24. Chapter 24
The next two weeks the training yard took over Maren's mornings.
Kira put Maren on the packed snow twenty times on the first morning.
Maren got up twenty times.
Kira didn't praise it.
Kira said, “Again.”
Maren did it again.
Jace watched from the fence rail.
He came to every session.
He didn't interfere. He didn't correct. He didn't walk onto the wedge.
He sat on the middle rail with his elbows on his knees and his boots braced.
His jaw in the set of a man who was holding a wolf in his throat that wanted very badly to be off the fence and on the snow the moment his mate took a hit.
He didn't get off the fence.
Kira knew he was there. Maren knew he was there. Kira's lessons didn't soften for Jace's wolf and Maren's body didn't ask him to soften them.
The pack didn't crowd. They watched from the paths between the cabins, an older female at the west path dipping her head to Maren morning after morning until Maren learned to dip hers back.
On the tenth morning a young wolf called Rosa copied Maren's stance off the fence line, hip turned, knees bent, weight forward, not knowing she was watched.
Maren didn't break her own rep to let on that she'd seen.
“You have good instincts,” Kira said on the twelfth morning.
Maren was bent over with her hands on her knees, breathing.
“And you work. That matters more than anything else I could teach you.”
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me. Show up tomorrow?”
“Same time. I'll bring the attitude.”
Kira walked off.
Maren stayed on the wedge a minute longer, breathing.
Jace came over without saying anything and put his coat around her shoulders.
They walked back to the cabin together.
There was nothing that needed saying yet.
Three nights later the knock came at her cabin door at eleven forty-one.
Maren and Jace were on the couch. She was reading, he had his eyes closed against her shoulder. The knock was small. Unsure.
She got up.
Tyler was at the door.
His wrists were still wrapped under his gloves. He had carried the same face since the septic crisis, which was to say that Tyler had put some weight back on and his eyes had started holding. He didn't quite meet her eyes now.
“Sorry. I know it's late.”
“Come in.”
“I.” He stopped. “I don't know why I came here.”
She looked past him into the cabin at Jace, who had gotten up from the couch and was standing by the kitchen table with his hand on the spine of a chair. His face said he understood what was happening at his mate's front door at eleven forty-one at night.
He gave her a small nod.
You got this.
“Come sit,” Maren said to Tyler. “You don't have to know why.”
They sat on her porch steps.
Tyler looked at his wrapped hands.
Maren didn't fill the silence. She had spent three years learning that silences got filled on their own timelines, and had spent the last three weeks learning that with a pack silences were a thing you made on purpose.
He looked at his hands a long minute.
“My brother died six months ago.”
“I know.”
“Car accident. I wasn't there. I was in the woods on patrol. I got the call at three in the morning. We were eighteen months apart. I was the older one. I was supposed to be the one who...”
He stopped. Started again.
“I was supposed to be the one who.”
“Yeah,” Maren said.
“I don't know who I am without somebody to protect.”
The clearing was quiet. Moon up. Snow under the porch light blue-white. She could see Rachel's cabin from here, a porch light on. Could see the lodge. Could see the path down to the training yard where she'd spent the last twelve mornings getting up off the snow.
“When my dad was killed,” she said, “I ran for three years. Three years of moving every ninety days. Three years of keys-in-my-knuckles. Three years of thinking I was alive because I was keeping moving and not because any actual thing was protecting me.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn't know who I was either. The woman who ran for three years wasn't the woman my dad had raised. I don't know who that woman is yet. I'm finding out.”
“Yeah.”
“Being chained isn't the same as failing. You know that. Rachel told you. Jace told you. I'm telling you. And tonight you came to my door at quarter to midnight because none of us had told you in a way you could hold.”
“You don't have to have all of it figured out. You don't have to know who you are without your brother yet. Maybe you don't get to know yet. Maybe you just show up tomorrow.”
He breathed out slow.
“Okay.”
He repeated it, slower. The repeat sounded like a decision.
They sat on the step another minute.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Anytime.”
He got up. Walked back toward his own cabin. His gait was the gait of a wolf who walked a little lighter, a little less troubled.
Maren watched him until he'd crossed the clearing.
She went back inside.
Jace was propped against the headboard of their bed in the lamp light. Book on his knee. He hadn't been reading it.
“He okay?”
“He will be.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That being chained isn't the same as failing. That he doesn't have to have it figured out. That he just has to show up tomorrow.”
Jace took that in.
“Did it help?”
She sat on the edge of the bed. Took her boots off. Thought about his question.
“I think so.”
She lay down against his chest.
“Jace.”
“Yeah.”
“He came to me. Not the healer. Not you. Me.”
Something like pride moved across Jace's face. She didn't see it because her face was pressed against his shirt, but she felt it in his chest, the quarter-inch tightening and release a man's chest did when he had just seen his mate grow into something she hadn't been yesterday.
“Yeah,” he said.
He didn't need to.
The lamp was on low. It had been quiet between them the way it had been since the night after the rescue. His hand came up and smoothed her hair back off her face and stayed there.
She closed her eyes.
“He came to me,” she said again, quieter this time.
Jace said nothing.
He held her.
Outside the cabin, Tyler had made it back to his own door by now. The compound was quiet. Patrols were still doubled but had been lightened. The federal case was building in three districts. The trial date was set. The waiting had an end in sight, but persisted.
Inside the cabin, something small shifted, the way a thing shifts that isn't going to be done settling by morning.
She let it sit.