Once everyone was sure the threat was over, we agreed to wait until tomorrow to make plans. After saying goodnight to Mia and Reign, I turned to my two anchors—my other halves.

The cottage door closes behind us, and the world outside ceases to exist.

Inside, it’s just the crackle of the fire, the smell of damp wool and woodsmoke, and the three of us, breathing. A deep, silent exhaustion settles over everything, heavy as a blanket. It feels less like tiredness and more like a cleansing, as if the storm inside me has finally passed and left nothing but hollow, quiet air.

“Easy,” James murmurs, his arm solid around Kai’s waist as we maneuver him toward the bed.

“I’m not glass,” Kai grunts, but he leans into James, his weight uneven, his face pale under the lamp’s glow.

We get him sitting on the edge of the mattress. I find a spare pillow and gently lift his injured ankle, settling it atop the softness. The careful way he doesn’t hiss tells me more about the pain than any shout would. I kneel on the floorboards in front of him, the wood hard and cool against my knees.

My hands come up to cradle his face. His skin is warm. Real. Alive.

The memory hits me like a physical blow: the blight swallowing them, the earth collapsing, the certainty that they were gone. That I was alone. A raw, fractured sound escapes my throat, and the tears come, hot and silent and unstoppable.

Kai’s breath starts to catch, he reaches out to touch my face.

I don’t say a word. I just press my mouth to his.

It’s not a gentle kiss. It’s fervent, desperate, a confirmation written in the taste of salt and the slight tremor in my lips. I pour every ounce of that terror, that loss, that impossible relief into it. His hands come up to my hair, holding me there, answering with a pressure that says I know, I know, I’m here.

I pull back only when my lungs scream, my breath shuddering. I turn, still on my knees, and find James already there, his green eyes watching me with an understanding so deep it aches. I reach for him, and he meets me halfway.

Kissing James is different. It’s an anchor dropping. It’s stability after a freefall. His mouth is softer, but no less intense, and when his hand cups the back of my neck, I feel the world stop spinning. I pour the same confession into him. We’re here. We’re all here.

When we finally break apart, we’re all breathing heavy. No one speaks. We just move, a slow, tired dance of limbs and comfort. James helps Kai shift back against the headboard, his leg propped. I blow out the lamp, leaving only the fire’s orange pulse to paint the room.

I crawl into the middle of the bed. Kai settles on my right, his shoulder a solid line against mine. James lies down on my left, his bare arm brushing my own. The space is small. We are tangled, close, a triptych of shared warmth.

The silence stretches, comfortable, full of the things we don’t need to say yet.

“So,” Kai says, his voice a low rumble in the dark. “The cave.”

“Yeah,” James replies from my other side. He shifts, and I feel his fingers find mine, lacing together on the blanket between us. “Woke up in a river. In the dark.”

“You were unconscious,” James says, and I hear the thread of remembered fear woven through the simple words. “Head wound. Ankle twisted to hell.”

Kai’s laugh is soft, pained. “Sounds about right. I remember… water. And then your annoying voice.”

“I cleaned you up. Sat with you.” James’s thumb strokes the back of my hand. “Waited.”

I close my eyes, listening, trying to see it. The dark cavern. The two of them, hurt and alone. My chest tightens.

“When you woke up,” James continues, the words deliberate, “I kissed you.”

James pauses, looking at his hands. I feel Kai go still beside me.

“I was afraid,” James says, raw and unflinching. “I thought I’d lost you. I needed… confirmation.”

There’s another silence, thicker this time. I can feel the weight of the admission hanging between them, over me.

“It was a good confirmation,” Kai says finally, his tone lighter, but the emotion underneath isn’t. “Then we found the trial. This… huge carved room. It said we had to ‘work as one’ to pass.”

“It was the key,” James says. “The anchor. We had to be grounded in each other. In getting back to you, Bree.”

My throat closes. I squeeze James’s hand, and my other finds Kai’s where it rests on the blanket. I hold onto them both.

“We felt you,” Kai whispers, his voice losing all its levity. “In the temple. That cry you sent out. It was like getting ripped in half.”

“We threw everything we had back at you,” James says. “My stability. His fire. Just to hold you up. To say we were coming.”

The tears are back, slipping from the corners of my eyes into my hair. They felt me. They anchored me. Even broken and miles away, they were my foundation.

“Then we felt the final blast,” Kai says. “The one that sealed it. We knew you’d done it. And we knew it had cost you something huge.”

The silence stretches as the sun reach the horizon. Thinking of how the day had felt like eternity from the moment they woke up before dawn till now. My thoughts drifted to the conversation I will need to have with William tomorrow and remembering how he smelled similiar to James.

The question comes out of me before I can think better of it, born from the tangled knot of today's exhaustion and tomorrow's dread. "William," I say into the dark, my voice scratchy. "When I met him... he smelled like you, James." I turn my head on the pillow to look at his profile, etched in fire-glow. "I never met your parents. I never met mine, either. Not really. Why did he smell like you?"

James goes perfectly still. The hand laced with mine tightens, just for a second, before his grip goes slack. The silence that follows isn't comfortable like before. It's thick, charged, like the air before a downpour. I can feel Kai holding his breath beside me.

"William is my father," James says finally. The words are flat, stripped bare. He doesn't look at me. He stares at the ceiling as if reading something in the rough-hewn beams.

I wait. The confession hangs there, incomplete. I can feel the *but* in the tension of his arm against mine, in the way his jaw works. Kai shifts, rolling onto his side to face James, his expression solemn in the low light.

"Is there anything I need to know?" I ask, softer now. "Before I go speak to my pack tomorrow? Before I speak to *your father*?"

James’s throat works as he swallows. His body is a line of rigid muscle beside me. I can feel the battle inside him—the old-soul patience warring with a raw, younger pain. He closes his bright green eyes.

When he speaks, his voice is cracked stone. "My mom got sick. Five years ago. Alzheimer's." He says the word like it’s a curse, something vile he has to spit out. "It was… slow. Then fast. At the end, she didn't remember anyone. Not me. Not him."

His hands, resting on his stomach, clench into white-knuckled fists. I watch the tendons stand out in his forearms. I don't dare breathe.

"He made a choice," James continues, each word measured and heavy. "He couldn't watch it. He said it wasn't her anymore. That staying was a betrayal of who she *was*. He... left. He tended the forest. He did his duty. He didn't come to the house." A sharp, bitter exhale. "I was the only one with her when she took her last breath. She didn't know my name. But she held my hand. She held it so tight."

The crack in his voice is the worst sound I’ve ever heard. It isn't a sob. It's the sound of something fundamental breaking, again, right here in the dark. A tear escapes the corner of his closed eye, tracing a path through the dust and grime on his temple.

My own tears are hot and immediate, a mirror of his pain. But this isn't my grief to claim. It’s his. And he’s sharing it, which feels more intimate, more devastating, than any kiss. I don't say "I'm sorry." The words are too small, too hollow. They’d evaporate in the heat of this truth.

Kai moves first. He doesn't speak. He simply reaches across my body, his hand covering James's clenched fist. He presses down, a steady, grounding weight. James’s fist trembles under his touch, but doesn't pull away.

"He's a good Beta," James whispers, the words taut with a conflict I can feel vibrating through the mattress. "He loves this village. He’d die for it. For you, now that you're Alpha. But he is not... he hasn't been my father since the day he walked out of her room."

I understand then. The easy grace James carries, the deep connection to the land—that’s his mother in him. The unwavering, dutiful protection—that’s William. And the chasm between those two halves is where James lives, has lived for years. A bridge to a ghost and a wall to a living man.

"What was her name?" I ask quietly.

His eyes open. He turns his head to look at me, and the raw vulnerability there steals my breath. "Elara," he says, and the name is a prayer. "She taught me the names of every plant in the valley. She could whistle like a songbird. She smelled like rosemary and sun-warmed earth."

He’s giving her to me. Not the faded ghost of her illness, but the living woman. I take her, hold her gently in my mind. Rosemary and sun-warmed earth. A whistler. A teacher.

"Thank you for telling me," I say, because it’s all I have. I untangle my hand from his and lift it, brushing the tear-track from his skin. The gesture feels enormous. "I won't... I won't forget that. When I speak to him."

James captures my hand, pressing my palm against his cheek for a moment before letting it go. The tension in his body begins to seep away, not gone, but spent. He turns onto his side, facing me, his green eyes searching mine in the dimness. Kai’s hand remains on his, a tether between us all.

"My father," I say, the words foreign in my mouth. "Aunt Mia says he was from here. That he left before I was born. She doesn't say much else. I think it hurts her too much. I don't even know if he's alive." I let out a shaky breath. "I used to make up stories about him. That he was a sailor. A pilot. An explorer. Something that would excuse him for not coming back. I wish he was there, when my mother had passed… Maybe things would have been different."

"Maybe he was just a man who got scared," Kai offers softly, his first words since James began. His star-blue eyes are dark with empathy. "Scared of the storm. Scared of responsibility. Scared of a daughter with storm-gray eyes."

"Maybe," I concede. The fantasy father feels flimsy now, childish. Compared to James's real, textured, painful history, my ghost feels like a sketch. But the loneliness that bred those stories is the same soil we all seem to grow from.

We lie there, a three-pointed star of shared loneliness and chosen connection. The fire pops, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. The wind moans outside, but it’s just wind now. Not a greeting, not a threat. Just weather.

James’s breathing evens out, deepens. The clenched fist under Kai’s hand slowly unfurls. He laces his fingers with Kai’s, then reaches his other arm across me, his palm coming to rest on Kai’s hip. An embrace that includes me in its circle.

I am held by them, and I am holding them together. The realization is a quiet thunder in my chest. This is the foundation. Not just their love for me, but theirs for each other. The kiss in the cave born of fear. The anchor they forged to get back. It’s all part of the structure we’re building, stone by stone, confession by confession.

"Get some sleep, Alpha," Kai murmurs, his lips brushing my shoulder. The title doesn't feel heavy right now. It feels like a blanket he’s tucking around me.

I close my eyes. The images come—James in a sunlit room holding a woman’s hand, Kai tending a head wound in a dark cave, William standing watchful and alone at the tree line. My father, a faceless silhouette walking away from the storm. They swirl and blend into the backdrop of the firelit room, the scent of two boys I love, the ache of my own exhausted body.

Sleep doesn't come like a switch being flipped. It seeps in at the edges, a warm, dark tide. The last thing I’m aware of is the solid, living weight of them on either side of me, in the quiet space between our heartbeats: *Whatever comes tomorrow, we face it from here. From this.*