Chapter 16
Merric
The bunkhouse is empty for the first time since we arrived. Rook and Briar are running the evening patrol, and Dane is working on some project with Warrick and Hannah, the teens who seem to have become his permanent shadows. Sienna is helping Greta with dinner.
I’m sitting on the edge of my cot, cleaning my boots, because cleaning boots is a thing you do when your hands need a job, and your brain won’t shut up.
Cameron turned to me. Closed his eyes. Trusted me to hold him upright when his own fire was eating him alive. And when I told him to respect his mother, he listened. Not happily, but he listened.
My son listened to me.
Stop.
I don’t know that. It’s not confirmed. Not spoken. But my wolf knows, and my blood knows, and the anchor sense that shouldn’t connect to a boy outside my pack but does… that knows too. It’s not a question anymore. It’s a fact I’m carrying without her words to confirm it.
The boot brush moves in circles. Dirt falls to the floor. The evening light gives me just enough illumination to work in.
A knock on the doorframe. Light. Hesitant.
I look up. Brenna is standing in the doorway.
She looks like she’s been arguing with herself the whole way here. Her arms are crossed—defensive, not aggressive—and her weight is on her back foot, ready to retreat. Her hair is damp from washing. She’s changed into a clean shirt, dark green, and the flecks in her eyes catch the low light.
“Brenna.”
“Can I—?” She stops. Takes a breath. “I need to talk to you.”
“Come in.”
She steps inside. Doesn’t sit. Stands near the doorway with her arms still folded, scanning the room—the empty cots, the gear stowed under bunks, Rook’s chess set on the table. Making sure we’re alone.
“Your people are all out?” she asks.
“For at least an hour.”
She nods. Doesn’t move further into the room. I set the boot down and wait, because whatever brought her here is balanced on a knife’s edge, and if I push, she’ll bolt.
“Today,” she says. “With Cameron.”
“Yeah.”
“What you did. Calming him. The things you said.” She’s choosing each word with care. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“You told him to respect me. You defended my decisions to my own son. You could have… Anyone else would have used that moment. Gained leverage.”
“I’m not anyone else.”
“No.” Something flickers in her eyes. “You’re not.”
Silence descends. Outside, the cicadas are starting up. The light is fading. The bunkhouse smells like boot leather and pine soap and the faint, persistent scent of her that’s been driving me slowly out of my mind for days. My wolf circles so impatiently that I want to leash him.
Brenna unfolds her arms and lets them hang at her sides. It’s a small thing—a shift in posture, nothing more—but from a woman who’s been holding herself together since the moment she came down that hillside, it’s seismic.
“You know,” she says. “About Cameron. You’ve known for a while.”
“I’ve suspected.”
“Don’t be careful with me right now, Merric. Not about this.”
I set the other boot down and look at her directly. “Yeah. I know. From the first day. His chin, his shoulders, the way he sets his shoulders. He’s mine.”
Her throat works, and her eyes flash. “He’s mine. He’s been mine for seventeen years.”
“I’m not disputing that.” I keep my voice low. This is dangerous territory.
“I raised him myself. No partner, no— I did it myself. Every scraped knee and broken bone and nightmare. Every time his magic erupted, I had to talk him down. Every question about his father that I had to answer without falling apart.” Her voice is steady, but the effort it’s costing her is visible—a tremor at the edges, held in place by sheer will. “I was enough.”
“You were more than enough. He’s extraordinary, Brenna. Whatever he is… that’s because of you.”
“Stop.” The word cracks. Just slightly. Just enough. “Don’t be all gentle and reasonable right now. I can’t… If you’re gentle, I’m going to—”
She stops. Presses her lips together. Looks at the ceiling.
I stand up. Slowly. The way I’ve learned to move around her: no sudden advances, no crowding. I cross the distance between us and stop within arm’s reach.
“He’s my son,” I say. Not a question. Not a demand. Just the truth, spoken aloud for the first time, hanging in the air between us.
“Yes.” The word comes out like it’s been held inside for seventeen years and has finally been allowed to surface. “He’s your son, Merric.”
The bunkhouse is very quiet. The cicadas outside. The creak of the floorboards beneath us. My heartbeat, which I’m fairly sure she can hear.
“I didn’t want it to be this way,” I say. “Brenna. If I could go back to that day—”
“Don’t.”
“I need to say this.”
“Merric—”
“I would have told them to go to hell. Every elder, every councillor, every wolf who thought they had the right to tell me who I could love. I would have ended Frostbourne before I walked away from you. I was young, and I was scared. I made the worst choice of my life, and I have regretted it every single day since.”
Her composure crumbles. Not dramatically, not a collapse. A single crack running through the surface, and underneath it something raw and pressurized that she’s been containing for too long.
“You don’t get to say that.” Her voice is thick. Rough. “You don’t get to stand here and tell me you regret it. I lived the consequences. I am the consequences. Every hard mile, every sleepless night, every time Cameron asked me why his daddy didn’t love him enough to stay—”
“He asked that?”
“He was five. He asked that at five, Merric. And I looked my son in the face and told him his father loved him very much—even though his father didn’t know he existed—because what the hell else was I supposed to say?”
The sound that comes out of me isn’t a word. It’s something from the bottom of my chest, a noise my wolf makes when the pain is too big for language.
“I should have come back,” I say. “I should have picked you. I should have—”
“You should have stayed in the first place.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Do you actually know, or is this the guilt talking? Because guilt is cheap, Merric. Guilt doesn’t change diapers at three in the morning. Guilt doesn’t hold a six-year-old through a magic flare that sets the curtains on fire. Guilt doesn’t—”
Her voice breaks, and the sound of it rips through me because Brenna Corvus does not break. She bends, she fights, she walks through fire and comes out the other side with her teeth bared. She does not break.
“Hey.” I reach for her. Not her face, not her hands—her arms, just above the elbows. A firm grip. “Hey. I’m here.”
“That’s the problem.” She’s not crying. Her eyes are bright, and her chin is trembling.
She is holding it together through what looks like an act of pure, furious will.
“You’re here, and you’re saying the right things.
You’re good with him. I don’t know how to be angry at someone who’s doing everything I wanted them to do far too late. ”
“Then don’t be angry. Not right now. Just let me—”
“Let you what?”
“Be here. Just… stand here. With you. And be sorry in a way that actually means something.”
She glares at me. The light is almost gone. The bunkhouse is dim, amber, intimate in a way that neither of us planned. Her arms are warm under my hands, and she hasn’t pulled away.
“I hate you,” she says, and neither of us believes it.
“I know.”
“I’ve hated you for eighteen years.”
“I know that too.”
“So why does it feel like—?” She stops. Swallows. Her eyes search my face, and whatever she finds there makes the last of her resistance waver. “Why does everything get quieter when you’re close?”
I don’t answer with words. I pull her toward me. Slowly. Giving her every chance to stop it, to plant her feet, to push me away. She doesn’t. She lets herself be drawn in, and her forehead comes to rest against my collarbone, and for one long, shaking breath, she just settles.
I wrap my arms around her. Carefully. She’s smaller than I remember—or I’m bigger—and she fits against me in a way that makes my wolf finally go silent.
Her hands come up. Fist into the front of my shirt. She pulls.
I tip her face up with one hand. She lets me. Her eyes are wet and fierce. She’s looking at me like I’m the answer to some unspoken question.
I kiss her.
This isn’t like at the river. The river was careful. Tentative. Two people testing whether the bridge would hold.
This is the bridge collapsing.
Her lips part under mine, and the taste of her goes through me like a lit fuse. The salt of her tears, the sweetness of her mouth. Her warmth. It’s like being lost in a memory. Only it’s real, and it’s now.
Her hands drag up my chest and twist in my hair, pulling me down, pulling me closer, and I stop being careful because careful isn’t possible anymore. My hands find her waist, her ribs, the curve of her back. She arches into me and makes a sound against my mouth that shoots down to my groin.
I can feel the resistance she’s been white-knuckling for days finally giving way. The mate bond slides into place with a resonance so deep it vibrates in my teeth, my bones, the floor beneath us.
She walks me backward. My calves hit the cot, and I sit, tugging her with me. She climbs into my lap with her knees on either side of my hips, her hands still in my hair, and her mouth still on mine. The cot protests under our combined weight with a creak that both of us ignore.
I find the hem of her shirt. My fingers brush the skin underneath—warm, smooth, alive. I graze the underside of her breast, and she inhales sharply against my mouth. Not pulling away. Pressing closer.
“Merric.” She breathes my name, ragged, barely a word.
“Tell me to stop.” I’m giving her the out because she deserves it, even though every part of me is praying she doesn’t take it.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
Her shirt comes up. My shirt follows. Skin to skin for the first time in eighteen years, and the sound she makes when my mouth finds her throat is—
“Oh, Jesus! Shit!” It’s Sienna’s voice. From the doorway. High-pitched with alarm.
Brenna is off my lap so fast the cot flips. I don’t even see her move; one second she’s in my arms, the next she’s standing four feet away with her shirt clutched against her chest and her hair wild and her eyes wide.
Sienna is frozen in the doorway with a dinner plate in one hand and a look of pure, horrified surprise.
Her mouth is open. Her face is scarlet. She looks from Brenna to me—shirtless, panting, sitting on the overturned cot—and back to Brenna with a speed that would be funny under any other circumstances.
“I was bringing… Greta sent… I didn’t—” Sienna spins on her heel and walks out so fast she nearly drops the plate. “Sorry! God. Sorry!”
She’s gone. Her boots hammer the porch steps, and the sound fades across the yard.
Brenna pulls her shirt on. Her hands are shaking. Her face is flushed, and her breathing is ragged. She won’t look at me.
“Brenna—”
“Go after her.”
“What?”
“Sienna. Go after her. She’s—” Brenna’s chest is heaving. She’s looking at the door Sienna just fled through. “She shouldn’t have to see that.”
I stare at her. “Why would Sienna—?”
“Just go, Merric.”
She’s out the door before I can form another sentence. Across the porch, down the steps, disappearing around the corner of the building in the direction of the main house. Gone.
I sit on the overturned cot in the empty bunkhouse with my shirt on the floor and the memory of her mouth still burning on my skin.
What the fuck just happened?
I replay the last thirty seconds. Sienna’s face…
shock, yes. Embarrassment, absolutely. She walked in on something she didn’t expect.
But Brenna’s reaction—go after her, she shouldn’t have to see that—reads like something else.
Like Brenna thinks Sienna’s shock was personal.
Wounded. The reaction of a woman who just caught—
Oh.
Oh.
She thinks Sienna and I are together.
Fuck.
The realization hits me like a truck, and the laugh that comes out of me is involuntary, slightly unhinged, and completely inappropriate. I press my hands over my face and breathe.
Brenna Corvus, who ran a covert intelligence network across four states, who can read a hostile delegation from three hundred yards, who planned a parley that made a purist alpha back down—Brenna Corvus thinks I’m sleeping with Sienna.
The laugh dies. Because it’s not funny. It’s the opposite of funny. She’s been watching us for days—the conversation, the touches, the easy proximity—and building a picture that’s completely wrong. And that picture just exploded in the middle of the most important moment of my life.
I need to fix this.
I stand up. Put my shirt on. Straighten the cot. My hands aren’t shaking, which is remarkable given that my entire body is singing with the taste of Brenna and the memory of her knees on either side of my hips and her voice saying, “Don’t you dare stop.”
I need to fix this.
But I don’t know which door to go through.
Brenna vanished toward the main house. Sienna fled across the yard.
In between is a misunderstanding that’s been building since the day Brenna started watching us from the ridge.
And I didn’t see it because Sienna is my packmate, my friend, and the idea of anything else has literally never crossed my mind.
The mate bond thrums in my chest. Fully awake now. No pretending it isn’t. I can feel Brenna on the other end—her confusion, her anger, the raw hurt of a woman who opened herself up and then watched someone else walk through the door.
I sit back down on the cot.
Then I get up again, because sitting here isn’t going to fix a goddamn thing.
I go through the door and into the evening. I have no idea how I’m going to reach her now.