Chapter 66
SLOANE
Ryker’s backyard was filled with his people. Sebastian was at the grill. That fact alone felt like the setup to a joke I didn’t know the punchline to yet. He stood over it with his arms crossed between flips, like the burgers had personally offended him.
Kip was in a lawn chair with his feet stretched out, Holland tucked against his side.
Cami sat across from them, her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, laughing at something Holland had just said.
Ryan was there too, standing slightly apart near the fence with a beer he kept turning in his hands.
He and Cami hadn’t spoken yet. But he’d shown up, and she hadn’t left, and in the arithmetic of whatever they were, that counted.
And Nate.
Nate had wandered over to talk to Sebastian near the grill.
He pulled up a chair and balanced a plate on his knee and was actually talking.
Not the careful, watching version of himself he’d been at home.
Something about the way Sebastian leaned in—unhurried, no pressure, genuinely interested—had unlocked a version of my brother I hadn’t seen in years.
I sensed Ryker before I heard him. His hand found the small of my back, warm and steady.
“You’re doing the thing,” he said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you stand at the edge and catalog everyone instead of joining them.”
I turned to look at him. “I’m not cataloging. I’m appreciating.”
The corner of his mouth curved slightly. “Same thing.”
He handed me a fresh soda and stayed beside me, his shoulder against mine, and both of us watched the yard.
“You’re relaxed,” I said.
He considered that. “I’m trying.”
I looked at him. Really looked. The tension he’d carried in his shoulders for weeks had dropped a fraction. Not gone. Just quieter. “It suits you.”
His mouth did the almost-smile. “Don’t tell anyone.”
I pressed into his shoulder a little more. He let me.
Across the yard, Sebastian caught my eye and grinned. It was the kind of grin that meant he was about to say something I wouldn’t be able to unhear.
“Sloane.” He raised his voice just enough to carry, his Australian accent thick. “I have a question.”
“No, you don’t,” Ryker said flatly.
Sebastian ignored him entirely. “How long did it take you to figure out Ryker was obsessed with you? Ballpark. Weeks? Days? Hours?”
Holland lifted her sunglasses to watch. Kip’s mouth curved.
“I’m not answering that,” I said.
“She knew,” Ella said from across the yard without looking up from the table filled with potato salad, chips, salad, vegetables, and condiments. “She absolutely knew.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“You knew,” Cami said, laughing.
“I thought he was going to kill me.”
“Tomato, tomahto,” Sebastian said, grinning.
Ryker turned his head slowly toward Sebastian with an expression that would have made a lesser man reconsider his life choices. Sebastian remained completely unbothered.
Kip tilted his head at me. “To be fair, there was a period where the line between those two things was pretty thin.”
“Kip,” Holland said, nudging him in the side with her elbow.
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re not helping.” She raised a brow at him.
“I’m not trying to help. I’m trying to understand the timeline.”
I laughed before I could stop it, the sound surprising me. Real laughter. The kind that came from the stomach instead of the throat.
Ryker looked at me sideways. Something in his expression shifted. A softening so quick I almost missed it. Like my laugh had done something to him he hadn’t prepared for.
I filed that away.
“For the record,” I said loudly, “I put up with a lot before I decided he was worth it.”
“She’s not wrong,” Ryker said, and the lack of argument in his voice made everyone look at him.
Sebastian pointed. “Did Ryker just admit he was difficult?”
“I’m always difficult,” Ryker said. “That’s not news.”
“He’s aware,” Kip said. “Growth.”
Sebastian flipped a burger without turning around. “He’s always been aware. He just didn’t care until Sloane came along.”
The yard went briefly quiet in the way it did when Sebastian said something that landed too accurately to argue with. Then Sebastian started laughing, and Ryker shook his head. Holland pressed her lips together to keep from smiling, and the moment dissolved back into noise.
I crossed the patio to where Holland and Cami were sitting. Holland shifted to make room and I dropped into the empty chair between them.
“How are you actually doing?” Holland asked, keeping her voice low enough that it was just ours.
I looked at the yard. At Nate. At Ryker standing near the grill now, arms crossed, listening to whatever Sebastian was saying with the flat attention of a man who was pretending not to care about the answer.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said. “It’s like I spent so long bracing for the worst that I don’t know how to just … be here.”
Holland nodded as if she understood my comment from her own experience. “It takes time. The bracing doesn’t stop all at once. It just gets softer.”
Cami tilted her head toward Nate. “He looks better today.”
“He does.” My chest tightened in the good way. “He slept through the night again.”
“That’s huge,” Cami said.
“I know.” I watched him laugh at something Sebastian said, the sound carrying. Easy. Unguarded. “I keep waiting for it to get taken away again.”
Holland put her hand on my arm. “You’re allowed to have this.”
I looked at her. “I know that in my head.”
“The rest of you will catch up,” she said simply.
Kip unfolded himself from his lawn chair and ambled over to where Nate and Sebastian were sitting.
He dropped into the empty chair on Nate’s other side with the casual ease of someone who’d decided they were friends whether Nate had agreed to it or not.
Nate glanced at him sideways, then relaxed by a fraction when Kip didn’t demand anything, just reached over and stole a chip off Sebastian’s plate.
Sebastian swatted his hand without looking.
Nate watched the exchange and something in his expression cracked open. Not in the scared way. The way that meant he was seeing something he hadn’t expected and didn’t quite know what to do with yet.
I knew that look. I’d worn it myself not so long ago.
Cami leaned in close to me. “Sebastian’s going to try to recruit him.”
“What?”
“Watch.”
I did.
It took approximately four minutes. Sebastian leaned back in his chair, completely relaxed, and said something to Nate I couldn’t hear from where I was. Nate’s brows lifted. Sebastian shrugged like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Kip nodded, like co-signing.
Nate looked between them, then laughed, short and surprised, and shook his head.
Sebastian said something else.
Nate’s expression shifted. He glanced toward me, then back to Sebastian. Then he nodded, slow and careful, like he was agreeing to something he wasn’t fully sure about yet.
I turned to Cami. “What just happened?”
“Velvet Vortex,” she said. “Sebastian offered him a job. Guaranteed.”
Holland smiled into her drink.
I stared at my brother, sitting in the sun with Sebastian and Kip flanking him like the most dangerous welcoming committee in the city, and felt something shift underneath my ribs.
He had no idea who they were. What they’d done. What they were capable of.
But he was safe with them. I knew that the way I knew very few things with certainty anymore.
Ryker appeared beside me again, quiet as always. He followed my gaze to Nate.
“Sebastian got to him,” I said.
“Sebastian gets to everyone,” Ryker said. “It’s annoying.”
“You love him.”
A long pause. “He’s useful.”
I snorted. Holland covered her laugh with her hand.
Ryker’s arm came around my shoulders, relaxed. Like he’d been doing it for years. Like it belonged there.
Ella materialized on my other side. She looked at Nate, then at me. “He’s going to be okay.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?” She said it gently. Not as a challenge.
I watched Nate tilt his head back and laugh again at something Kip had said.
“Yeah,” I said, and this time I meant it. “I really do.”
The afternoon stretched long and slow the way good ones did.
Someone put music on. Sebastian finally handed grill duty off to Kip, who immediately started giving a running commentary on technique that Sebastian walked away from mid-sentence.
Holland and Cami pulled me into a conversation about nothing important, a restaurant they’d been to, a show Holland was watching, Cami’s upstairs neighbor who apparently owned too many wind chimes, and I let myself be in it.
Fully. Without constantly checking the perimeter.
At some point, I found myself standing with Nate near the fence while the others drifted in small clusters around us.
“Sebastian offered me a job,” he said.
“I heard.”
He glanced at me sideways. “You’re not going to tell me not to take it.”
“No.”
He turned that over. “Why not?”
I looked at Sebastian, currently losing an argument with Kip about something that appeared to involve tongs. “Because they’re good people.” I paused. “Complicated. But good.”
Nate was quiet for a moment. “I didn’t think my life was going to feel like this.”
I looked at him. “Like what?”
He gestured vaguely at everyone. At all of it. “Like today was actually mine.” He said it carefully, as if the words were fragile. “Like I was allowed to be in it.”
My throat tightened. “Nate—”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad,” he said quickly.
“I just.” He stopped. Started again. “I spent a long time in a place where I wasn’t a person.
I was a thing they were using. And then I woke up and you were there, and these people were here, and I keep waiting for the part where I have to pay for it. ”
I reached over and took his hand. He let me.
“You already paid,” I said. “More than you should have. You don’t owe anyone anything, Nate. Not a single thing.”
He squeezed my hand once, tight, then let go before it got to be too much for either of us.
“Starlight,” he said quietly.
I laughed even though my eyes were burning with unshed tears. “Roof.”
He bumped my shoulder with his, and I bumped back, and we stood there in the sun in the middle of all these people who had become our family without asking permission, and it was almost too much to hold.
Almost.
Ryker found me again as the afternoon started to tip toward evening, the light turning gold and long across the grass. He stood close enough that our arms touched, and for a while neither of us said anything.
Then he looked around one more time. At Sebastian cleaning up, at Kip and Holland tangled together in the lawn chair, at Nate talking to Ella with the patient attention of someone who had been starved of small ordinary things for too long, and something in his face went quiet in a way that wasn’t pain.
“This is what I wanted,” Ryker said, quietly.
I looked up at him.
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.
I leaned into his side, and his arm came around me, and we watched the people we loved exist in the light together.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t fixed. There were things still waiting in the dark that we’d have to face.
But right now, in this yard, with this noise and this light and these people?
We were home.