“I’ve been doing this wrong,” I said.
The words came out without a plan, the way the truest things did. I let them sit there and see if they still meant what they had meant when I reached for them.
They did.
“I thought, I thought doing it alone was the right way. I thought if I could just manage everything on my own, not ask for anything, not need anyone, that was how I honored him. That was how I proved I could do it.” My thumb moved in a slow, unconscious circle against the quilt. “But I slipped in the barn this morning and three men were on their knees on the barn floor, and the thing I thought when I looked up and saw their faces was,” I stopped. The thought was still unfinished and I let it be unfinished. “I wasn’t alone,” I said instead. “And it wasn’t the worst thing. It wasn’t anything like the worst thing.”
She moved under my hand. The long, deliberate roll I knew, the one that meant she was simply present.
“I’m going to call you Hope,” I said.
The name sat in the room differently than it had the first time I had said it.
Hope.
I said it once more, quietly, without the rest of the sentence, and it settled in the room like the light settled, like the warmth from the mug settled, like something that had found the place it was supposed to be and stopped moving.
My eyes had grown heavy without my noticing it. The mug had cooled in my hands, not cold but no longer warm enough to need holding. I set it on the nightstand and lay back against thepillow, and my hand stayed where it was, flat on my belly, and I felt the slow, certain weight of her under my palm.
The curtain moved once in the draft from the window, and I slipped into a soft, soundless, sleep.
Chapter Nine – Cole
Her pulse had been there. Steady, even, and present. I’d felt it in my fingertips and I sat with it, let it be real, but she hadn’t opened her eyes straight away, her body was still in the way that bodies were still when they were not choosing stillness but the way she lay with one arm loose and her head turned at an angle she would not have chosen, was what finally did it.
It pulled the floor out from under me. Not all at once. In pieces, the way it always came: the orange color first. The windows of the pack house had been lit from the inside before I even got the truck stopped, and for a moment I had sat in the cab in the dark and told myself it was the lamps, that someone had left every lamp on, that it was nothing. Then the smoke reached me through the closed window and I got out.
The front door was unlocked, which was the first wrong thing.
I called names. One and then another and then all of them, rapid and loud, and the silence that came back was not the silence of a house where no one was home. It was the silence of a house that had run out of things to say. The smoke sat in the rooms at about knee-height and the fire had been in the walls a long time already, and I moved through it with my shirt over my face, calling and not being answered, and I found them one by one in the places they had fallen.
Two fingers to the neck. Pressing, counting, finding nothing. Moving to the next one.
The roof beam let go somewhere above me, a sound like a chest giving way, low and deep and final, and the light through the staircase window went from orange to white for a moment, and I was at the last door at the end of the upstairs hall and I opened it and I found nothing inside it either. Just the smokeand the heat and the particular silence of people who had stopped answering.
I walked out through the front door. I didn’t know how. My legs found the porch steps and the yard and the truck and I sat in the cab again and I listened to the fire work through the rest of the building, and I was the only one sitting in any vehicle in that yard, and I understood, clearly and completely, what that meant.
I had pressed two fingers to six necks and found nothing in any of them, and I had walked out alone, and I had not stopped moving since.
She’d given me a scare. I thought I’d lost her before I had chance to have her. Not that I’d ever take what wasn’t my own. I was okay with waiting until she was ready, after all she’d been through enough this last year, the complication of a new scentmatched pack might not be something she’s all that ready for.
I exhaled long and hard. I had been carrying the fire for four years. I knew its edges, knew the particular slant of light or smell or quality of silence that could wake it, knew how to step around it most of the time, knew that it would always be there in the way that certain things were always there, not loud, not gone. I had learned to live alongside it the way you lived alongside a bad knee or a fence that would never sit quite plumb: you accounted for it, you didn’t pretend it wasn’t there, you got on with the rest of the work.
The first morning on this ranch, I had ridden in with Rhett and Wade behind me and found her clearly exhausted, looking for her cattle. I knew there was something about her right there and then, and when I’d looked at her, I told myself that this was the omega for us. She was our omega, the fierce little warrierwe’d hoped for. And now I’d nearly lost her, I knew one more thing… I’d fallen in love with her.
Chapter Ten – Lila
The light came in at the low winter angle that meant morning had already made up its mind without me, the sun’s pale reach crossing the floorboards at a slant that told me it was well past seven. I lay still for a moment with both hands flat on my stomach and the ceiling above me, the familiar inventory already underway before I’d consciously decided to begin it: the ache in my lower back, the heaviness in my hips, the particular stiffness in my neck that accumulated from too many hours in the same position, which was the protest of a body that had spent four days in a bed and was now formally registering its dissatisfaction with the arrangement.
The room had acquired, over those four days, a particular quality that I hadn’t noticed accumulating until I was looking at it with the slightly more awake eyes of a morning that felt different from the ones before it. The dresser held a stack of meal trays, three of them nested, each one wiped clean. On the chair by the door sat the folded pile of laundry I had not been the one to fold, my work shirts, a pair of jeans, the thermal vest I wore under everything when the cold got serious, stacked with the neat, impersonal efficiency of someone who had done it without thinking twice about it. Fresh towels were draped over the footboard, white and straight, their edges aligned.
I had been aware of these things as they appeared. I had been aware of hands setting trays on the nightstand, of voices low in the hallway, of the door pushed almost shut and the particular care with which it was done. I had taken all of it and said the minimum and not examined it too closely because examining it required more of me than I’d had available. Now I looked at the stacked trays and the folded shirts and the towelsthat no one had asked me about, and I let the accumulation of them land all at once, cleanly, without fending it off.
I pressed both palms flat against the mattress and sat up.
The room shifted as it always did now, the slow, tilting adjustment of a body that had additional opinions about the mechanics of getting upright, and I held still at the edge of the bed with my feet finding the cold floor through my wool socks and waited for the ache in my sacrum to relocate itself from sharp to merely present. It did. I stood, one hand braced on the nightstand, and when my legs held I moved across the room to the bathroom, gripping the doorframe as I stepped over the threshold out of habit, an old caution I had stopped thinking about.
I turned the shower as hot as it would go, which in this house was a negotiation between the water heater’s ambitions and its actual capacity, and waited for the small tiled room to fill with steam before I stepped in. The heat found my shoulders first, then moved down the column of my back, and I stood with both palms braced flat against the wall and my head tipped forward and let the pressure of it work into the places that had been complaining the loudest. The steam closed the room around me, warm and close, and I stayed there longer than I needed to, which was the first purely indulgent thing I had done in as long as I could remember.
