Page 132 of Fate, Interrupted

It’s also not enough for what I need to say next.

“She pushed me out of the way.”

The words come out differently than everything that came before them. Unguarded in a way that bypasses whatever I’ve been using to hold the rest of this in place.

Logan’s eyes sharpen.

I don’t look at him. I look at my hands.

“She saw it before I did. Or she moved before I did. I don’t know which one.” I pause, the facts of it arranging and rearranging without resolving. “He had a gun, and she saw it coming and she pushed me, and she…”

I stop because finishing the sentence requires going somewhere I can’t go right now.

“I was blocking her, and she pushed me out of the way of the bullet. She exposed herself.”

Lower this time. Not for Logan, but because it needs to be said out loud to be real.

Logan is quiet beside me. I feel the meaning of what Logan doesn’t say as clearly as if he’d spoken it. Over a month ago, he told me to stay away from her. Three weeks ago, he asked me what would happen if staying here stopped being an option. Two weeks ago, he said to be careful. He has said nothing tonight except okay and what happened and my name.

He doesn’t say I told you so.

That is Logan’s version of an answer, and I receive it as one.

I’ve been in situations that required fast decisions my entire life. Pack territory, business negotiations, the pressure of a room where everyone is deciding how far things are going to go. I know what fast looks like. I know the difference between instinct and training and the kind of choice that bypasses both entirely and comes from somewhere else.

Norah didn’t hesitate. She understood the risk and moved anyway.

I think about her in the truck after the lake, turning back toward me, knowing exactly what she was doing. I think about the alley behind her shop. I think about her duffel bag pulled toward her before she’d finished deciding, because she understood that thinking too hard was its own kind of trap.

She has always moved toward things. I didn’t know, until I was in a gravel parking lot at the edge of nowhere, what that looked like when it counted most.

I’ve spent weeks telling myself I was protecting her by not telling her what she was to me. That withholding was a form of care. That she needed to come to this on her own terms, without the weight of a bond she didn’t ask for and didn’t know she was carrying.

She didn’t have that same issue. Naming it makes it real. Real things require decisions. I wasn’t ready for the decision that naming it would force.

I think of the myriad ways Norah decided. A text to her sister that said I’m good, talk soon, when she watched me throttle two men on a public street, my wolf apparent, and then immediately assured me she didn’t care. She’s decided every time she asked a question and listened to the answer she didn’t like and still didn’t leave.

I’ve been the careful one. The one who reads the room, assesses the situation, and calculates the cost before acting. It has always felt like strength. It reads differently now. The armor of a man who hasn’t trusted anything enough to move toward it without knowing first that it would hold.

There are things I haven’t told her. Things she deserves to know that I’m going to tell her when she’s out of surgery and conscious and capable of hearing them. The full truth of what she is to me. What the word fated means. What it means that she didn’t know it and chose anyway—that she made the choice without the information, making the choice more hers than it would have been if I’d told her at the beginning.

I don’t know yet whether she’ll see it that way.

But I’m going to tell her. All of it. Whatever comes after that is hers to decide.

After a while Logan exhales slowly, his gaze dropping briefly to my sleeve before returning to my face.

“I called Dad,” he says.

I don’t move.

The sentence tightens the room. I look at the tile between my feet. Then I lift my head.

“Did I ask you to?”

Logan meets my gaze without flinching. “No,” he says. “You didn’t.”

I nod once.