[Dylan’s POV]
I find her on the back porch with her knees drawn up, and I know immediately that something happened between this morning and now. Her shoulders have that careful form, every muscle holding a line she doesn't want anyone to read.
I don't ask. Asking is Leon's move—direct, surgical, expecting truth like it's owed to him. I just drop onto the step beside her and bump my shoulder against hers. "Kids down?"
"River negotiated seven extra pages of the wolf book." Skyler almost smiles, almost. "Ashton told her the wolf dies at the end so she'd stop stalling."
"Does it?" I ask.
"No. He made it up." She shakes her head, and the ghost of a grin surfaces. "My son is a tactical genius and I'm mildly terrified."
There she is. Somewhere behind whatever tightened her face today, the version of Skyler that makes me want to write down every word she says is still running.
I stand and offer my hand. "Walk?"
She takes it, lets go once she's upright, and we fall into our circuit. The gravel path around the east wing, past the garden wall, through the birch trees that smell like wet bark and cold air.
We've done this enough times that our strides have synced without discussion. The moonlight turns everything silver-blue and the gravel crunches under our feet in a rhythm I've started counting like a heartbeat.
That shouldn't mean as much as it does.
"What was the worst job you ever had?" She's looking straight ahead, hands tucked in her sleeves. "Before Beta. Before all of this."
The laugh comes out big and stupid, the kind that bounces off the birch trees and startles nobody because there's no one out here but us and the moon. "Oh, man. You want the crown jewel?"
"Give me the crown jewel." She nods eagerly, thankful for something to occupy her thoughts with.
"The summer I was sixteen, my father caught me forging Leon's signature on a training exemption form. Which, in my defense, was an excellent forgery." I gesture expansively, because this story deserves the full wingspan. "My father disagreed."
"What was the punishment?" Her mouth is already twitching.
"He sent me to work at the pack tannery for five weeks. Processing raw hides—scraping, soaking, the whole beautiful operation." I drop my voice into my father's baritone. "'You want to forge documents? Wonderful. You can document every hide that comes through that facility, by hand, while you work.'"
"That sounds..." She wrinkles her nose.
"Oh, it gets worse. By week two the chemical stench was so deep in my skin that wolves were crossing hallways to avoid me. My own brother made me eat dinner on the porch." I spread my hands. "Character building."
She laughs, real, short and bright, making my chest effortlessly open up like someone unlatched a window I didn't know was shut. Then her face composes herself back, the laughter folding into something sharper.
"Mine was scrubbing the pack house toilets." Her voice is level, almost conversational. "Every bathroom, every floor. Kailani told the staff it would teach me humility."
"When was this?" I keep my voice even.
"I was seven months pregnant with the twins. On my knees with a brush and a bucket, belly so big I couldn't reach the base of the bowl without turning sideways."
She says it the way she says everything about Kailani—dry, precise, the edges filed until the horror almost passes for anecdote.
"One of the maids offered to help." She tugs a birch leaf from a low branch. "Kailani docked her a week's pay for the trouble."
My hands curl in my pockets. What's burning through my sternum right now isn't mine to display—it's her story. But she's choosing how to carry it, and I don't get to rearrange the weight.
"I threw up twice from the chemicals." She spins the leaf between her fingers. "Filed a formal complaint with my stomach. Denied."
And there it is—the thing that keeps catching me sideways.
She takes the ugliest thing anyone's ever done to her and reshapes it until it almost sounds like a punchline. Not to shrink it, not to make it safe. To refuse to let cruelty be the whole picture. To say ‘I survived this, and I'm still funnier than the person who did it to me.’
I want to tell her that the way she survives things makes me want to be braver about surviving mine. The words sit on my tongue, too big, too bare, so I give her something else instead.
"My mom used to sing this song." My voice drops lower than I planned as I try my best to veer into safer territory that doesn’t involve retraumatizing Skyler. "Before she died. Every night—this one melody. I remember maybe eight bars."
Skyler looks at me—really looks, the distracted veil lifting. Whatever sat behind her eyes all evening thins enough that I can see the person underneath it, paying attention.
"Fair warning, I sound terrible."
Then I hum it—off-key and stumbling over the places where memory blurs into guesswork. My ears burn and I'm grateful for the dark.
"I know that song." Her voice is so soft the birch trees lean in. "That's a northern pack lullaby. My mother used to sing it too, before she…" She doesn't finish.
But she sings the next line instead, quiet and clear and slightly rough, and for a few seconds the grounds dissolve. No gravel, no politics, no ghosts. Just two people holding the same melody in the dark.
The silence that follows is the kind you don't fill, so we walk, and the rhythm finds us again.
"This is going to sound strange," she says, rolling her neck with a frown, "but my hearing's been off lately. Sharper. And I'm catching scents from the kitchen when I'm in the east wing."
"Since when?" I keep the question light.
"A few weeks, maybe. It's stress, my body's just overcompensating probably." She waves a hand, dismissive, and I nod like the answer satisfies me while my brain runs calculations.
The path circles us back. Her door materializes in the corridor light, and I lean against the frame while she turns to face me.
The walk, the stories, a lullaby hummed between two people who lost their mothers too young. Standing at her door while the house sleeps around us.
This is the life I told her I wanted—not a version of it, not a sketch. This exact shape, quiet and ordinary, and the distance between what I'm living right now and what I'm allowed to keep presses into my ribs until I have to steady my breathing to hold the shape.
She looks up at me. "Thank you, Dylan."
No defense in it. No wit, no deflection, no careful edges. Just gratitude, bare and unguarded, and it twists in my chest harder than any confession she could've made with more words.
"Goodnight, Skyler."
I push off the frame and walk. I do not look back, because if I see her face in that corridor light for one more second, I will close the distance—and the next time I kiss this woman, I am not stopping at just ‘goodnight.’