Chapter 11 #3
I stepped back quietly and carefully, the way I’d moved through enemy camps during the war, each footfall placed with the precision of a man who understood that some moments were not meant to be witnessed.
By the time I reached the barn, my hands were steady and my chest felt both lighter and heavier than it had any right to.
They walked back toward the house together.
I saw them from the barn doorway, moving side by side across the yard, and the difference from this morning was visible even at a distance.
Gabriella’s shoulders were looser, her stride easier, and Sabrina walked with that bounce in her step that she got when something difficult had been faced and survived.
The fracture between them had eased. The edges had been brought together, the gap narrowed to something that looked, from where I stood, like it might eventually close.
Gabriella saw me first. Her eyes found mine across the yard, and she held my gaze without the coldness that had been there this morning, without the shattered composure.
Just Gabriella, looking at me with the clear, steady regard of someone who had decided, against considerable evidence, that I was worth keeping.
Sabrina saw me next. She gave me that smile, the one that was equal parts warmth and mischief and something more complicated, and raised her hand in a small wave that contained thirty percent “I see you” and seventy percent “we handled it, you enormous disaster of a man.”
They didn’t come to me. They went to the porch instead, settling on the steps side by side, and what happened next was the magic of sisters who had shared a lifetime: the heavy stuff gave way to the light.
I watched from the barn doorway as the conversation changed.
Sabrina said something that made Gabriella snort, the kind that happened when laughter arrived too quickly for dignity to intercept.
Gabriella retaliated with what appeared to be a detailed critique of Sabrina’s hair, gesturing at the tangles with the relish of someone who had been storing that observation for years.
Sabrina gasped in mock outrage, shoved her sister’s shoulder, and Gabriella shoved back, and then they were both laughing, the sound carrying across the yard to where I stood with dirt on my boots and something dangerously close to gratitude expanding in my chest.
They sat close. Their shoulders touched.
Sabrina’s wing extended loosely behind Gabriella’s back in that unconscious gesture of protection that had been part of their dynamic since childhood, and Gabriella leaned into it the way she always had, accepting the shelter without resentment.
The anger was gone, replaced by the fragile, real warmth of two women who loved the same impossible man and had decided, against all available logic, that this did not require them to stop loving each other.
I watched them for a while. Long enough to be sure, and then I turned away and left them to themselves. Some territories needed no garrison. Some peace needed no witnessing.
I went back to the farm wagon Angelina and I had been repairing yesterday.
The last iron pin still needed driving home, and there was something comforting about the sheer physical simplicity of lifting something heavy and putting it where it belonged.
My hands knew the work. My body fell into the rhythm of it without requiring my brain’s participation, which was fortunate because my brain was currently occupied with the considerably more complex task of processing the fact that I had two girls who loved me, who had just agreed to share me.
* * *
I came back to the house when the sun was high enough that my shirt was dark with sweat and my arms had that pleasant, hollow ache that came from good work honestly done. The kitchen door swung open on quiet hinges, and the first thing I saw was Angelina.
She was waiting for me. She stood at the counter with her arms folded, one hip leaned against the edge, her honey-blonde hair loose around her shoulders in a way she rarely allowed during daylight hours, and the expression on her face was the one she wore when something serious could no longer be danced around.
The kitchen was quiet. The girls were still outside, their voices carrying faintly from the porch where the laughter had settled into the easy rhythm of ordinary conversation.
Bread cooled on the rack. Tea sat in the pot, probably cold by now.
And Angelina looked at me with those steady hazel eyes that had seen through every lie I’d ever attempted between the ages of six and twenty-six, and I knew, with the certainty of a man standing on the edge of a cliff he had been approaching for days, that the dancing was over.
“Stop protecting me from the truth,” she said. Her voice was calm, firm, the tone she had always used when the bullshit needed to stop and the honesty needed to start. “Whatever it is. However messy. Just tell me.”
For a moment, I felt a spike of fear so sharp it bordered on physical.
Part of me expected anger. But under the fear, quieter and more surprising, was something else: a low, steady pride.
I did not regret the lake with Gabriella.
I did not regret last night with Sabrina.
Both moments had felt real and necessary in ways that transcended the complicated situation we had found ourselves in.
Both had been born from love that predated the physical acts, love that had been growing in dark soil for years before either of us had the language to name it.
I was not ashamed of loving them. But they were Angelina’s daughters, and I had no idea what she would make of any of this.
I decided, in the space between one breath and the next, that I would not hide any longer.
So I told her everything in plain words, without excuses, the way I’d delivered battlefield reports to officers who needed facts rather than florid prose.
How close Gabriella and I had become after I returned.
The trauma potion, Lyra, the fairy healer with her dragonfly wings and her unusual payment method.
The night at the lake, the crushed wildflowers, the way Gabriella’s body had taken mine with a hunger that still lived in my muscles.
The kidnapping. The rescue. The raw emotion of holding Sabrina after bringing her home, and how that emotion had carried us into her narrow bed with an inevitability that felt like gravity.
That both sisters now knew. That they had reached a fragile agreement not to fight over me.
That the farmhouse, which had always been the safest place I knew, now contained a truth so complicated I had no map for it.
I finished speaking. The kitchen was very quiet.
Angelina had not moved. Her arms were still folded, her hip still leaned against the counter, and her eyes had not left my face throughout the entire confession.
I waited, braced for judgment, for the coldness that comes when someone you love looks at you and sees something they cannot recognize.
“I was afraid,” I said quietly. The admission cost me something. “That you would look at me differently. That you would… think I was being selfish. They’re your daughters, Angelina. And I love both of them.”
Angelina’s expression did not collapse. It softened gradually, the lines around her eyes easing, her mouth curving into something that looked, to my complete astonishment, close to pride.