35. Brynn
brYNN
The marble is back in the atrium, and it’s the wrong color.
I notice it the second I walk in. The old floor was black, veined with silver, cold enough to numb your feet through your shoes. This new slab is warmer. Gray shot through with gold. It catches the morning light and holds it instead of swallowing it.
“You’re staring at the floor again,” Tristan says.
“It’s a nice floor.”
“It’s a floor.”
“It’s a hopeful floor.” I crouch and press my palm to it. The stone hums faintly under my hand, settled and quiet, no false bonds threaded through it anymore. “Eclipse picked the color itself. Nobody chose this.”
“The resort has opinions now. Great. As if this place needed an ego.”
I grin up at him. Three weeks since the throne went back to sleep, and the resort is rebuilding itself one room at a time. Walls knitting closed. Mirrors clearing. The dome overhead no longer groaning like something trapped.
It feels less like a haunted house and more like a home that survived a bad year.
“Marguerite’s old office is cleared,” Tristan adds, and his voice goes a notch flatter on the name. “If you still want it.”
I straighten. “I want it.”
He nods once. Doesn’t argue. None of them argue about Marguerite anymore, which is its own kind of grief, the careful way they all step around the shape of what she did.
She mentored me for eight years and I trusted her. She also led the people who tried to use my blood to lock a thousand lies into place.
Both things are true. I’m still learning to hold them at the same time.
“Go on, then,” Tristan says, bumping my shoulder with his. “New Head Matchmaker. Try not to set the chair on fire your first day.”
“That was one love seat.”
“It was three love seats, Brynn.” He laughs.
The office still smells faintly like her. Bergamot and old paper. I open every window and let the lunar air pour through until the smell is mine instead.
Then I get to work.
The Fairmont archives come back in pieces.
Augustin had them hidden in a sealed cabinet behind the stasis chamber, the records Marguerite spent decades trying to erase.
Seven hundred years of witness testimony.
Real bonds confirmed. False ones exposed.
The whole history of my bloodline, stamped out and buried and now, finally, mine to put back on the shelf.
I’m halfway through cataloging when Leo finds me.
I feel him before I hear him. The bond does that now, a warm pressure low in my chest that brightens when he’s close. He stops in the doorway and just looks at me, sleeves rolled, hair a mess, surrounded by towers of recovered paper.
“You missed lunch,” he says.
“I had a granola bar.”
“You had half a granola bar. I found the other half in the hallway.”
“I got distracted.” I lift a brittle page toward him. “Leo. This one’s a Fairmont witness confirming a real bond in 1612. She wrote a note in the margin. She drew a little heart.”
He crosses the room. Reads it over my shoulder, his chin nearly resting on my hair.
“She drew a heart,” he agrees.
“Four hundred years ago, some witch sat in this exact resort and was happy for two strangers. And then somebody tried to erase her. And I get to put her back.” My throat goes tight. “I get to give her back her heart.”
Leo is quiet for a moment. Then he turns me by the shoulders and kisses my forehead, slow, like he’s got nowhere else to be in the world.
“You’re going to cry about the 1612 witch, aren’t you?”
“I am not.”
“You already are,” he sighs.
I am. I laugh and swipe at my eyes and let him pull me into his chest, the page held carefully off to the side so I don’t ruin four-hundred-year-old grief with my own.
His heartbeat is steady under my ear. That’s the part I still can’t believe. For weeks his wolf ran hot and unstable, a storm I could feel through the bond. Now there’s just this. Even and calm and mine.
“The board confirmed it this morning,” he says into my hair.
“Tristan and Evander are going to share the CEO seat. They’ll do a great job together as their skills complement each other.
Dominic wasn’t interested in it anyway and he requested to move into the Head of Security position for the company as that was open. ”
I pull back to look at him. “That’s great!! And the High Alpha thing?”
“That’s not a job you apply for.” A faint smile. “Apparently it’s a job that picks you, and then your mate carries you out of a death trap, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to deserve it.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“It’s service. Not a crown.” He says it like he’s still trying the words on. “My father used it like a weapon. I’d like to use it more like a guardian.”
I press my hand flat to his chest, over the bond. “A guardian?”
“Someone people can trust to help and guide them.” He covers my hand with his. “You and me. Standing together. If you want.”
“I want it very much.”
I don’t say it out loud. I don’t have to. The bond carries it across, warm and certain, and I watch his eyes go soft and silver at the edges as he hears me.
That’s when Dominic kicks the door open.
“Sorry to interrupt the staring contest,” he says, not sorry at all, “but Evander wants everyone in the library, and Tristan’s being weird.”
I wipe my face. “Tristan’s always weird.”
“Weirder than usual.” Dominic’s grin slips a fraction. “He got a message an hour ago. On the dead mirrors. The ones that aren’t supposed to turn on anymore.”
The warmth in my chest cools by a degree. “What did it say?”
“That’s the thing.” Dominic shrugs, but there’s nothing easy in it. “He won’t tell anyone. He just went pale and walked off, and Tristan doesn’t go pale. Tristan goes loud.”
Leo’s hand tightens on mine.
“We’re coming,” he says.
The library is the one room that rebuilt itself fastest, like the resort knew we’d need somewhere to gather. Books reshelving themselves. The big fireplace lit. Evander stands at the long table with files spread in front of him, and Tristan sits in the window seat looking at nothing at all.
I’ve never seen Tristan sit still before.
“Show me,” I say.
Evander slides a single mirror-shard across the table. It’s the size of my palm, cracked clean down the middle, and the message is still burned into the glass in pale gold script.
I read it twice. My stomach drops both times.
She’s awake. And she’s looking for you.
“Juliette,” Tristan says, not turning from the window. His voice is careful. Too careful. “It’s about Juliette Mercer. The file Brynn found. Ninety-eight point four percent.” A muscle jumps in his jaw.
“Someone hid my mate for years, and now someone’s telling me she’s awake, and I don’t know which someone, and I don’t know what awake means.”
The room goes quiet.
Found family, I think. This is what it costs. You feel each other’s wounds now.
I cross to the window seat and sit beside him. He doesn’t look at me, but he doesn’t move away either.
“We’ll find her,” I say.
“You don’t know that.”
“I’m a Fairmont witness in a stabilized resort with the full archive back online.” I knock my knee against his. “If your bond is real, I can find it. And if someone’s been hiding her, I can prove it. That’s literally my whole job now.”
He finally looks at me. Something raw moves under the charm.
“Ninety-eight point four,” he says quietly.
“That’s the second-highest reading I’ve ever seen.” I hold his gaze. “Want to know the highest?”
His mouth twitches. “Don’t make this about you and my brother.”
“Hundred and twelve percent. Which shouldn’t be possible. So.” I bump him again. “Yours has room to grow.”
A laugh cracks out of him, surprised and a little wet. He scrubs a hand over his face and lets out a breath, and the loud, ridiculous Tristan flickers back to life around the edges.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Find me my impossible witch, then.”
“After dinner.”
Dinner is chaos.
It’s always chaos. The whole family in the old hall, the long table dragged in front of the fire, Augustin at the head looking twelve years thinner than his portraits and yet more alive than any of them.
Evelina sits at his side and pretends she isn’t watching him breathe every few seconds.
She is. I catch her at it. I don’t say anything.
Dominic flicks a bread roll at Tristan. Tristan catches it without looking and eats it out of spite.
Evander reads at the table, which Evelina has apparently given up fighting.
Leo argues with his father about treaty borders in a language I don’t speak, and every so often his hand finds my knee under the table just to check I’m still there.
I’m still here.
I look around the firelit hall, at this loud broken stitched-together family, and the bond in my chest glows so warm it almost hurts.
Three weeks ago I was a chaos witch who set love seats on fire.
Now I have a family. And people to love and support me.
“You’re doing the floor thing again,” Leo murmurs.
“I’m doing the everything thing.” I lean into him. “I’m allowed. We won.”
“We won,” he agrees, and kisses my temple, and for one perfect stretched-out moment the war is over and the resort is warm and nobody is in danger.