Amara leans back in her chair. “I can do that. People talk to me.”
“I know they do.”
“Helena.” Caroline turns to Silas’s sister. “You know the Council’s structure, their procedures, their weaknesses. You know where the bodies are buried because you helped dig the holes.”
Helena flinches at the metaphor but doesn’t argue. “I know enough to be dangerous.”
“Good. Be dangerous. Help Silas build a case—something concrete, something that can’t be dismissed or buried. Document everything.”
“And me?” Griffin asks.
Caroline looks at him. Something soft passes across her face, there and gone.
“You stay,” she says. “You stay with me.”
It’s not a command. It’s a request. Griffin hears the difference, and so do I.
The room settles. The plan is loose, incomplete, full of holes. But it’s a start. It’s more than any of us had an hour ago.
Helena leaves to set up at a motel on the edge of town—she doesn’t want to be seen at the manor or at Caroline’s, not yet. Silas walks her out, and I watch through the window as they talk in the driveway, their heads close together, two siblings standing on the edge of something they can’t take back.
When Silas comes back inside, the room feels different. Lighter, somehow. Like we’ve passed through a storm and come out the other side.
“Now what?” Griffin asks.
Silas looks at Caroline. Then at me. Then at Griffin.
“Now we figure out if what happened between us was real.”
“What do you mean?”
“The bonding failures. If the Rift has been preventing bonds for years, then whatever formed between us—whatever we felt during the heat—shouldn’t exist. The connection shouldn’t be there.”
“It’s there,” Caroline says quietly.
“Is it? Or was it just the heat?”
The question hangs in the air. I feel it in my chest—the same doubt I’ve been carrying since this morning, since the fairgrounds, since the moment I realized that wanting something doesn’t mean you can have it.
“There’s a way to check,” June says.
We all look at her.
“A bond verification ritual. It’s old—older than the Council, older than the keeper families. It was used before bonded packs became a formal institution, back when people just… chose each other. The ritual doesn’t create a bond. It just reveals whether one already exists.”
“Can you do it?” Caroline asks.
“I can guide you through it. It requires all four of you. And it requires intent. You have to want the bond to be real.”
Caroline looks at me. I look at Griffin, who looks at Silas, who looks back at Caroline. A circle. Unbroken.
“We want it to be real,” I say.
“Then let’s find out.”
June pulls supplies from her bag—candles, salt, a small vial of something that glows faintly amber. She clears the coffee table and arranges everything in a pattern I don’t recognize, her movements sure and practiced. Amara watches from the armchair, her knees pulled up to her chest. Thistle has descended from the bookshelf and is sitting in the doorway, his bright eyes fixed on the candles.
“Stand in a circle,” June says. “Hands touching. Doesn’t matter who holds whose hand, as long as you’re all connected.”
