Forrest Chapter 29 Duty and Desire 360
Forrest
Laughter rolls down the hall from the living room, a warm wave that tempts me towards it like a moth to a flame.
The sounds fill every inch of space around me.
Kieran’s boisterous voice, Selena’s bright shriek, the low, contented rumble of Anik.
And woven through all of it, Raven’s attitude that’s tinged with what sounds like euphoria from here.
I stand in the hallway's shadow, a stone in a riverbed while the current of their joy rushes around me. I should be in the study. Working. Planning the next mission. But another part of me—all of me, if I'm being honest—wants to stay. Just a little longer.
The voice inside my head—the one that runs a constant catalog of my failures—falls silent as Raven steps out of the living room to gaze up at the wall of photos Miriam constantly adds to.
Her focus hones in on the front-and-center shot: a younger, harder me with Anik's arm slung awkwardly over my shoulders.
Miriam's first photo of us. After the reunion I engineered.
It was a strategic move. Anik had a liability—a missing family. I had the resources to neutralize it. Sending him to retrieve them and set them up here was simple logistics.
Miriam has never understood logistics.
She looked past Anik that day, pulled me inside by my sleeve with a terrifying certainty. "You bring my son home," she said, her voice thick with an accent that would fade as her English improved. "You sit. You eat."
She never stopped. With soup left at my elbow while working, socks darned before I noticed the hole, that photo enshrined as a monument to a moment she calls heroic instead of practical.
She is a liability. Her affection is a door with no lock. Her belief that I am "a good man" is a critical flaw in her perception. I have not been able to correct it.
Selena is a byproduct. A loud, chaotic security nightmare who texts me pictures of stray cats as potential nephews. Introducing her to Raven triggered a low-grade migraine pulsing behind my eyes and hasn’t lessened since.
And yet.
When a rival pack targeted Selena years ago, I didn't feel rage. I felt the foundation of the one good thing I'd helped build with Anik tremble. So I removed the source of the instability. Permanently. No paperwork. No trial. Just eight missing shifters and a message etched in blood and silence.
They never knew. They just know they are safe. That is the only part they need to understand.
Raven, meanwhile, is still looking at the photo, seeing the younger—and somehow harder—version of myself, the way Anik’s arm is slung over my shoulders awkwardly at Miriam’s insistence.
She sees a moment while simultaneously blind to the cost-benefit analysis that preceded it, or the ongoing, draining, illogical obligation that followed.
She stands in that blind spot, the noise of the others bending around her, leaving her in a pocket of quiet.
Which means this is the moment I will allow myself. Not only for me, but for my brothers, for her.
I step out of the shadows and move to close the distance.
She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t turn. Six steps and I’m at her shoulder, and the fact that she never registered my approach is a flaw in her defenses I would have carved into her for a week ago.
The critique rises, sharp and habitual. I bury it.
She’s not a soldier on a drill. Not right now.
Once I’m beside her, she looks up. Her eyes are still wide from the night’s revelations, but she offers a tentative smile. The fear is gone. I will ensure it stays gone, even if it means swallowing every corrective word I have.
“Raven.” My voice is too low, too rough. I have to force the next words past the bedrock of my own failure. “A word.”
She follows me a few steps down the hall, just far enough for privacy. I don’t know how to do this. There’s no protocol for it so I just do the only thing I can, I speak the truth as I see it.
“In the gym. What I said.” I meet her gaze, hold it. She needs to see I’m not hiding. “I called you pathetic, a liability. That was inaccurate.”
She blinks, but says nothing, just keeps handing me rope to hang myself with.
“You are not a liability. You are a complication. A high-risk, high-value variable. And my handling of the situation was… flawed.” I rake my hand through my hair and roll my shoulders, trying to loosen them.
“I projected my own standards, my own failures. That is on me.” I take a breath, the air feeling thin.
“I am… trying. To be better. For them.” I jerk my chin minutely toward the living room.
“And for you. You all deserve better than my… shortcomings.”
She studies me for a long moment, her head tilting the other way. I can almost see her picking apart my statement, looking for the trap, the hidden clause. She won’t find one. I just gave her the ugly, unfiltered truth.
Then she says it. Quiet, simple, and it hits me like a sniper’s round between the ribs.
“You know you deserve better, too, right?”
It’s so profoundly foolish. So utterly divorced from the reality of my existence, of the ledgers I keep and the costs I tally. I have no answer for it. My mind simply takes the statement and rejects it outright.
I give her a single, stiff nod—not of agreement, but of acknowledgment that she spoke. Then I turn and walk toward the study. My sanctuary. My prison.
You deserve better, too.
The words echo in mind as I open my laptop and I get to work burying them under guard rotation schedules. I try drowning them in contractor bids. I attempt to layer over them with maps of Ember Hollow and possible trafficking routes.
But they are persistent. They float to the surface during lulls in my work.
You deserve . A meaningless concept. Deserve is for people who haven’t calculated the price of their own failures.
Deserve is for people like them, in the other room, who can still laugh without hearing the echo of every mistake they ever made.
Every second of this… celebration they are having is a luxury we can’t afford.
But I let it happen. I saw her face when she overheard them planning their little competitions for her.
Not fear. Not the usual overwhelm. Something softer.
Something that looked like belonging. I could not take that from her.
Not yet. Not in the wake of the colossal failure that was due to nothing but my own issues and my inability to control them.
I contained the earlier crisis. I forced the confession. Now I've detached to do what I do best. I have done my part where my family’s happiness is concerned, now my part is here.
Two screens. Two worlds.
The left is the work. Quarterly reports, procurement logs, the machinery that keeps them safe. A fortress. A cage. But it's mine to hold.
The screen on the right is something else. Emerson's files on Raven. The trafficking network. The hunt. The thing I keep telling myself is just another case file.
Emerson's files on her are a testament to her impossible nature. My own notes on the trafficking network, or the Collectors, as we've started calling them, alongside the communications Emerson has been picking up are telling. They're hunting for something "unique." A prize of some sort.
It’s her. I know it is.
That knowledge changes nothing. The work doesn't pause for revelations. It's a cliff face, and I am the only one with a pick ax and rope.
The laughter from the other room is a distant warmth I’ve walled myself off from. A fresh peel of it—Raven’s, clear and bright—hits the door like a physical thing. My jaw tightens. Not a smile. A crack in the armor. I force it to still.
My mind produces the image of her in Anik’s arms as he carried her out of the training room. She was pale, shaking, and utterly defeated. I had done that to her.
You are a liability .
I’d said it to carve the weakness out of her. To make her strong.
I carved too deep. I saw the threat. The chaos. The divine bomb ready to take my whole family with it. I didn't stop to look at the woman who was still learning how to stand.
The part of me that isn’t the stiff CEO, the part of me that is stone and instinct and ancient violence, had watched and been satisfied. It saw something fragile and beautiful and wanted to test its strength. To lock it away where nothing but him could ever break it. To keep it.
That part got too close to her. It is never getting that close again. It’s why I’m in here, and she’s out there.
A digital chime sounds and I answer it. The video conference window opens. Liam, the London director, looks exhausted. It’s three in the morning over there and a safe house breach has forced the people I put in charge to clock some overtime.
“Mr. Hatcher. Thank you for making time for us.”
“The Carlisle contract,” I say, skipping all preamble. “Your last update said ‘minor delays’. The project timeline shows a fourteen percent slippage. That is not minor.”
Liam flinches. “The artisans are… particular. The stone sourcing—”
“I’ve already emailed you three alternative quarries with verified purity specs and faster shipping lanes. Use the Melbourne supplier. The premium is justified. Next item. The London safehouse.”
“It’s getting back to operational, all leaks have been sealed. We moved the Selkie family to the Birmingham safehouse.”
“Security protocol?”
“Standard detail. Two on rotation.”
“Inadequate.” I pull up a file on my second screen, glancing at it briefly.
“That family just had their lives threatened under our watch. Go to three-person teams. Rotate them every six hours. No patterns. I’m sending you the new schedule now.
” The soft whoosh sound punctuates my sentence for me well enough.
Liam’s shoulders slump in relief. He’s running on fumes. “Right. Understood.”
“See that you do.” I try to keep my tone from being cruel, only factual. The machine must run and someone needs to keep it on track. My finger hovers over the ‘end call’ button. “Liam.”
“Sir?”