[Agatha’s POV]
The forest is older than anything I've walked through—trees wide enough that three wolves couldn't circle them, canopy so dense the light arrives in fragments. Jericho moves through it like he's part of the root system, and I follow with the awkward reverence of someone visiting a cathedral she didn't know existed.
"The council fire pit." He stops at a clearing ringed with stones worn smooth by decades of use. "Your father sat there—the flat one with the crack down the center. Refused to replace it."
"Sentimental about a rock?" My boots find the packed earth where generations of wolves wore the grass away. "That tracks with nothing I've been told about a fearsome alpha."
"He was sentimental about everything." Jericho's mouth does something warm. "Caelan kept every letter your mother wrote him—even the supply lists. Said her handwriting made requisitions feel personal."
His hand finds the small of my back as I step over a root, guiding me left where the path splits. The warmth of his palm prints itself through my shirt and stays long after he drops it, and I catalog the sensation against my will.
The river appears through the birches—wide, shallow, catching late morning sun. Wolves fish along the far bank, and two pups chase each other through the shallows with the focused chaos of creatures who haven't learned dignity yet.
"Your mother planted those." He points to herbs along the waterline—chamomile, comfrey, yarrow. The same varieties, the same configuration I planted in Moonveil's garden without ever knowing why the arrangement felt right.
"I grow the same ones." The words come out quiet, stripped of the edge I usually wrap them in. "The exact same pattern. I thought I learned it from a book."
"You learned it from her blood." He stands close enough that his shoulder presses mine, and neither of us corrects the distance. "Clara had a theory that herbs grow better planted by instinct rather than instruction. Drove the healers insane."
"She sounds like someone I would have liked." My throat does something inconvenient, and I cover it by crouching to touch the chamomile—petals identical to ones I planted a thousand miles away in a garden that belongs to a woman who stole my life.
Jericho is different here. The man from the cells—measured, careful, every word placed like a stone—has loosened into someone whose laugh comes easier and whose body forgets tactical distance.
In Moonveil he was a weapon sheathed; here he's just a man in his own forest, and the version of him that exists on home ground is someone my chest has no defenses against.
"This way." His fingers brush my elbow as he steers me up a slope, and the contact lasts two full seconds longer than navigation requires. He doesn't notice. I notice enough for both of us.
The clearing appears at the top—open, sun-filled, carpeted in wildflowers that have had twenty-four years to reclaim whatever stood here. No walls, no foundation, just color and light and the ghost of a house that held my parents.
"This is where they lived." His voice drops into something I haven't heard before—tender, almost careful, like the clearing itself might bruise. "Front door faced east. Your mother insisted—she wanted morning light in the kitchen."
I step into the wildflowers and my boots crush something that smells like sage. "What happened to it?"
"Burned the night your father was killed." His hand hovers near my shoulder blade—close enough that I feel the heat, not quite touching. "My father pulled you out before the roof came down. You were three months old and furious about the whole situation."
"I started young." My voice cracks on a laugh that's mostly tears. The wildflowers sway around my ankles and I stand in the footprint of a life I was supposed to have, and the absence presses against my ribs like a hand.
"Caelan's laugh—you could hear it from the river." Jericho moves beside me, arm against mine. "Full-bodied, unselfconscious. Made everyone within earshot smile before they knew why."
"And Clara?" I press my thumbnail into my palm because my eyes are doing something unauthorized.
"She physically carried unruly pups out of the clearing and deposited them into their parents’ arms." His grin is sudden, real, devastating. "They ran back again, obviously, and she repeated, until they tired out."
"Oh my. Very dedicated woman." My mouth curves despite everything, and the shared amusement between us builds something warm and structurally unsound.
"She was. The pups sometimes called her mom. She always pretended she hasn’t heard." He catches my eye and holds it a beat too long, and the air between us thickens.
We walk back as the light shifts from white to amber, and he keeps weaving them into the landscape—the tree Clara carved their initials into before Caelan pointed out that alphas shouldn't vandalize their own territory.
His hand finds my back on a steep descent, his fingers brush mine when he points out a hawk's nest, and every accidental contact accumulates like a debt I can't settle.
By nightfall, the ache hits. Not gradual—sudden, surgical, a physical weight behind my sternum where Nico's head should be resting. My arms remember his exact heft, and the absence is a wound shaped precisely like a three-week-old child.
I sit by the fire and press my fist against my breastbone. The camp settles around me—low voices, the crack of wood, the specific quiet of wolves winding down.
Jericho appears and sits beside me. Not across—beside, his thigh near mine, radiating warmth like something designed to dismantle distance. He doesn't speak, just stays, and the simplicity of it undoes something I've been holding rigid since the escort rode away.
I lean into him. My shoulder against his, my weight shifting into the heat of his body, and the contact is so foreign my muscles lock before they remember how surrender works. Three years since I leaned into anyone—and the last time was Vesper, performing closeness rather than feeling it.
He doesn't move. Doesn't wrap an arm around me, doesn't turn it into anything I'd have to decide about. Just stays—immovable, warm, his breathing steady against my temple.
"Your father named you the night you were born." His voice comes low, rough-edged, vibrating through his chest into my shoulder. "The whole camp gathered. He held you up and spoke the name, and dad said every torch flared at once."
His lips find the space near my temple, breath warm against my hair. "Aelindra." The sound travels down my spine and settles somewhere behind my ribs—not foreign, not borrowed. The way his mouth shapes it, low and certain and almost reverent, turns four syllables into something I can feel in my own blood.
"Say it again." The words leave before the careful part of me can catch them, and my fingers grip my own knee hard enough to ache.
"Aelindra." Closer now, the name landing against my skin like it's been waiting twenty-four years to come home. The fire sends sparks upward into the dark, and I sit pressed against a man who just handed me the last missing piece of myself—and for the first time, the name doesn't feel like someone else's story. It feels like mine.