The house on Birch Lane comes into view, and my chest does the thing it always does—that small, involuntary loosening, like my body recognizes home before my brain catches up.
Silas is on the porch.
He’s kneeling by the front steps, a small chisel in one hand, a block of wood in the other. Shavings curl around his knees, pale against the dark stain of the porch boards. He’s carved protective runes into every surface of this house—door frames, window sills, the threshold, the fence posts. Some are standard ward work, the kind you’d find in any witch’s home. Others are his own design, variations I’ve never seen in any text, developed specifically for this place and these people.
He looks up when I approach. His face does something—not a smile, exactly, but a softening. A rearrangement that only I get to see.
“How was work?”
“Good. Tessa burned three batches of bread.”
“Is that a record?”
“Tied with last week.”
He sets down the chisel and stands, brushing shavings from his knees. When he gets close, I can smell the wood and the faint mineral tang of the runes—cedar and iron and something underneath that’s just him.
I kiss him. Just a quick press of lips, unhurried, casual in a way that still surprises me. We’ve been doing this for months, and the ease of it feels like the biggest miracle of all.
“Griffin’s bringing lunch,” I say.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“I didn’t say it was a good plan.”
Inside, the house is warm. Damon’s boots are by the door—his patrol shift ended an hour ago, and he’s somewhere in the house, probably showering. The kitchen smells like the soup I left simmering this morning, and there’s a vase of flowers on the table that weren’t there when I left.
Wildflowers. From the meadow behind the manor.
Griffin’s truck pulls up as I’m setting the table. He comes through the back door with a paper bag and a grin that means he’s about to be insufferable.
“I brought sandwiches from the Brass Lantern.”
“We have soup.”
“Sandwiches are better.”
“Soup is homemade.”
“Sandwiches are made by someone else, which is the highest form of food.”
Damon emerges from the hallway, hair damp, wearing a T-shirt that stretches across his shoulders in a way I will never not notice. He takes one look at Griffin and the sandwich bag and sighs.
“You couldn’t have called ahead?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
We eat at the kitchen table—all four of us, crowded around a surface that’s slightly too small for the number of people. Griffin steals tomatoes from my sandwich. Damon reads his phone between bites, frowning at something Gallagher sent him. Silas sits quietly, eating methodically, his knee pressed against mine under the table.
It’s ordinary. Mundane. Four people eating sandwiches in a kitchen while the sun goes down outside.
It’s everything.
After dinner, Damon washes the dishes, and Griffin dries them, arguing about something that happened at the firehouse. I curl up on the couch with Thistle in my lap and listen to them bicker, and Silas sits beside me and opens a book he’s been working through—old ward theory, the kind of dense, academic text that puts me to sleep in five minutes.
“Read to me,” I say.
“You won’t understand it.”
