[Nell’s POV]
Lanterns hang between the oaks like someone strung the sky too low. Tables bend under food I didn't cook, children dart between legs, and the Blackvale compound smells like roasted meat and pine smoke and the particular sweetness of people who feel safe enough to celebrate.
Two years ago I would have been wallpaper at a gathering like this—pressed flat against the nearest wall, waiting to be needed or dismissed, whichever came first. Today I'm standing in the centre of it, and the strangeness of that hasn't worn off.
"Ash, do not put that in your mouth." I pry a pinecone from my son's fist and he shrieks at a pitch that could shatter every lantern in the yard. His brother Rowan sits placidly in Doris's lap across the fire, content to observe while Ash attempts to consume the natural world one fistful at a time.
Then Oren is beside me—no announcement, no footsteps I registered—and he lifts Ash off the ground and onto his hip with the practised ease of a man who has done this hundreds of times before. My son grabs a fistful of his shirt and settles immediately, the traitor.
"Go eat something." His voice pitches low, meant for the space between us and nowhere else. Ash reaches for his jaw and Oren catches the tiny hand without breaking eye contact with me. "You can rest today, Nell."
"I don't need—" I start, and his hand brushes mine as he shifts the baby's weight. Just knuckles across knuckles, barely contact, and my lungs forget every lesson they've ever learned.
I smile at him. Not the careful version I've perfected over eighteen months of sharing porches and pretending the air between us is normal—the real one, the kind that uses muscles I forgot I had. For exactly two seconds I let him see everything behind it.
Then my brain catches up to my face and I look away so fast I nearly pull something in my neck. He saw it—he always sees it—and neither of us says a word, because words would require acknowledging the thing we've spent half a year not-acknowledging.
"Nell!" Sable calls me before she rounds the corner, and Oren immediately disappears with Ash still in his hands.
Sable comes into view carrying a three-tiered cake frosted in a colour I'd generously call lavender, lopsided in a way that suggests it survived a small earthquake on the walk over. "This is it—two days of my life poured into this masterpiece."
"It looks amazing." My voice holds steady while the rest of me quietly mutinies beneath my ribs.
"I've rehearsed the presentation speech." She tilts the cake to show me the side, which reads HAPPY BIRTHDAY in letters that shrink as they ran out of room. "I set it down in front of him, say something effortlessly charming, and he looks at me the way he looks at those wolves of his."
"Flawless," I manage, and behind my sternum a fist tightens around something I refuse to examine or give oxygen to. Sable is my family—she ran with me, bled with me, held my hair through the first trimester in a cabin that smelled like cedar. She loves this man and I owe her everything.
The math is simple even when my chest disagrees with the arithmetic. I straighten the frosting on the bottom tier with my thumb and tell her to save me a seat near his table.
"Fix your hair first." She's already moving, cake balanced like a declaration of war. "You've got pinecone in it."
The celebration closes around me again—laughter, clinking glasses, a fiddler starting up near the bonfire. I try to settle into it the way everyone else seems to, loose-shouldered and easy, but two years of running have rewired me in ways that don't switch off for parties.
I scan the crowd out of habit, the kind that lives in the spine rather than the brain. Exits: tree line north, main road east, the gap between the storage barn and the elder hall.
My boys: Ash still on Oren's hip near the musicians—Oren swaying slightly to the fiddle, one broad hand across my son's back—and Rowan tucked safely into Doris's arms. Faces familiar, all of them known, all of them safe.
I let out a breath that has been lodged in my chest since I stepped outside this morning. My shoulders drop a full inch.
Then the air behind me changes. Not a sound—a weight, a shift in temperature, the way a room gets heavier when someone walks in who expects it to rearrange around them. My glass stops halfway to my mouth.
I turn around and the party drops out from under me. Rhys—three feet away, hands in his coat pockets, watching me with dark eyes that give away nothing and take in everything.
The same heavy brow, the same controlled stillness—broader now, older around the jaw, but unmistakable in the way that nightmares are unmistakable even when you haven't had them in months. He doesn't speak. Doesn't need to.
My dead husband’s brother right here, in front of me—in a place I’ve only just now started calling safe.
The fiddler plays. Children run past us shrieking, and someone calls out a toast to Oren across the yard—glasses rising in a wave of warmth that washes over us and means nothing, because the man standing in front of me erases every safe thing in this compound by existing in it.
My boys—the thought arrives from somewhere deep and primal, not words, just direction. Ash on Oren's hip, Rowan in Doris's arms, both across the yard, both visible, both too far away, and my legs won't move to close the distance.
"Long time." His voice is low and stripped bare, two words that do the work of a hundred, and my throat seals shut.
I try to speak. What comes out is nothing—just air through a closed space, the shape of a word with no sound behind it. My fingers have gone numb around the glass and the party keeps churning around us, a world made of laughter and lantern light that has no idea what just walked into it.
Rhys watches me not-speak with the patience of someone who expected exactly this. Then he reaches into his coat—slowly, deliberately, a movement designed to be seen—and pulls out a fold of fabric. Dark green, careful stitches, wool that still holds a shape my hands know from the inside.
The scarf I made him three years ago—hours of quiet work at a kitchen table where quiet meant survival, every stitch a sentence I wasn't allowed to finish out loud. I thought Callum destroyed it the way he destroyed everything.
He kept it. That fact moves through me before the fear can catch it—he kept it, folded and cared for, not crumpled at the bottom of a drawer or forgotten in the back of a closet. My stitches held their shape because someone made sure they did.
Rhys holds it between us and I search his face for the thing I should be afraid of—the Adler calculation, the hunter's patience—but what I find doesn't match.
His thumb crosses the wool once, slow, almost careful, the way you touch something you've been carrying a long time. His eyes stay on mine, and they're not cold. They're not empty. There's something in them I can't name, something that sits closer to the way he looked at Callum's body in the pack hall than to anything threatening.
Maybe he didn't come for the reasons I should expect. Maybe the man who kept a scarf for three years isn't the same as the family that sent him.
I don't trust it. Not yet. But I don't run from it either.