[Skyler’s POV]
"Got a minute?" Dylan leans against the doorframe of a supply cabinet, hands in his pockets.
Not the bathroom interrogation posture—arms open, shoulders loose—but not the coffee-delivering version either. Something in between, a man who's rehearsed his opening on the walk over.
"Depends on what you're here to accuse me of this time." The words come out sharper than I intended, and his mouth twitches—not a smile, more like acknowledgment that he earned that.
"Fair." He steps inside but doesn't close the door, and the choice reads deliberate. "You've been here over a week now. Shown up every day, done good work, no complaints."
"Is this a performance review? Because I was promised dental benefits and I haven't seen paperwork." I don't smile, because he has to earn that, but there's an umistakable amusement in my voice that I can't hide.
He exhales through his nose—almost a laugh, but still not quite. "I came on too strong. At Crescent Ridge, and then here… The bathroom thing was unfair, and I know that."
"Terrifying is the word I'd have picked, but unfair works too." I set the gauze down and turn to face him fully. His eyes go lighter at the edges—hazel bleeding into something almost gold under the overhead fluorescents. I notice, and I hate that I notice.
"Our siblings are married. We're part of the same family now. Technically," he says, and his voice has dropped the rehearsed edge. "And I'd like to be better at it than I've been."
It's not an apology. He hasn't said sorry, hasn't wrapped it in a bow or asked me to absolve him. But he's standing here with his walls lowered, offering something that costs him more than the word would.
Leon promised me safety once—a wire ring and a morning departure and seven years of silence. Dylan hasn't promised anything. He just showed up with coffee and a clinic job and kept showing up, and the difference is starting to sit heavier than I'd like.
My fingers release the shelf edge I didn't realize I was gripping. "Okay. But don't make me repeat it—that was hard enough once."
His eyebrows lift, like he'd prepared for a longer siege. Then his tone shifts—lighter, more casual. "The twins get out at three, right? There's a lake about ten minutes out. Trees, water, the whole nature experience."
The smart answer is no—distance, boundaries, the careful separation I've been maintaining since his interrogation. The answer that actually leaves my mouth is: "River's been asking to see water since we arrived."
His grin breaks through before he can catch it, quick and warm, and something behind my ribs responds to it the way a match responds to friction—involuntary and entirely too fast. I turn back to the supply shelf so he can't see whatever my face is doing.
At three-fifteen, Dylan pulls up to the school in a truck that's too clean for who he seems to be. River scrambles into the back narrating her entire day before the door closes.
Ashton climbs in after, buckles his seatbelt with military precision, and says nothing. He does glance once at Dylan in the rearview mirror, assessing, before staring out the window. From my son, that's more than A+.
The lake opens through the trees—wide, still, ringed by birch and pine, the surface so flat it mirrors the sky back twice. River is ankle-deep before I can warn her, and her shriek startles birds from a nearby oak.
Ashton stands on the bank with his arms crossed, projecting the energy of a man categorically too mature for wading. He lasts ninety seconds before he splashes his sister, and her scream echoes clean across the water.
Dylan and I settle on the grass near the waterline. He leans back on his hands, and for a few minutes we just watch them—my children playing like children, without looking over their shoulders.
"So." I pull my knees up and go for the jugular—if he wants it to be an apology, I will make him work for it a bit more. "How was it growing up as an Alpha's heir? Fewer mop buckets than being a Gray, I'm guessing."
"More trucks, fewer mops, too many broken noses in training." He squints at the water. "Leon was the heir. I was the contingency plan."
"That sounds lonely." I watch his profile, the way humor wraps around something sharper underneath, holding the shape together.
"Mostly boring, which is worse—at least loneliness has dignity." He picks at the grass. "When I was fifteen, I stole my father's truck and drove it into the perimeter fence."
"On purpose?" I ask, and his mouth curves without the rest of his face committing to the expression.
"Terrible at driving, so technically no. Emotionally… debatable." He tosses a blade of grass toward the water. "Six weeks mucking stables. It taught me horse manure has layers, each one individually worse."
A laugh escapes me before I can catch it—startled and scraping against muscles that forgot this use.
"I understand being the one who doesn't count," I say, and the humor drops from his face, something raw surfacing underneath. He doesn't respond right away. Just looks at me with an expression that says he heard more in that sentence than I meant to put there.
Neither of us pretends the conversation is light anymore. I let the silence settle, then look at the kids—River chasing minnows, Ashton standing guard over her shoes like they're classified material.
"That's… impressive, but not surprising." He chuckles, watching Ashton fold River's socks into the shoes so they don't blow away. "I once hid in a supply closet for five hours to dodge Marsh's lecture on pack genealogy."
I raise my eyebrow at him and he lifts both hands in defense, grinning. "Woke up smelling like bleach and regret."
The laugh that escapes me aches in the good way—the way I'd forgotten ribs could. He stretches one leg out and leans back, easy in his body the way people are when they've stopped performing.
The breeze carries River's laughter back to us, and his mouth softens listening to it—like her joy is something worth paying attention to. Nobody outside of me has ever treated it that way, and it makes me want to share that little joy that she is.
"River drew a wolf with stars in its fur last week." The words come out quiet, offered more than spoken. "She said it was me, which is either the sweetest thing anyone has ever—"
I stop, because Dylan isn't listening to the story anymore. He's looking at me—not at the words, not at the lake, not at the children splashing twenty feet away. At me, the laughter still fading on my face.
He's watching it the way someone watches a sunset they can't believe they're allowed to see. My pulse does something unreasonable, and I should look away. I don't.
His hand finds mine on the grass. Fingers close over my knuckles, warm and unhurried, and the touch is so careful it aches—like he knows what carelessness has cost me, like he's decided to knock on the door instead of scaling the walls.
I think about the coffee he brought without asking how I take it. The supply box he caught mid-air with that startled laugh. How he enrolled my children in school, remembered a throwaway conversation about medicine, and turned it into the first life that's ever been mine.
Nobody has ever been this steady for me. Not my mother, not a pack. Leon promised and couldn't—and here is Dylan, who never promised, just did. Quietly, without ceremony. And the contrast is becoming impossible to ignore.
He leans in. Slow—so slow I could stop him, so slow the choice is entirely mine, his breath warm against my mouth. His eyes don't close, and the wanting in them is bare and undisguised, a man who's decided to stop hiding the thing he's carrying.
The gap between our mouths is less than an inch. Behind us, the children's laughter rings across the water, his fingers tighten around mine, and I don't pull away.