[Nell’s POV]
Sable takes the twins at eight with the efficiency of a woman conducting a military extraction. Ash goes willingly because Sable bribes him with a biscuit; Rowan goes because Ash goes—his entire decision-making process is just what is my brother doing and how do I follow him there.
"Sleep," Sable orders from the doorway, one boy on each hip. "Actual sleep—horizontal, eyes closed, not whatever you've been doing the last four nights that's made you look like a haunted Victorian portrait."
"That's very specific imagery." I pull the blanket off Ash's head where he's already tried to eat it. "Have you been saving that?"
"Since Tuesday." She shifts Rowan higher and pins me with a look that could staple me to the wall. "If I come back tomorrow and you haven't slept, I'm staging an intervention with Doris, and she has opinions about chamomile that will take years off your life."
The door closes and the cabin goes quiet in a way that should feel like relief but instead feels like being handed an empty room and told not to think. I last eleven minutes—counted against the ceiling beams—before my feet touch the floor without consulting me first.
I am not going to Rhys's door. I'm going for a walk, and the fact that the walk takes me across the compound and stops at the guest quarters is a coincidence my brain will process later, or never.
He opens on the second knock, still dressed, which tells me he wasn't sleeping either. His eyes drop to my hands—empty, no yarn, no excuse—and come back to my face without asking.
"I couldn't sleep." The understatement of the century, delivered with the conviction of a woman who definitely walked here on purpose.
"Come in." He steps back and the room is small and warm and smells like cedar shavings, a half-carved shape sitting on the desk beside a knife with a worn handle.
I take the chair because the bed feels like a statement. He sits on the bed because there's nowhere else, and the distance between us is four feet of floor and every unfinished sentence from the past two weeks.
"Tell me about them." He nods toward the compound, toward the cabin where my boys are probably already dismantling Sable's evening. I’m thankful for a topic that’s not orbiting around what am I doing here. "Not the Adler heir version—the real ones."
"Ash tries to eat everything—pinecones, dirt, a button off Doris's coat that we spent forty minutes retrieving from his mouth." My hands find each other in my lap and twist. "He approaches the world like a buffet and he's personally offended by anything he hasn't tasted yet."
"And Rowan?"
"Rowan watches." My thumb runs across my knuckles. "Sits in someone's lap and studies faces with this intensity that reminds me of—"
I stop, because the name I almost said belongs to a man whose porch I've been avoiding for three days. "Of Oren's wolves."
"Were you scared? During the birth." His elbows rest on his knees, hands loose between them.
"Terrified doesn't cover it. Sable held my hand and swore at the midwife for three straight hours—called her things I didn't know existed in English." My mouth curves at the memory: cedar walls, Sable's voice cracking between fury and panic, the moment they put Ash in my arms.
"I didn't know you could love something so hard it makes breathing more difficult and more important at the same time."
"What were their first words?"
"Ash's was no." I look up and find him watching me with something I can't read. "First and favourite—uses it for food he doesn't want, sleep he's rejecting, the general concept of sharing."
"And Rowan's?"
"More." The laugh comes out before I can catch it. "Which tells you everything about both of them—one who refuses the world and one who wants all of it."
Rhys laughs. Not the controlled almost-sound from the fire pit—something unguarded, pulled from a place he doesn't usually let people near. My hands go still in my lap because I have never heard that sound from him before, and its absence across every interaction suddenly weighs something enormous.
"What were you like?" The question leaves my mouth before the careful part of me gets a vote. "Before everything—when you were a kid."
His hands lace together between his knees, grip tightening once before he deliberately loosens it. "I carved things—started at twelve. Workshop behind the kitchens, tools nobody used, only room in the compound where nobody followed me."
"What did you make?"
"Spoons first, then bowls, then small animals—a fox, a rabbit, a wolf that looked more like a dog with ambitions." His thumb traces the scar across his palm. "Left them on doorsteps before sunrise, never once knocked."
"Why not?"
"Because a boy the pack already thinks is dangerous can't hand someone a gift without them searching for the threat underneath." He says it flat, matter-of-fact, weather that happened to someone else's childhood. "Leaving them was the only way it stayed clean—just the object, no source to distrust."
A boy carving foxes in the only room where nobody followed him, leaving kindness on doorsteps because his own hands had been made suspicious. My fingers twist the hem of my sleeve until the thread protests.
"Nell." His voice drops into a register I feel against my collarbone. "You don't have to stay."
"I know." I don't move. "That's why I'm still here."
His hand comes up slowly—telegraphed, deliberate, giving me every chance to flinch or pull away or do what my body has been trained to do when a man's hand approaches my face. His fingers brush my jaw, light enough to be imagined.
My whole body holds still—not frozen, not the stillness of a woman bracing—something I have no rehearsal for, because my chin tilts toward his palm instead of away.
The distance closes by my direction, my choice, my mouth finding his in a room that smells like cedar and new wood.
His mouth is warm and his hands are careful in a way that has nothing to do with hesitation, and when my back meets the mattress the only thought left is that this is the first time in my life I've moved toward something instead of away from it.
After, the dark holds us both. His breathing has gone deep and steady beside me, one arm across his ribs, and the quiet in this room has a pulse that the quiet in my cabin never does. My fingers rest against his shoulder where the bandage sits beneath my palm.
His coat hangs over the chair back, one pocket slightly agape. I wouldn't have noticed if the moonlight hadn't caught the edge—a fold of paper, heavy stock, the kind of stationery that comes from offices where decisions are made about other people's lives.
I don't move for a long time. Then I do—the paper slides out with barely a sound, warm from the lining.
My fingers find the fold and open it against my knee. The handwriting is precise, controlled, each stroke familiar enough to make my teeth lock together before I've read a single word.
Harlan's script. Harlan's seal. Addressed to the man breathing beside me in a bed that still holds my warmth.