Chapter 15
Brenna
I hear Cameron before I see him. We’re halfway across the pasture, the parley group strung out in a loose line heading back to the ranch, when the shouting starts. Not words at first; just a voice, high and cracked with fury, carrying across the cleared ground from the direction of the house.
Then the heat.
It rolls toward us like a wave, dry and scorching, carrying the distinct signature I’d know from a thousand miles away. My son’s magic, breaking its banks.
I run.
The yard comes into view. Cameron is on the porch, squared off against Dane, and the air around him is shimmering.
His hands are balled into fists at his sides.
Light is crawling up his forearms in erratic pulses.
Dane stands in the doorway with his arms crossed, face unchanged, a cliff face weathering a storm because that’s what cliff faces do.
Greta heads to the kitchen porch, one hand on the rail, watching with the focused calm of a woman who’s seen this before.
“You can’t keep me locked in a house!” Cameron is shouting at Dane. His voice has the ragged, over-wound quality of someone who’s been arguing for too long and has run out of words and is now operating on pure, distilled fury. “She’s out there with those… with the same wolves who—”
He sees me. Stops mid-sentence. The relief on his face lasts about half a second before the anger swallows it whole.
“You’re okay.” He says it like an accusation.
“I’m fine. The parley went—”
“You left me here.” He comes off the porch. Two steps, three. The light is intensifying, pulsing with his heartbeat. “You went out there to face the people who tried to kill us, and you left me here with him.” A jerk of his head toward Dane, who hasn’t moved. “Like I’m a child. Like I can’t—”
“Cameron, I need you to breathe.”
“Don’t tell me to breathe! You disappeared for two years, and now you’re back for five minutes, and you’re already walking into danger without me. What if they’d attacked? What if the parley was a trap? I’d be sitting in the kitchen while you—”
His voice breaks. Not from anger. From the thing underneath the anger, the thing he can’t say, which is: I just got you back, and you could have been taken from me again.
The magic responds to the emotion. It always has.
Cameron’s power is tied to his heart in a way that makes it volatile, beautiful, and terrifying in equal measure.
His fire flares outward in a ring, searing the grass beneath his feet.
The air warps with heat. One of the porch posts starts smoking. Panic flares across his face.
“Cameron.” I step toward him, hands up. “Look at me. Ground it. Find the earth, push it down—”
“I can’t!” The fire climbs his arms, licks across his shoulders. His eyes are going full copper, the whites disappearing. “I can’t do the breathing thing, it’s not enough, it hasn’t been enough since—”
Since the Syndicate. Since they broke something open inside him that I don’t know how to close. He doesn’t need to say it. I can feel it.
I reach for him. My magic rises to meet his, white fire meeting copper-gold, the calming technique I used when he was a child.
But his power has changed since the lab.
It’s bigger, wilder, running hotter than anything I’ve felt from him, and when my magic makes contact, it slides off like it’s nothing.
I push harder. The white light flares. Cameron flinches. Not from pain but from the pressure. And the flinch feeds the fear, and the fear feeds the magic, and the cycle accelerates.
“Ma, stop! It hurts—”
I pull back. The fire is climbing his neck now, licking toward his face. The grass in a five-foot radius is black. The porch post is actively burning.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck!
There’s nothing I can do. No way to help. Nothing I can—
Suddenly, Merric is there.
He doesn’t push through me or shove me aside. He steps around me, puts himself between us, not blocking my view but occupying the space Cameron is spiraling in. And then it happens.
The anchor sense opens.
I feel it this time through my own magical awareness; a wave of calm, heavy and grounding, rolling outward from Merric. It doesn’t fight Cameron’s fire. Doesn’t try to smother it or redirect it. It just… settles underneath. A foundation. A floor for the boy to land on when the fall comes.
Cameron’s fists loosen. The flaming light stutters.
“You’re alright.” Merric’s voice is low and carries the weight of an alpha command that’s been stripped of everything except care.
Not dominance. Not control. Just the bone-deep assurance of a man who is not going to let my boy fall.
“Feel the ground under your feet. Feel the air. You’re home.
You’re safe. Nothing happened to your mother. She’s right here.”
Cameron’s breathing slows. The fire recedes. Down from his neck, his shoulders, his arms. It pulls back into his hands and pauses there, flickering, uncertain.
“That’s it,” Merric says. “Let it go. It’s done its job. It kept you safe. Now you can let it rest.”
The last of the golden light dies. Cameron sways on his feet. Merric catches his arm—one hand, firm but not gripping—and holds him steady.
And my son leans into him.
Not a collapse. Not a dramatic crumbling. Cameron just shifts his weight toward Merric, a few degrees of tilt that carry his shoulder against the alpha’s chest, and he stays there. Breathing. Eyes closed. Letting himself be held upright by a man he’s known for little more than a week.
I stand four feet away and watch my son choose Merric’s anchor over mine.
The rational part of my brain recognizes it. His magic has changed since the Syndicate; my technique doesn’t work anymore. It’s not a rejection of me. It’s a mechanical incompatibility. My fire pushes against his. Merric’s calm slides beneath it. Different tools for different problems.
The rational part of my brain can go to hell.
Because my son is leaning against a man he barely knows with the unconscious trust of a child who’s found something he’s been missing his whole life, and it doesn’t matter why the anchor sense works when my magic doesn’t.
What matters is the look on Cameron’s face.
The easing, the relief, the softness of a boy who has been holding himself for months and is finally, finally allowing himself to be held.
I gave him seventeen years of everything I had.
Every lesson, every meal, every night spent sitting with him through the nightmares and the magic flares.
The questions about his father that I answered as honestly as I could without breaking us both open.
I was his mother, his teacher, his alpha, and his rock. I was enough.
And now I’m watching him rest against someone else’s chest, and I know—with the terrible clarity of a woman who’s been telling herself comfortable lies—that I was never the whole picture.
I was half. The other half has been empty his entire life.
And Cameron has been adapting to that absence without either of us acknowledging it.
Merric adjusts his grip. Steadies the boy. Then he steps back—creates distance, gives Cameron room—and looks at him directly.
“Your ma walked into that parley to protect you,” he says. His voice is quiet but firm. “Every decision she’s made—leaving you here, going out there, all of it—she did because keeping you safe is the thing she puts before everything else. Including herself.”
Cameron’s mouth tightens. “She left me behind like I’m—”
“She left you behind because if those wolves had seen you, the boy whose magic lit up half a pasture three days ago, every plan she had would have gone sideways. You’re not a liability, Cameron. You’re a priority. There’s a difference, and your mother knows it even when you don’t.”
Cameron looks at Merric with an expression that’s caught somewhere between resentment and hunger. Resentment because he’s being told something he doesn’t want to hear, hunger because he’s being told it by a man whose opinion has started to matter more than he’s comfortable admitting.
“She’s always doing that,” Cameron mutters. “Deciding things for me.”
“That’s what parents do. You don’t have to like it. But you don’t get to yell at her for it either. She walked into a field with hostile wolves to make this ranch safer for you. You owe her better than a tantrum on the front porch.”
The word tantrum lands hard. Cameron’s eyes flash. For a second, I think the fire is going to come back.
“Now, apologize to your mother, son.” Merric’s voice has an edge to it that tells me he’s dead serious.
My boy’s chin juts out. Then something shifts. The fight goes out of him; not all of it, not permanently, but the immediate blaze. He looks at Merric, then looks at me, and I see him mentally adjusting. Factoring in new information, even when it contradicts what he feels.
“I’m sorry, Ma.” He says it stiffly. Grudgingly. With the gracelessness of a seventeen-year-old who knows he’s wrong and resents knowing it.
“I know,” I say. My voice comes out calm. I make sure of that. “I know you were scared.”
“I wasn’t scared. I was—” He stops. Reconsiders. “Okay. I was scared.”
“That’s allowed.”
He nods. Doesn’t meet my eyes. Then he turns and walks into the house without another word, and the screen door bangs shut behind him with the finality of a teenager who needs to be alone with his bruised pride.
The grass smokes faintly. The porch post has stopped burning, but the wood is blackened and will need replacing.
Dane hasn’t moved from the doorway. He watches Cameron go inside, then looks at me, and offers the closest thing to an apology I’ve ever seen from him—a small, gruff shrug that says, “I kept him in the house. The rest was above my pay grade.”
Greta starts directing cleanup without being asked. The ranch adjusts to the disruption the way it always does: absorbing the shock, patching the damage, moving on.
Merric stands in the middle of the yard with his hands in his pockets, watching the door where Cameron disappeared.
I should thank him. I should walk over and say, “You did what I couldn’t, and I’m grateful,” because it’s true and because he earned it. The words are right there.
Instead, I watch the back of his head and feel the ache of something unfamiliar. Not gratitude. Not jealousy. Something more complicated. The recognition that my son needs something I can’t give him, and the man who can give it is the same man I’ve been telling myself isn’t worthy of the role.
Merric didn’t claim anything, didn’t use the moment. He just steadied my child and told him to respect his mother. Told him that my choices come from love, not control. Defended me to my own son without asking for credit or position or acknowledgment.
That’s what a father does.
My throat tightens.
Willow appears beside me. She’s been watching too, standing at the edge of the yard, reading the scene.
“He’s good with him,” she says. “Cameron. Merric is good with him.”
“I know.”
“You going to tell him?”
I don’t answer. I don’t have an answer. Three days ago, I was certain that Merric Rourke hadn’t earned the right to know his son. Now I’m feeling that certainty fade away the same way Cameron’s fire flickered out, and I don’t know what’s underneath it.
“I’m going to check the wards,” I say.
Willow lets me go. She’s learning when to push and when to let me run, and right now she can see that pushing will break something I’m barely holding together.
I walk toward the north boundary. The wards glow along the line I spent all yesterday feeding. They’re strong. They’re holding. They’re doing exactly what I built them to do.
I wish everything else in my life were that simple.