The wax cracks under my thumb. Lira's handwriting fills the page in her sharp, furious slant—the hand of a woman who writes like she's arguing with the paper.
Jericho shifts closer, reading over my shoulder. I angle the letter toward the candlelight and start from the top.
Agatha—Nico is well. Growing fast. He has started grabbing at everything within reach—fistfuls of hair, spoons, the edge of Neve's braids. She had to start pinning her hair up because he nearly took a chunk during a feeding.
He sleeps restlessly until someone holds him, and then he goes boneless and heavy against whoever is carrying him like he has decided that person belongs to him now. My throat does something inconvenient. I press on.
Neve says his energy signature hums when he is out—a low vibration that makes the nursery candles flicker. He cries when rooms go quiet. Ronan says he has your stubbornness but I think he has your ears.
"He sounds like you," Jericho says, and the gentleness in it is so precise it could cut glass.
"He sounds like a baby who doesn't like being alone." My thumbnail finds the crease in the paper. "Which tracks, considering."
Jericho's hand settles on the back of my neck—warm, steady, an anchor I didn't ask for but am gripping with both hands internally. Then the letter shifts.
I can feel the moment Lira's pen changed pressure, the strokes tighter, the words chosen with the care of someone who knows a runner could be intercepted.
Now the part you need to hear. Hilda has been holding private dinners with the inner circle—Aldric, Marsh, and Fenn sit at her table twice a week now. She dismissed two of the household staff you trained and replaced them with wolves from her old pack.
She reassigned the eastern patrol without consulting Ronan. She is not behaving like a Luna, Agatha. She is behaving like someone who expects to need loyalty she has not earned, and is buying it while she still can.
Then Ronan's hand—broader, blunter, the letters of a man who fights better than he writes. A single line wedged beneath Lira's paragraph: Vesper is not listening. Four words that could have replaced the entire letter.
"How bad?" Jericho asks quietly. I fold the letter along its existing crease, pressing hard.
"Bad enough for Ronan to put it in writing." My fingers whiten on the paper. "He doesn't commit things to paper unless he's out of options verbally. Which means he's tried."
Lira's closing fills the bottom of the page, her handwriting loosening again—the part she wanted to end on.
Do not worry. Ronan checks the nursery guards every shift change and I have been spending my evenings in the wing. Nico is covered. He is safe and loved and grabbing at the world with both hands, just like his mother.
The assurances are specific in the particular way of someone who knows the reader will dismantle every sentence for what it doesn't say. The fact that she wrote do not worry is the loudest alarm in the entire letter.
“What will you do?” Jericho asks, pulling me out of my anxious spiral. I don’t look at him.
"I go back." The words leave me flat, already decided. "When the two months end, I go back for Nico."
"I know." Jericho's hand hasn't moved from my neck, his thumb tracing a slow line along the tendon. "I'm asking what happens after."
The silence that follows has a different texture than the ones we've been building. Those were warm, full, the quiet of two people who didn't need words. This one has edges.
"You go back. You get Nico. Then what?" He drops his hand, and the absence registers like a change in temperature. "You bring him here? You stay in Moonveil? You split time between two packs with a child prophesied to reshape the continent?"
"I haven't exactly had time to draft a five-year plan, Jericho." My arms cross before I can stop them.
"I'm not asking for a plan." His voice stays level but his jaw has shifted. "I'm asking if you've thought about it."
"Of course I've thought about it." The words come out harder than intended. "I think about it every night between wondering whether Hilda has stationed her wolves outside my son's door and whether Vesper has finally noticed his own pack being hollowed out under his nose."
He stands. Not aggressive—he pushes off the bed frame, crosses to the window, presses his palms flat on the sill. His back is a wall of tension I could map blindfolded.
"I need an heir in Stormhowl." The words come out quiet, stripped of everything but the fact. "My wolves followed me because I told them I'd find the bloodline and bring it home. That was the promise. Not temporarily. Not for visits between crises."
"And I need my son." I am on my feet now too, the letter crumpled in my fist. "Who is currently behind walls controlled by a woman who tried to erase him before he was born."
"I know that." He turns from the window—not calculated, not strategic. A man inside a problem that has no clean answer.
"Then what are you actually asking me?" The space between us has become a geography of its own, four feet of air carrying everything we've built and everything we can't solve.
"I'm asking where you see yourself when this is over." His knuckles are white on the sill behind him. "Because I need you here, Agatha. Not as a political symbol. Not as an heir I present to the pack."
He gestures between us, sharp and truncated. "I need you here because this is not something I can do at a distance."
My throat closes around every word I could say. Not because he's wrong—because he's not wrong, and neither am I, and the place where both truths coexist does not appear on any map I've ever seen.
"I am not asking you to choose." His jaw tightens. "I'm telling you I don't know how to be what you need and what my pack needs at the same time. And I'm asking if you do, because I am out of ideas and I would really like one of us to have one."
The honesty of it lands somewhere behind my ribs—not cruel, not even angry, just the raw scrape of a man who has hit a wall he cannot lead through. I open my mouth and nothing useful comes out.
He leaves first. Not slamming, not storming—just a quiet goodnight and the door clicking shut, carefully like holding something volatile very still.
The room is suddenly enormous. I sit on the edge of the bed and smooth Lira's crumpled letter flat on the table with fingers that are not as steady as I'd like. Nico's name in Lira's handwriting. Ronan's four blunt words in the margin. Jericho's warmth fading from the air like a season ending.
A son behind enemy lines. A man who just asked me for something I cannot give without losing something I cannot survive losing.
I press my palm flat over the letter, over Nico's name, and sit in the quiet of a room that has no answer in it—only the growing, marrow-deep certainty that whatever I choose, I will spend the rest of my life grieving the thing I didn't.