The rest of the party happens to someone else. I'm standing in it, smiling, nodding, holding a glass I haven't sipped, but the woman doing those things is a puppet I'm operating from very far away.
Both boys are in my lap on the blanket near the bonfire, and I'm holding them too tight. Ash squirms against my ribs while Rowan has gone boneless against my chest, and I press my face between their heads and breathe them in like they're the last clean air in this compound.
Someone says my name and I smile. Someone asks about the workshop and I answer with words that must make sense because they nod and move on, and I cannot recall a single syllable that came out of my mouth.
The fiddle plays and the lanterns sway. Every shadow at the edge of the firelight wears Rhys's shoulders, and I can't stop checking the dark spaces between cabins for a shape that shouldn't be there.
Rowan stirs, lifts his head, and slides off my lap with the quiet determination of a child who has spotted something more interesting than his mother's heartbeat. He crawls past the blanket's edge toward the fire pit where the stones glow orange and the air shimmers.
I reach for him and my hand closes on empty wool. Rhys crouches in Rowan's path before I can stand, one hand on my son's back, gentle, redirecting him away from the heat with the absent ease of a man catching a glass before it tips.
He doesn't look at me. Doesn't pause or linger, doesn't make a performance of it. Just guides my boy back toward the blanket, straightens, and walks on with his drink like nothing happened.
Nobody saw it except me. An Adler hand on my son's spine, casual and unhurried, and the casualness is worse than anything deliberate because deliberate I know how to fight.
"Nell." Sable's fingers close around my arm behind the cake table hard enough to leave marks, her face the colour of old paper. "We need to leave. Right now, tonight, the way we did last time."
"We can't." I keep my voice below the music. "The boys are half-asleep, the compound is full of people, and running blind in the dark with two one-year-olds is how you get caught."
"Staying is how you get caught." She pulls me closer, her grip shaking against my skin. "Do you remember what they used to say about him back in Adler territory? That he's unstable, Nell."
"Callum told everyone his brother was dangerous." Her nails press white crescents into my wrist. "The kind of wolf they kept on the perimeter because the elders didn't trust him near the centre."
"Callum told a lot of people a lot of things." The words leave my mouth before my brain signs off, and Sable's eyes narrow to slits.
"This isn't about Callum." Her voice climbs and I press my hand over hers on my arm. "This is about his brother standing three metres from your children like he belongs here. We pack the car, take the boys, drive until the petrol runs out."
"That worked when I was pregnant and invisible." I hold her gaze until she blinks first. "I have two children now, Sable. I can't strap them into a hatchback and hope for the best."
"And you can't sit here while an unstable Adler—from the same blood that made Callum—walks around touching your kids like he has the right." Her jaw goes so tight the tendons in her neck stand out like wire.
"He told me the pack thinks it was a break-in." I walk her through it, keeping my voice steady, clinical—the contaminated scene, the forced window, my name only as a missing mate. "Not a suspect. Just someone who disappeared during a tragedy."
"That is a trap built by someone who knows exactly what bait looks like." She reaches for her coat, one arm already through the sleeve. "He hands you the one story you'd kill to believe and waits for you to walk into it."
"I know what it sounds like." My nails dig half-moons into the fabric of my skirt, and my teeth press together hard enough to ache.
"Then why are we still here, Nell?" She stares at me with both hands gripping the coat like a lifeline.
"Because if there's even a chance it's real—one chance that I could stop running, that the boys could grow up without me counting exits every time we walk into a room—I owe it to them to find out." My voice cracks on the last word and I press my lips together until it passes.
"I'm not saying I believe him." I swallow hard enough to hear it. "I'm saying I need to know what he actually wants before we panic."
Sable goes still. Her coat hangs from one shoulder, every muscle braced to bolt, and the silence between us stretches until the fiddle fills it.
"If he so much as breathes wrong." Her voice drops to something low and lethal I've heard exactly twice before, both times right before she got us out of trouble and straight into different trouble. "If he touches those boys again, if I see his hand anywhere near them—"
"Then we go. No argument, no hesitation." I hold up both palms and she searches my face for the lie she expects to find there. "We go."
She pulls the coat off slowly, folds it with too much care, and sets it on the bench. She sits beside me with the rigid spine of a woman who has agreed to something her body violently rejects. "I'm not sleeping tonight."
"Neither am I." The words taste honest, which is more than I can say for most things that have come out of my mouth tonight.
A couple hours later, the cabin is dark and the twins breathe between us—Rowan's soft rhythm, Ash's hitching little sigh that catches every third breath. I lie on my back with my eyes on the ceiling, turning Rhys's words over like river stones.
Every surface feels smooth, and I search for the seam where the face cracks and the lie shows through. The version he built is careful—someone entering hours after I left, the scene contaminated beyond tracing.
And that's the problem—it's exactly the story I'd want to hear, assembled by someone who studied what I need. Callum taught me what it looks like when a man hands you the perfect answer, not to help you but to keep you still long enough for the real one to arrive.
Outside, Ash lies across the cabin threshold with his ears flat and his eyes aimed at the guest quarters like a needle locked on north. He's slept at my door every night for a year, and most nights his breathing goes deep within the hour.
Tonight it stays shallow. Every few minutes a low vibration moves through his ribs, not quite a growl, not quite a warning—something in between that says I'm here and I'm counting.
Through the cabin window, the guest quarters light burns steady and unchanged, and it is still burning when the first grey light of dawn bleeds across the compound.