Chapter 13 #2
Mom crossed the floor.
She sat on my armrest and rested her hand on my back in silence. "He chose you," Mom said softly. "Since he first saw you, he has chosen you—not the easy version, but the true one that requires patience and a man willing to show up even when it's tough."
Her hand moved in a slow circle across my back. "You are not protecting yourself by staying behind that door, baby girl. You are protecting your fear. And your fear has been costing him something he is too good to ever charge you for."
I couldn’t stop the tears.
“Come here, beloved,” Gran said.
I got up and handed Xavier to Mom. I walked across the room and knelt in front of Gran. She reached over and took my hands with hers.
"Healing isn't just surviving." Her eyes never left mine.
"Healing is trusting that you don't have to carry the pain forever.
You must fully release what no longer belongs to you.
" Her thumb rubbed slow circles across my skin.
"You can't keep carrying twenty-year-old pain and expect today's love to breathe beneath it.
" She looked me dead in the eye. "You can't heal while you're still clinging to what hurt you. "
I sat there for a few moments and let every word these women who loved me unconditionally sink in. I had already known I needed to shift, but now I fully understand the urgency.
I nodded. “I understand,” I said. “Thank you, all of you, for putting up with me and still loving me anyway.”
I stood up, kissed Gran on the cheek and went back to my seat.
"I love you," I said. "All of you.” I looked around.
"We love you too, sissy.” Everyone laughed and nodded.
Mama Mara stood from the chair with the full authority of a woman whose stove was still on. She pointed the dish towel at me. "For the love of everything good and holy on this compound — bite that man."
The room erupted. Larissa spilled half her mimosa. Gran laughed heartily, looking like her old self before everything that made her Gran. Mom pressed her lips, tried to suppress a laugh, and let it go.
I laughed so hard that Xavier side-eyed me.
"Mama Mara," Sage said, with the tone of someone who was not even slightly disapproving.
"I said what I said." She turned back toward the stove and pointed over her shoulder without looking. "Now, bring yourself in here. If you want to cook tonight, I'll show you how to cook those greens the right way. The food cooked in y’all’s kitchen has been a travesty, and I can’t hold my tongue any longer. "
"You have never held your tongue a day in your life," Larissa said.
"I have shown extraordinary restraint," Mama Mara said with full conviction, like she believed every word.
I stood up. I handed Xavier to Mom — carefully, kissing his forehead once before letting him go. I followed Mama Mara into the kitchen.
A bunch of greens was already waiting on the counter, like she had known this was coming. She handed them to me without one word of preamble and started talking.
I listened to every single word.
***
TYRELL
I had been staring at the same paperwork for almost twenty minutes, not reading it, just looking at it while my mind ran in circles around Destiny again.
The office windows were cracked open to let in the evening air, carrying distant sounds: voices near the commons, laughter outside the Academy, and the hum of generators farther east.
Normal sounds. Pack sounds. Usually, they grounded me, but this evening they only made the silence in my office louder.
I was tired. Not of loving her. Never that, but tired of feeling her both inside and out at once.
The thing was, even sitting there, exhausted by it, I already knew what the answer would be if someone asked me whether I intended to stop waiting.
I wouldn’t.
Destiny was the kind of woman you waited for because once you understood her, there really wasn’t anyone else. Even her difficult parts fit me too well. Even the distance and the caution.
Kai stirred quietly beneath my skin.
She’s trying.
I know.
And she was. That was the problem. I saw how clearly she was trying, and it made it impossible to resent the time it was taking.
Then I picked up my phone and sent a message in the brothers group thread.
Gym. Twenty minutes.
Darius responded first: Already there.
Carter responded second: Headed that way.
Marcus took four minutes, which meant he had been in something. Then: On my way.
I laced up and went.
The gym smelled of rubber, iron, and effort, a testament to years of the four brothers working out since their father gave them weights. Darius was already warming up on the floor.
Carter arrived two minutes afterward, carrying his gym bag over one shoulder and a protein shake he seemed suspicious of.
"I want it noted," he said, holding up the cup, "that I made this myself, and I still don't trust it."
"Then why did you make it?" Darius said.
"Because you told me to." He took a sip. Considered it. "It will do."
Marcus came in last, still pulling his shirt on, moving with the compressed energy of a man who had stepped out of a meeting but had not fully left it.
"What are we doing?" he said.
"Lifting," I said. "And you're actually going to be here, not in whatever that meeting was about."
Marcus looked at me. "I'm here."
"Your face isn't."
He almost smiled. Almost. "Give me five minutes."
"You've got three," Carter said. "I'm already warming up, and I don't plan to slow down for leadership."
"You're not doing anything," Darius said. "You're just standing there, drinking something you made yourself and looking at it as if it owes you money."
"I'm warming up internally."
"That's not a thing."
"Everything is a thing if you commit to it."
Marcus pressed two fingers to his temple. "Why did I end up here?"
Carter explained, "Because Ty texted, we all show up—it's just how it is. Pops always said family sticks together or not at all. So here we are.”
Nobody said anything after that.
Marcus picked up a bar. "Three minutes is up. Let's go."
We moved the way we always moved together — without needing to coordinate, without anyone calling it, the way four people who have trained in the same space since childhood learn to occupy it.
The conversation came the same way. In between sets, in the breaks, building the way real conversations build when no one is trying to have one.
I felt better twenty minutes in.
Not fixed. But lighter around the edges.
Marcus was benching when he looked over toward Darius casually.
"You need to handle Stacey," he said.
Darius continued his rep. Finished it. Set the weight down clean.
"I'm handling it," he said.
"You've been handling it for eight months."
“Bro. “What did she do now?”
“She cornered Sage yesterday at the general store, asking questions about mating bonds while buying three more of the same yellow shirts.”