Chapter 28

Wren

Rurik found her at breakfast the next morning, which wasn't unusual in itself — they'd fallen into an easy habit, over six months of overlapping alliance business, of comparing notes over the first meal of any joint gathering — but something in the careful, deliberate way he chose the seat across from her told Wren, before he'd said a single word, that this particular breakfast wasn't going to stay as easy as the others had been.

"You look like you didn't sleep." He said it plainly, no judgment in it, just observation. "And Ezra's been watching you all morning like a man trying to decide whether to say something."

"Ezra's always watching me like that. It's practically his resting expression."

"Fair." Rurik didn't push, exactly, just let the silence sit there long enough that Wren understood he was giving her room to fill it if she wanted to, and equally comfortable letting it go unfilled if she didn't. That patience, she thought, not for the first time, was one of the things she genuinely loved about him — had loved, past tense, in the specific way she'd let herself love him for two years before gently, carefully, letting that particular door close between them.

"He was there last night," she said finally, because Rurik had never once, in six years of friendship and two years of something more, made her carry a secret alone that he'd have handled with more grace than she was managing. "Kade. We met to go over task force logistics, and he told me—" She stopped, searching for the right way to say it. "He told me he's spent five years thinking about what he did. That he's not asking for anything. Just wanted me to hear it."

Rurik's expression didn't change much, which she'd learned, over the years, was itself a kind of tell — the stillness he retreated into whenever something actually mattered to him rather than simply interested him. "And how did that land."

"Badly. Well. Both." She pushed her food around her plate, appetite gone. "I told him it didn't change anything. I meant it when I said it. I'm considerably less certain I still mean it this morning, and I hate that, Rurik. I hate that five years and an entire pack and a title and everything I've built still isn't enough to make that man's voice stop meaning something to me."

Rurik was quiet a long moment, turning something over behind careful eyes. "Can I tell you something, and you actually hear it instead of just being polite about it?"

"Always."

"I've known for two years that whatever we had wasn't going to be the whole story for you. I let myself hope otherwise for a while — I'm not going to pretend I didn't — but I've watched you long enough to recognize the difference between someone building a life and someone still finishing one that got interrupted." He said it without bitterness, which somehow made it land harder than bitterness would have. "I let you go, when I let you go, because I meant it when I said I wasn't in a hurry, and because some part of me already understood, even then, that whatever wasn't finished with him was always going to need finishing eventually, one way or another. I'd rather you finish it and come out the other side certain, than spend the rest of your life wondering."

"That's absurdly generous of you."

"I've had two years to make my peace with it." A small, real smile, more rueful than sad. "Doesn't mean it doesn't still sting a little, watching it actually happen. I'm allowed that much, I think, without it meaning I regret a single day of the two years we had."

Wren reached across the table and took his hand, holding it a moment, grateful in a way that went beyond words for a friendship that had survived becoming something more and then, with real grace on both sides, becoming something else again without breaking. "For what it's worth — whatever happens with Kade, or doesn't — I don't regret a single day of us either. I want you to know that."

"I do know it." He squeezed her hand once, then let it go, some of the careful weight in his expression easing into something lighter. "Now. Eat your breakfast, because we've got a task force briefing in an hour and Ashborne's delegate looked entirely too pleased with herself yesterday about volunteering us for the first joint patrol assignment, which I suspect means it's going to be considerably more dangerous than she made it sound."

He was right, as it turned out. The briefing that followed, held in the same war room Kade and Torren had apparently claimed as the task force's unofficial headquarters, laid out an assignment considerably heavier than simple intelligence-sharing: a joint patrol, drawn from all five packs' territories, tasked with investigating the oldest and most direct lead they had — the ruins of Ashenmoor itself, abandoned for forty years, never fully surveyed by anyone since whatever catastrophe had ended it.

"Nobody's set foot on that land in four decades," Ashborne's delegate said, spreading a rough territorial map across the table, Ashenmoor's borders marked in old, faded ink at its northernmost edge. "Superstition, mostly, though given what we now know about the brand appearing on organized rogue incursions, I'd suggest the superstition might have been worth listening to. Someone needs to go in and find out what's actually there. I'd like it to be a joint effort — every affected pack represented, so no single pack bears the risk or claims sole credit for whatever's found."

Wren felt Kade's attention land on her before she looked up to confirm it, and found him already watching her from across the war room table, something unreadable and entirely too familiar in his expression.

"I'll lead Nightshade's portion of the expedition personally," she said, before anyone else could suggest otherwise, before the old instinct to send someone else into danger on her behalf could even finish forming. "It's our bloodline's history buried in those ruins. I'm not sending anyone else to uncover it in my place."

"Then I'll lead Blackthorn's portion," Kade said, and something in the room shifted at the flat, immediate certainty in his voice — Torren, beside him, closing his eyes briefly in an expression that suggested he'd expected exactly this and hoped, futilely, to be wrong. "Given the joint command structure we agreed to last night, it makes sense for both co-leads to be present for a discovery this significant."

Ashborne's delegate glanced between them, something faintly, infuriatingly knowing in her expression, and made a small note on her own copy of the assignment roster without further comment.

Wren didn't look at Kade again for the rest of the briefing. She didn't need to. She could feel, with a clarity she was rapidly losing the ability to pretend away, exactly how thoroughly the next several weeks were about to test every single piece of the careful distance she'd been so certain, twelve hours ago, she still knew how to maintain.