Chapter Twenty
~ Braham ~
The fifth attempt ended the way the first four had, with a controlled, deliberate collapse that Grace treated not as a failure but as data collection.
She pushed herself back to sitting, eyed the coffee table edge with the focused suspicion of a pup who had decided the laws of physics were negotiable, and reached for it again with both hands.
I watched from the deep leather couch with my coffee warming my palm and the morning quiet of the estate settling around us like weather. Pale Oregon light cut through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long shafts that reached the timber floor and pooled in warm rectangles.
Beyond the glass, the Douglas fir pressed dark and close, massive trunks holding their ground against a sky the color of old ash. The great room smelled of wood smoke and cedar and the faint ghost of last night’s fire that lingered in the stone hearth.
Grace’s small fist closed around the oak edge of the coffee table—heavy, custom, built by someone who had never considered that an infant might one day use it as gym equipment—and she hauled herself upright with the grim, methodical determination of someone conducting an experiment that had not yet produced the desired result.
The thread hummed low in my chest. Warm and specific, carrying the sound of Jai in the kitchen behind me, locked in what had been a forty-five-minute argument with the espresso machine delivered in the specific low, cutting register he reserved for inanimate objects that had personally wronged him.
You are an overpriced paperweight with delusions of functionality.
I drank my coffee. Did not offer to help.
Had learned, at measurable cost, that offering help with the espresso machine before nine a.m. was a conversational sinkhole with no clean exit and at least one sharp turn into my taste in coffee, which Jai had described on multiple occasions as “aggressively incorrect.”
Grace made it upright. Both hands white-knuckled on the oak edge, round-bellied in her current human form, oversized feet planted on the wool rug with the wide-stance stability of someone who understood that balance was theoretical until proven otherwise.
She looked at me over the rim of my mug with the focused, self-satisfied expression of a pup who had just proved a point she’d been working on since breakfast.
Then her expression shifted. Something behind her eyes went still, the kind of focus that happened when the shift was coming whether anyone was ready for it or not.
She sat down hard on the rug. The shift ran through her in a wave that the human eye couldn’t quite track.
One moment she was upright, human, seven months old and round-faced, and the next she was a small wolf pup with oversized paws she still hadn’t grown into, fluff more than fur, sitting on the wool rug with the dazed expression of someone who had changed shape mid-experiment and was now recalibrating.
She grabbed the corner of the throw blanket—charcoal wool, expensive, a gift from the Ridgeline Pack’s senior members that had arrived with a note I still kept in the study drawer—and immediately started chewing it with the focused dedication of a creature who believed fabric was either food or an enemy, possibly both.
I looked at her over the rim of my mug. “That’s a blanket, not breakfast.”
She chewed harder.
Ashe arrived at eight sharp. The front door opened and closed with the same controlled economy he brought to everything, and his boots on the timber floor carried the specific rhythm of a man who walked the way he did everything else, with purpose, nothing wasted.
He appeared in the great room doorway, notebook already in hand, and read the room in his standard two seconds.
His eyes moved: the leather couch, me, Grace on the rug with the throw blanket corner in her mouth, the faint espresso stain visible on my wrist where I’d reached across Jai’s shoulder that morning and paid for it.
He filed each item, said nothing, and handed me the weekend security summary without comment.
“Clean,” he said. The word carried the satisfaction of a man whose operational standards did not permit loose ends to remain loose for long.
“Declan’s runner was located and dealt with.
Quiet extraction. No resistance. He’s been integrated into the eastern territory under supervision. ”
I scanned the summary. Block capital, Ashe’s handwriting, each line allocated the exact space it required.
The second unknown party—the private intelligence firm Gerald Flynn had hired to compile leverage on Jai—had been identified in month three through the shell company dissolution records my legal team pulled.
The firm no longer existed. The leverage no longer existed. The legal separation was permanent and on record, filed in triplicate and backed by the kind of paperwork that made judges nervous when they saw my name at the bottom of it.
“The Ridgeline Pack has been chartered under Wolfe protection. Full autonomy, conditional alliance. Grace’s lineage is documented and sealed.
The Morrow ability is classified at the highest tier.
” Ashe’s delivery was flat and efficient, the grocery list of loose ends being tied.
“She is, as of eight weeks ago, legally Grace Flynn-Wolfe.”
The name sat between us with the weight of something that had cost more than paper.
I had watched Jai say it aloud in the lawyer’s office, his voice steady, eyes on the document, no performance in it, and then he had looked at the ceiling for a long moment in the way he does when something has landed harder than he intended to let it.
I had said nothing. Just let him have the silence, because some silences belonged to him and I had learned, slowly and at cost, which ones those were.
My eyes found the study door. Behind the desk panel, the safe held Grace’s adoption papers and the marriage certificate with Jai Flynn-Wolfe’s name on it.
I had opened that safe seventeen times in the past two months. Had pulled both documents out, held them under the study lamp, confirmed they were real, and put them back. Security-conscious men did not open their safes seventeen times in two months.
I had done it anyway.
I would do it again.
Grace shifted back to human form without warning and immediately face-planted into the rug. She pushed herself to sitting, looked at the coffee table with fresh suspicion, and reached for it again.
“She’s determined,” Ashe said. The observation carried the faintest edge of something that might, in a different man, have been admiration.
“She gets that from Jai.”
“God help us all.”
Jai appeared in the kitchen doorway holding his espresso mug like a trophy seized from conquered territory. His yesterday’s t-shirt—faded black, Army Ranger, the one with the tear along the shoulder seam that he refused to throw out—hung loose on his frame.
His hair was doing the thing it did in the mornings, standing up at odd angles like it had been conducting its own experiments overnight. The espresso stain on his wrist had migrated to his forearm, a dark crescent that he had clearly noticed and elected to ignore.
He looked at Ashe. “Your boss snores.”
Ashe didn’t blink. “I’ll note that in the log.”
“You should. It’s disruptive. The thread carries everything. I get a front-row seat to the nasal symphony.”
“I don’t snore,” I said.
Jai drank his espresso. Looked at me over the rim with the specific expression of a man who held incontrovertible evidence and was prepared to deploy it at length. “The thread doesn’t lie. You sound like a bear with a sinus infection.”
“I don’t have sinus infections.”
“You have a deviated septum from that fight in Vancouver. I felt it. The thread is very informative about your deviated septum.”
I had discovered, over the past six months, that the mate bond was an exceptional source of ammunition in Jai’s hands.
He deployed it with visible, cheerful ruthlessness, cataloguing every physical detail the thread carried and weaponizing it at precisely the moments designed to produce maximum irritation.
I found it infuriating.
I also, privately, found it completely wonderful, though I would not say so under threat of waterboarding.
Grace pulled herself upright again. Both hands on the oak edge, round-bellied, standing with the wobbling certainty of a creature who had just discovered that verticality was possible and was now determined to master it.
She looked at me with the focused satisfaction of a pup who had decided that physics, after all, was a suggestion.
Then her expression shifted again. The quality of focus that preceded the change. She sat down hard on the rug, and the shift ran through her—human to wolf in the space of a breath—and she grabbed the throw blanket corner with renewed enthusiasm and started chewing.
Ashe closed his notebook. Slipped the pen into his inside pocket with the economy of a man who had delivered his report and was now preparing to exit a conversation that had veered into personal territory he had no interest in listening to.
Jai dropped onto the couch beside me. The leather creaked under his weight.
He reached across, stole the corner of my toast without asking or acknowledging the theft, and ate it in two bites.
Said nothing. Leaned his shoulder against mine and watched Grace destroy the throw blanket with the focused dedication of someone who believed fabric crimes were her divine right.
The thread hummed, warm and steady. Grace chewed.
The Douglas fir stood dark beyond the glass.
The estate held its Saturday-morning quiet around us, timber and stone and the particular weight of a place that had stopped being just a house somewhere in the past six months and had become something I did not have a clean word for.