Chapter 31 #2
I lean against the barn door and watch. Not hiding it, not advertising it. But I feel the bond, and Conner’s awareness of me registers as a slight shift in his posture—shoulders easing a fraction—before he goes back to the post in his hand.
Then the group appears. Six rescued wolves heading to the dining hall, walking close together the way the freed ones do, shoulders nearly touching, a herd instinct that captivity drilled into muscle memory. They round the corner of the barn and see Conner.
The reaction ripples through them at once. Two of the women pull closer together. A teenage boy stiffens, then deliberately looks away. But it’s the man at the front—stocky, hard-faced, a wolf I don’t recognize from any Ravenclaw family—who stops dead.
He stares at Conner. The recognition crosses his face in stages: confusion, certainty, then something hot and bright and furious.
“Fucking Forrester.” He spits on the ground between them.
Rook straightens. His hand tightens on the post he’s holding, and I feel his energy spike; not fear, readiness. Preparing for this to go sideways.
Conner sees the man looking. He doesn’t stop working. Doesn’t look away. Doesn’t stiffen or flinch or square up the way an enforcer would if challenged. He holds the man’s eyes for a long, measured second. Not challenging. Not apologetic.
Present. Willing to be seen for exactly what he is.
My wolf surges. Every instinct says, “Go to him, stand between them, bare your teeth.” The bond screams it.
He’s mine, and they’re looking at him like he’s something scraped off a boot.
The primal part of me doesn’t care about context or justice or the fact that this man probably rode in a truck that Conner loaded.
I don’t move. I grip the barn door frame, and I stay where I am.
Because this isn’t mine to fix. And Conner isn’t asking me to.
The man holds the stare for another heartbeat. Then he turns, mutters something to the woman beside him, and moves on. The group shuffles past. The teenage boy casts one last look over his shoulder, and then they’re gone.
Rook exhales. Glances at Conner. “Gonna be a lot of that.”
Conner sets the post. Reaches for the next one. “Yeah.”
That’s it. No discussion, no processing, no moment of vulnerability. He goes back to the fence. Rook goes back to handing him posts. The rhythm resumes.
Nobody thanks him. Nobody will. That’s part of the price, and he’s paying it without complaint, and watching him do it does something to the knot in my chest that I thought was permanent.
I turn away and head across the compound.
I find Mia in the children’s room. She’s been moved from the medical tent—a good sign, according to Healer Sable, the older Frostbourne woman who runs things with a quiet authority that reminds me of Brenna.
Sable meets me at the door, keeping her voice low.
“She’s eating. Not much, but enough.” Sable glances back into the room. “She responds to physical contact: grips a hand, presses into warmth. Curls into whoever holds her. She hasn’t spoken.”
I look past her. Mia is sitting on a cot near the window, knees drawn up, her dark eyes tracking the room the way a feral animal tracks movement through the bars of a cage. Watchful. Still.
“Can I sit with her?”
Sable nods. “Slow. Let her come to you.”
I cross the room and lower myself to the floor beside her cot. Not on it, beside it. Below her eye level. I learned this with Cameron when his magic was bad, and the world was too loud: make yourself small, make yourself still, let them decide when to close the distance.
Mia watches me. I stay silent.
A minute passes. Then two. Then one of the Ravenclaw children—Eli, maybe five, missing his front teeth—ambles in with a red rubber ball and drops it. It rolls across the wooden floor in a lazy arc, bumping against the leg of Mia’s cot.
Mia’s gaze follows it. Not the flinch I expected. Not the blankness I’ve seen on her face since the facility. Something else. Her eyes trace the ball’s path with a focus that has nothing to do with threat assessment.
Interest.
I look at Sable. She’s seen it too. Her hand is pressed against her mouth.
Eli, oblivious, retrieves the ball and drops it again. It rolls back toward the cot. Mia’s fingers twitch on the blanket.
She doesn’t reach for it. Not yet. But she watches it until it stops, and when Eli picks it up and wanders out, her gaze stays on the empty floor where it was.
“That’s new,” Sable says, her voice thick. She clears her throat. “That’s new as of today.”
The first sign that the world outside her survival instincts might hold something worth noticing.
When Conner comes for Mia in the late afternoon, I’m still in the children’s ward.
I’ve been sitting with her for an hour, not touching, just there. She’s drowsy. the kind of half-sleep that isn’t rest, just a body too exhausted to maintain full vigilance. Her eyes drift closed, snap open, drift again. Every time they open, they find me first. Checking.
The door opens. Conner fills the frame, still dusty from the fence work, his bad arm strapped against his side. He sees me and stops.
“I can come back.”
“Stay.” I rise from the floor, my knees protesting. “She knows you.”
He crosses the room slowly, no sudden movements, keeping his footsteps audible. He lowers himself onto the edge of the cot. Not the floor, where I sat. The cot. Closer. I wonder if he decided that or if instinct took him there.
Mia’s eyes are open now. She watches him come with that silent, assessing gaze. But when he settles, she relaxes. She knows him. Not safe, maybe. Not yet. But known. The man who came for them and carried her out.
Conner doesn’t speak. He rests his good hand on the blanket beside hers. Palm up. Open. Offering, not taking.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Then her fingers creep across the wool and curl around his index finger. The grip is fierce, clinging.
He doesn’t react. Doesn’t look at her hand. Just sits, looking out the window at the valley, breathing slow and even, letting her hold on.
I lean against the wall near the door and watch them. The enforcer and the broken girl. There’s no poetry in it, no redemption arc tied up in a bow. Just a man sitting with a kid because he said he would, and a kid holding his finger because it’s the only thing she knows how to do.
Sable appears beside me. She watches for a moment, arms folded, her expression unreadable.
“She goes down faster with him,” she murmurs. “Heart rate drops. Breathing evens out. Whatever he did in that facility, she remembers it.”
“He got her out.”
Sable nods slowly. “That’d do it.”
We watch. Mia’s eyes drift closed. This time, they stay closed. Her grip on Conner’s finger doesn’t loosen—if anything, it tightens as sleep takes her—but the rigid line of her body softens, curling toward the warmth of him.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t check the time. Doesn’t shift his weight or flex his bad shoulder, though it must be aching. He just sits, steady as a fence post, and lets a damaged child sleep holding onto his hand.
When her breathing deepens into something that might be real rest, Sable catches Conner’s eye from across the room and raises her eyebrows. Same time tomorrow?
He nods.
She nods back.
He eases his finger free; slowly, a millimeter at a time, replacing it with a fold of blanket that Mia grips without waking. He rises and walks to the door where I’m standing. Our eyes meet.
“She’ll be better when we find her parents,” he says. His throat works.
“Yes,” I say, not adding more, because we both know there’s little chance of that happening. Doesn’t mean we won’t try, though. And I sense that my mate is going to try harder than anyone.
I take his hand as we step onto the porch. His fingers tighten around mine, and it feels good. Better than good.
The next evening, he finds me at the creek behind the lodge.
I’m sitting on a flat rock with my boots off and my feet in the water.
Reaching for every wolf on the property, reading the bonds, checking for distress.
It’s become a nightly ritual: a scan of the pack, the way I used to do during the raids when every night might be the last.
He sits beside me on the rock. Doesn’t take his boots off. The mark on my neck pulses once when his shoulder brushes mine. It always does.
“Martin Donovan talked to me today,” he says.
“What did he say?”
“He said his wife had a quilt. Her mother’s. The guards took it when they arrived. He asked if I knew about that. About the belongings being taken.” A pause. “I didn’t. But I told him I should have.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t want an apology. He wanted the quilt back.” Conner looks at the water. “I can’t give it back. The facility’s a ruin. Whatever was in those storage rooms is ash.”
“Yes.”
“So what do I do?”
“You keep showing up. You keep working. You let them see you, and you don’t expect them to be comfortable with it.” I put my hand on his knee. “That’s all you can do.”
He’s quiet. The creek runs over our silence. The stars are thick above the ridge… the Ozark sky, darker than what was once Conner’s Hill Country because the hills are higher and the lights are fewer.
“This is beautiful,” he says. Looking at the valley, the ridges, the sky. “I understand why you love it.”
“Wait until the fog comes to the valley. It fills the bowl, and only the ridges show through. Like islands in a white sea.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“You will.”
The promise is small. Ordinary. A woman telling a man he’ll see the fog.
But it carries everything underneath: the mating, the choice, the future we’re building out of rubble and willingness.
He’ll be here for the fog. He’ll be here tomorrow.
He’ll be here next month, and next year, and the year after that, because I chose him and he chose me.
And the wolves we carry inside us aren’t interested in half measures.
He takes my hand. We sit by the creek and listen to the water until the cold drives us up.
We walk back along the path. The lodge is lit, voices inside… Greta and the kitchen crew, the low hum of a pack settling for the night. The turnoff to my room is on the left. His cabin is straight ahead.
I don’t turn left.
He doesn’t ask. His hand tightens around mine, and we keep walking.
His cabin is small: a cot, a chair, a window facing the eastern ridge. His bag is on the floor, half unpacked. The sling for his shoulder is draped over the chair back. It’s the room of a man who doesn’t know how long he’s staying and hasn’t let himself settle in.
I close the door. He sinks onto the cot and watches me with an expression I’m learning to read: want held in check by the fear that he’ll want too much.
I pull off my boots. Lie down beside him, fitting myself against his side, my head on his chest, his good arm pulling me in. The cot wasn’t built for two people. I don’t care.
His heartbeat is steady under my ear. He smells like soap and timber and the creek we just left.
“You’re staying the night,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
We lie there. The cot creaks when either of us shifts. The wind moves through the valley outside.
“It’s quiet here,” he says.
“Too quiet?”
“Different quiet. The Hill Country at night sounds like insects and space. This sounds like water and trees.”
“The ridges hold the sound in. In winter, you can hear the creek from every cabin.”
He’s quiet for a while. His fingers trace a slow line down my arm.
“Willow.”
“Mm.”
“I don’t know how to do this. Be here. Be someone these wolves don’t want to kill.” A pause. “Wake up next to you and believe it’s real.”
I lift my head. Look at him. In the dark, his face is all shadow and the faint light from the window.
“It’s real,” I say. “The rest we figure out.”
“That simple?”
“Nothing about this is simple. But I’m here. You’re here. Let’s start there.”
He pulls me closer. Presses his mouth to my hair. The cabin is dark and small, and the cot is too narrow, and his shoulder is injured, and there are wolves outside who’d rather he wasn’t breathing. None of that matters right now.
What matters is this: the weight of his arm, the sound of his breathing slowing toward sleep, and the knowledge that tomorrow I’ll wake up beside him in a valley that smells like home.
I close my eyes. Sleep comes faster than it has in weeks.