The scarf disappears into his coat and my stitches vanish with it—swallowed back into Adler fabric like they never left. The party churns around us, fiddle and laughter and clinking glasses.
"You look well, Nell." His voice sits beneath the music, pitched for the space between us and nowhere else. "The boys are beautiful—they have your eyes."
My fingers tighten around my glass. He's been watching long enough to study my children's faces, which means he chose this moment—surrounded by people, lanterns, warmth.
"How've you been?" He asks it light, easy, as if the answer doesn't carry the weight of two years and a dead man between us.
"Busy." The word comes out clipped and I make myself soften the edges. "Twins don't leave much room for existential reflection."
"I can imagine." His mouth curves—not quite a smile, not quite anything. "Nell, there's something I need to tell you. About Callum."
My heart stops. Not slows—stops, like a fist closed around it mid-beat. I know what's coming because I built what's coming with a kitchen knife, but I have to receive it like a woman hearing the worst news of her life.
"What about him?" My voice comes out thin and careful, exactly right, and I hate how easily the performance slides into place.
"He's gone, Nell. Callum is dead." His eyes search my face with a precision that makes my scalp tingle. "I'm sorry—I thought you might already know."
I let the glass slip in my fingers—not enough to drop, just enough to tremble. My free hand presses over my mouth, and the gesture is so practiced it disgusts me.
But underneath the performance something real is happening: a roaring in my ears, because this is the first time anyone has said those words to my face.
"How?" The word comes out cracked. I don't have to fake that part—my body remembers the kitchen whether I want it to or not.
"Someone broke into the flat after you left—forced entry through the back window." His hands stay in his pockets, posture open, unthreatening. "The scene was too contaminated to trace. The pack concluded it was an outsider."
I press my fingers harder against my lips and blink until my eyes sting. For one terrible second the grief is real—not for him, but for the girl who knitted him scarves and believed the bruises were a phase.
"When?" I whisper it, because a woman who doesn't know would need a timeline, would need to place herself somewhere safe inside it.
"The night you left. Hours after, from what they could tell." He watches me the way you watch a crack spreading through glass—careful, still, waiting to see which way it breaks.
Does he really know nothing? He saw the flat. He saw the kitchen—the dent in the plaster shaped like a body. In every version of this moment I rehearsed in the dark, Rhys Adler never looked gentle.
"After his death we were worried you'd suffered too—that maybe you'd been taken, kidnapped." Something raw pushes through the polish in his voice. "I'm so glad to see you alive, Nell."
A sound escapes my throat—half sob, half breath—and I don't know if I'm acting anymore. My hand shakes around the glass.
"I didn't know." I say it looking straight into his eyes, and the lie sits in my mouth like a stone. "I just left, Rhys. I packed a bag and I left and I never—I never looked back."
"Of course you didn't. You were running from a marriage, not a murder." He nods slowly, absorbing my version without resistance, building something around it brick by careful brick.
The word murder detonates behind my ribs. My vision narrows and I force it back open by counting breaths until the ground steadies under my feet.
"Was he—" I stop, swallow, start again with my voice held low and shaking. "Did he suffer?"
"It was quick, from what the pack could tell. He'd been drinking." He tilts his head, almost gentle. "You don't need those details, Nell."
But I do. I need every detail because each one tells me what the pack knows and where the gaps are that could swallow me whole.
"The pack wants your account of the days before his death—a formality to close the file." His voice stays low and steady. "You could come home, Nell."
Home. My jaw tightens and I stare at the lanterns above his shoulder because his face requires more composure than I currently have in stock.
"That's a generous offer from a pack that never once knocked on my door to ask why I wore long sleeves in July."
"You're right—they should have, and I should have." Something shifts behind his eyes, quick and unreadable, before the composure resettles.
The admission catches me mid-breath. The sincerity in his voice—real or performed—loosens something in my chest that I immediately tighten back down.
"I'll think about it." The words are careful, measured, giving nothing and pulling nothing back.
"That's all I'm asking." His hands open at his sides, palms up, and the gesture is so precisely calibrated that my teeth ache.
"Then we're done for tonight." I meet his eyes and hold them until mine burn. "Enjoy the party, Rhys."
A growl splits the air between us—low, guttural, vibrating through my boots. Ash plants himself between my body and Rhys's, seventy pounds of grey fur and bared teeth, and the sound isn't a warning—it's a verdict.
Across the fire, Rowan erupts in a sharp wail that cuts through the music. Baby Ash twists on Oren's hip, both arms straining toward me with frantic urgency.
Oren materializes beside me with the ease of a man who was already watching. "Easy, Ash." One hand on the wolf's neck, voice warm—the perfect host smoothing a disruption at his own party.
He passes the baby to me and my son's fists close on my collar like he's anchoring himself to shore. I press my nose into his hair and breathe in the only scent in this compound that has never carried a warning.
"Rhys Adler." Rhys extends his hand, and the surname drops between the three of us and sinks without a ripple. "I don't believe we've formally met."
"Oren Blackvale." The handshake holds a beat past comfortable—Oren's fingers steady, his expression pleasant as a locked door. "How do you two know each other?"
"Old acquaintances—a family connection, nothing more." Rhys withdraws his hand smooth as a card trick. "Best wishes from my pack for your birthday."
"Family." Oren repeats the word the way you test a floorboard—pressing down, listening for what gives underneath. His smile stays polite, offering nothing resembling warmth.
His hand comes to the small of my back—not touching, hovering—and steers me toward the food tables. Baby Ash buries his face in my neck and I hold him tighter than a one-year-old appreciates.
Oren doesn't ask what Rhys said or why the wolf snarled or why my hands are shaking. He walks beside me, solid and silent and there—and his silence holds more safety than every careful word Rhys just built for me.
Across the yard, I feel Rhys watching us go—a shift in pressure against my neck. My son's heartbeat drums against my collarbone, and the hum in my belly stirs for the first time in months.
Sable's voice rises from the cake table, bright and oblivious, calling my name like nothing in this compound has changed since she frosted that lopsided cake this morning.