not sure what you mean by that.”
“Okay.”
She hadn't taken a man's shirt off a man in three years. Her hands hadn't forgotten. Her palms went against the skin of his chest and the heat of him came up through her palms into her breastbone. Her breath went a quarter-inch deeper without her deciding.
His hands came to her shoulders. Down her arms. Careful at the place Rachel had checked for bruises that morning. Not avoiding. Acknowledging. His palm spanned the small of her back and pulled her the quarter-inch closer, and her whole front went warm against the whole front of him.
She hadn't touched a man's bare chest in three years.
Hadn't wanted to.
He walked her two steps back toward the bed.
He stopped at the foot of it.
Mouth opened. Closed.
She looked up at him.
“What?”
His mouth did the thing it did when he was about to say something he wasn't sure about.
He wasn't smiling. He wasn't embarrassed.
He was a man who walked through a bay door in wolf form that morning and had a woman standing in front of him bare from the waist up and his hands were at his sides because he didn't know where to put them next.
She let him take his time.
“They all just left my head.”
He laughed at himself once. A quiet short thing. His palm came up and rubbed the back of his neck.
She hadn't known her chest could do what it did then.