POV: Kieran
Children are the only honest mirrors left in a world that has learned to lie politely, and this one reads me before I open my mouth.
I find Dylan in the garden beside Phoenix, who is demonstrating her controlled grip exercise on a rubber training ball — squeezing it to precisely half compression and holding, the discipline it took her two years to master on display for an audience of one.
Dylan watches her hands with the focused attention of a scientist observing a phenomenon that does not yet have a name in his vocabulary.
"This is my dad Kieran." Phoenix does not look up from her compression hold. "He lives here too."
"Hello, Dylan." I keep my voice neutral — no performance, no warmth pitched to charm, no authority.
He turns his head toward me and does not respond. Those grey eyes — my brother's eyes in a face still learning which expressions to commit to — study me with an unnerving patience that reminds me of Luna.
I do not crouch. Crouching telegraphs an adult trying to seem less threatening, and this child reads intention the way his cousin reads emotion. Instead, I sit down on the grass beside Phoenix, fold my legs, and watch her exercise alongside him.
"She is very focused." Dylan directs the observation toward me without looking away from Phoenix.
"She has been practicing that particular technique for a long time." I match his conversational tone.
"Two years is a long time for one thing." He tilts his head, processing the commitment.
"Phoenix is extremely dedicated when she chooses to be." I lean back on my palms casually.
"And when she does not choose to be?" He turns those grey eyes fully on me now, curious.
"Then furniture gets broken." Phoenix grins without releasing her grip on the rubber ball.
"I have broken a lamp before." Dylan offers this as credentials, delivered with quiet pride.
"Amateur — I broke the living room wall when I was eight." Phoenix flexes the ball with emphasis.
"How do you break a wall?" His skepticism carries the practical weight of a child running math.
"With your fist, if your fist is strong enough." She releases the ball and holds up her hand.
"That seems like it would hurt." He examines her knuckles with the gravity of a medical inspection.
"Not if you do it right." She picks the ball back up and resumes her compression with easy rhythm.
The three of us sit in the garden for several minutes without agenda or expectation. Morning light stretches across the grass, and I let the silence hold because it belongs to the boy, not to me.
Phoenix demonstrates her half-compression hold three more times. Dylan watches each repetition with the same focused intensity, cataloging variables the way Orion catalogs data — quietly, without asking permission to observe.
I notice things. The way he positions himself between Phoenix and the garden exit, keeping both in his sightline. The way his breathing adjusts when a guard passes the far wall, deepening slightly as though he is gathering information through the air itself.
He is barely more than a toddler and he maps his environment with the instincts of a wolf who has never been taught that he is one.
Then Dylan turns. His eyes settle on my chest — not my face, not my hands, but the center of my sternum — with the specific attention of a child reading words written across a surface that no one else can see.
The scrutiny lasts a beat. Each second of it registers in my body like a separate detonation beneath the ribs.
"Does it hurt?" His voice is quiet and direct, carrying no sympathy — only inquiry.
Every muscle in my body locks. The question arrives from a small child with the precision of a scalpel finding the one nerve that the surgeon told the patient was dead.
"Does what hurt?" I hear my own voice from a great distance, steady and completely false.
"In there." Dylan lifts one small finger and points at my sternum with absolute certainty.
"It looks like it is trying to get out." He holds the finger steady, tracing a shape I cannot see.
The garden tilts. The morning light goes sharp and strange around me, and I feel years of sealed silence cracking along a fault line I built my entire recovery on top of.
He can see it. The thought arrives with the clarity of a bell struck in an empty room. This child can see my wolf.
"Watch this, daddy." Phoenix's voice punctures the moment with the cheerful force of a child.
She crushes the rubber ball completely flat in one hand, holds it, then releases with a grin so wide it threatens to split her face. The ball rebounds into shape with an audible snap.
"Impressive — that is the cleanest compression I have seen from you." I redirect toward Phoenix.
"Told you I have been practicing." She tosses the ball to Dylan, who catches it with both hands.
"Your turn." She points at the ball in his grip with a commanding nod. "Squeeze hard."
Dylan squeezes. The ball dimples slightly under his small fingers — ordinary strength, ordinary effort, an ordinary child's grip. He hands it back to Phoenix with an expression of honest assessment.
"I am not very strong yet." He delivers the evaluation without disappointment, just data.
"Yet is the important word." Phoenix takes the ball and pockets it with authority.
"Were you strong at four?" He looks up at her with practical interest in the timeline.
"Extremely strong at four — I lifted a bookcase." She stands and brushes grass from her legs.
"I should probably start with the lamp again." He stands too, mirroring her movement precisely.
Phoenix laughs — bright and unguarded, the sound carrying across the garden with the warmth of a girl who has never once questioned whether the world deserves her joy. She takes Dylan's hand without asking and leads him toward the compound doors.
I follow at a distance that grants them space. The walk back takes ninety seconds, and for eighty of them I feel nothing unusual — just the residual weight of a boy who named what he found in my chest.
Then I reach the doorframe, and the wolf surges — not a whisper, not the deliberate press I felt during the Dominic call, but a full-body convulsion that locks my hand around the metal frame and pins me in place.
My knees buckle halfway before I catch them. My vision narrows to a corridor of light and shadow that pulses once, twice, three times with a rhythm I have not felt in over three years.
I stand braced against the doorframe for a long moment while the compound moves around me — guards passing, a wolf nodding in my direction, Phoenix's voice fading down the hallway with Dylan's quieter answers trailing behind.
A long moment of gripping steel while a presence I declared dead a lifetime ago presses against the walls of its cage with a force that no longer accepts permanence as an answer.