[Rhys’ POV]
Ash fights me on the pajamas like it's a point of personal honour. He twists sideways, shoves the shirt off his head, and shrieks once—sharp, triumphant—before Nell catches him mid-roll and threads his arm through the sleeve with the efficient grace of a woman who has won this war a thousand times.
"He gets it from you," she says without looking up. "The stubborn part, specifically. The volume is all his own invention."
"He gets it from himself." I hold Rowan against my shoulder, the boy's weight warm and still, his breathing slowing toward sleep. "I was never this loud about it."
"No, you were quieter about it." She buttons Ash's pajama top and lifts him to her hip. "That's worse—quiet stubborn is the kind nobody sees coming."
Rowan's fingers curl around my collar, grip tightening once before sleep takes him. I lower him into the cot with the particular care of a man handling something he has no right to hold, and his lashes flutter and settle.
Across the room Nell rocks Ash against her chest, singing something tuneless and low. The boy's protests lose their architecture—each cry softer, each thrash weaker—until he sags against her collarbone.
The porch step is cold beneath me. I settle on the left side because Nell always takes the right, her back against the door frame so she can hear if one of them wakes.
The cedar block is warm from my pocket. I open the knife and find the line I left yesterday—the curve of a haunch, a turned head—and the blade bites into the grain.
Nell watches my hands for a while. "I used to do that," she says. "Not carving—knitting, hours, entire nights sometimes."
"Tell me." The blade follows the wood's grain because fighting it only breaks the piece, and some things teach you about themselves if you let them.
"I'd make him things—scarves, hats, a blanket once that took me three weeks." She pulls her sleeves over her knuckles. "Every stitch was a sentence I couldn't finish at the dinner table."
"And he destroyed them." My thumb steadies the blade against the emerging spine, though the answer is already written in her voice.
"Every single one." She exhales through her nose. "And I kept making them. The most deranged feedback loop you can imagine—me in the kitchen at two in the morning, knitting love letters to a man who used them for kindling."
"I know that math." The cedar gives under my blade, a clean curl dropping between my boots. "Twenty years performing for a pack that was never going to see me. Callum wrote the story before I ever opened my mouth, and I kept showing up like the ending might change."
She turns her head and her eyes find mine in the low light. The recognition between us is a door neither of us meant to open—different rooms, same house.
"Different tools," she says quietly, and the two words carry the weight of a verdict. "Same machine."
"He needed someone smaller than him in every room." The blade pauses on a knot—resistance, then yield. "Fists for you, whispers for me—same architect."
Somewhere in the tree line an owl calls once and doesn't repeat itself—the kind of creature that says what it means and trusts the dark to carry it.
"The worst part is that it worked." Nell's thumbnail digs into the grain of the porch step. "I still arrange my face before I walk into a room. Every room, every time."
"I still read footsteps on stairs." The admission sits between us, plain and ugly. "Weight, rhythm, the space between steps. My body runs the calculation before my brain catches up."
She doesn't say she's sorry. I don't either. The absence of apology is the most honest thing we've offered tonight, because sorry belongs to people who had a choice.
"Do you think he knew what he was building in us?" she asks after a while, and her thumbnail is still pressing into the wood.
"Callum didn't build things by accident." I close the blade and the click sounds final. "He was the most deliberate person I've ever known."
I reach into my jacket. The letter crinkles against my fingers—heavy stock, the Adler crest, my father's handwriting. "Father's latest."
Her shoulders shift—a bracing I've learned to read the way she reads footsteps on stairs. "How bad?"
"Bad enough to have a timeline." I turn the envelope without opening it. "He's assigned a verification wolf to retrace my reports, check every sighting I fabricated. Blackvale is weeks from exposure."
"What do you do?" Her jaw works once, then sets hard against whatever answer she already expects.
"I go back, take the fall, end the trail at myself." Speaking the words is easier than carrying them.
"Tell Father I went rogue, the misdirections were mine." I hold her gaze. "The trail dies where it should have started—with an Adler."
"No." She turns her whole body toward me and her eyes are bright and hard. "You don't get to do that."
"Nell—" I start, but her hand comes up, palm out, and the gesture is so close to the one she described making for Callum that my mouth closes on its own.
"You don't get to sit on my step for weeks, carve wood with my children asleep behind you, and then offer yourself up like a trade." Her voice drops but doesn't soften. "That's not noble. That's his playbook with better packaging."
"This is the first real choice I've ever made." I keep my voice level because one of us has to. "Every other decision was scripted by Callum or assigned by Harlan. This one is mine."
"And you're choosing to walk back into the house that broke you." Her knuckles go white against the step. "That's a surrender, not a choice."
"It's a trade. Me for this, for them." I nod toward the door where the boys sleep. "The math works."
"I won't let you." The fierceness in it belongs to a woman who has already lost enough to know what losing sounds like before it finishes speaking.
"You can't stop me." Quiet, stripped clean—not a challenge, just the shape of a fact I wish were different.
"Watch me." Quieter still—not a bluff, and the way her chin lifts makes clear she means it with everything she has.
Neither of us moves. The space between us hums with everything we've said, and the owl calls again—once, clear, unanswered.
I stand. The letter goes back in my jacket, and I don't say goodnight because goodnight implies tomorrow, and I've stopped making promises the universe hasn't approved.
The guest apartments are dark. I set the cedar block on the table beside the lamp and turn it slowly, and the blade has been making decisions without me—a spine, a tilted head, four legs gathered mid-stride.
A small wolf, ears forward, running toward something it hasn't identified yet. My hands knew before I did—they always do.
I set it beside the green scarf and the blue one. Three objects that tell a story I didn't agree to write—a scarf she made when I was nobody, a scarf she made when I was something worse, and a wolf my hands carved while the rest of me pretended I was still leaving.
I open the wardrobe and start folding shirts into my pack, and the wolf on the table watches with the patience of something that already knows where I'm going.