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 as 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 Fire Sifts with a log collapsing inward. Silence, comfortable, full of the things we don’t need to say yet. I glanced at the boys each in turn, and then thier eyes connect a stronger bond showing in their depths.
“So,” Kai says, his voice a low rumble in the dark. “The cave.”
“Yeah,” James replies from my other side. He shifts to his side facing kai and I, 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. Shifting on his to his side, eyes on James. “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.”
Kai shifts beside me, the movement deliberate. I can feel the grin in his voice before it even forms. "So," he murmurs, his star-blue eyes catching the low light. "The three of us, a magic cave-in, a death temple, and a cosmic weed-whacker. We should start a band. Call it 'Near-Death Experience.' Our first single can be that sound James made when he saw the spider in the cavern."
The joke is so absurd, so perfectly Kai, that it punches through the lingering weight in my chest. A startled laugh escapes me, sharp and bright. I turn my head and see James’s face, the solemn lines of it dissolving into a wide, genuine smile that reaches his bright green eyes. Our gazes lock in the shadowy space between us, and for a second, there is nothing but the shared, breathless relief of it, the sheer, stupid joy of being alive and together to hear something so foolish.
“That spider was the size of my hand,” James protests, but he’s laughing now, the sound a warm rumble. The tension breaks like a dam, and we are suddenly a tangle of limbs and laughter. I push myself up on an elbow, reaching for Kai’s side, my fingers finding the ticklish spot I’d discovered days ago. James joins in, his own hand sneaking to Kai’s other flank.
Kai squirms, his laughter shifting from triumphant to breathless plea. “Traitors! Unhand me—ah! Mercy!” He writhes between us, a warm, solid anchor of shared hysteria, and for a handful of heartbeats, we are just three kids in a dusty cottage, forgetting the world outside. Then Kai arches, a sharp, involuntary hitch in his breath, and a faint wince tightens the corner of his mouth. My laughter dies in my throat. My fingers still against the dark blue linen of his shirt.
James’s hand freezes too. We both go quiet, the playful energy draining away to reveal the raw truth beneath: the bandage on his ankle, the lingering ache in James’s shoulder, the deep, hollow fatigue in my own bones. We are a mosaic of fresh scars. Kai’s smile turns soft, apologetic. "Sorry," he whispers. "Forgot my own edges for a second."
We settle back into the nest of blankets, closer now, our breathing syncing into a slower, more careful rhythm. My head finds the hollow of James’s shoulder; my hand rests gently over Kai’s heart, feeling its steady, reassuring beat. The silence returns, but it’s different now—not charged with unsaid horrors, but softened by the shared laughter, tender around the acknowledged hurt. It’s a quiet that feels like holding, and being held.
The silence stretches as the sun reaches 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 similar 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. James closes his eyes and sucks in a breath like he is preparing himself, then with the release of his breath his eyes open again.
"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.
Their breathing is my lullaby. James’s deep, steady rhythm against my back, Kai’s lighter, warm exhales against my neck. I lie awake in the dark long after they’ve fallen asleep, memorizing the feel of it. The rise and fall of their chests, the faint pulse I can feel where James’s wrist rests near my own. I trace the lines of their sleeping faces with my mind’s eye—James’s stern brow softened, Kai’s sharp features gentled. This. This is the sound of home. And the terror of this morning—the cold certainty that they were gone—claws at the edges of this peace. I cling to the rhythm of their breath, a frantic, silent prayer. *Never let this be the last time.* The thought is a splinter in my heart. I hold it, and them, until sleep pulls me under like a slow, dark river.
I open my eyes, and I know I’m dreaming. The light is wrong. It’s the flat, gray-yellow light of a Seattle morning filtering through cheap blinds, not the deep amber of firelight. The air smells of dust and old carpet, not pine and woodsmoke. I’m twelve. I’m in my bed in the townhouse, the one with the squeaky spring right in the middle. My heart hammers against my ribs. Downstairs, a pan sizzles. Bacon. And underneath it, the sweet, almost-burnt scent of waffles. Mom only made waffles on Sundays.
Tears are already hot in my eyes before I even move. I push back the faded comforter, the fabric familiar under my fingers. The floorboards are cold. I pad to the top of the stairs, my hand on the banister I’d slid down a hundred times. I hesitate. A wild, irrational fear seizes me. What if she’s not there? What if I walk down and the kitchen is empty, and this dream becomes a nightmare? Then I hear it.
Her voice. Low, a little off-key, weaving through the sizzle and pop from the kitchen. *“Tell everybody I’m on my way, new friends and new places to see…”* The song from *Brother Bear*. She’d sung it every Sunday. The sound of it unlocks something in my chest, a pain so sweet it’s dizzying.
I take the stairs two at a time, my socked feet silent. I stop in the doorway to the tiny living room, my hand braced against the frame. And there she is.
Mom. Her back is to me, her dark hair piled in a messy bun, a few strands stuck to her neck with steam. She’s wearing the faded blue bathrobe, the one with the coffee stain on the sleeve. She shuffles sideways, a little dance-step as she flips a strip of bacon, humming now, the words trailing off. The sight of her is a physical blow. I can’t breathe.
“Mom.” The word comes out a cracked whisper.
She turns. Her face is exactly as I’ve held it in memory, but alive. The laugh lines around her mossy green eyes—crinkle. A smear of flour on her cheek. “There you are, sleepyhead. I was about to send a search party. You dreaming of storm clouds again?” Her voice is real. It’s not a memory-echo. It’s her.
I can’t speak. I just shake my head, the tears finally spilling over, tracking hot paths down my face. I must look pathetic, a teenager crying in her pajamas, but her smile doesn’t waver. It just softens. She sets the spatula down and opens her arms.
I cross the space in two strides and bury my face in her robe. She smells of Ivory soap, bacon grease, and the faint, always-present scent of the vanilla extract she used in everything. I sob, great, heaving things that shudder through both of us. Her arms come around me, tight. She kisses the top of my head. “Oh, my brave girl. My Bree. It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” I choke out, my voice muffled against her shoulder. “It’s not okay. You left. Everyone leaves.” The confession is ripped from a place deeper than the dream, from the raw nerve James exposed hours ago. “He left her. She didn’t know his name. And I’m so scared I’m going to leave them, or they’ll leave me, and I don’t know how to be what they need.”
She holds me, rocking us gently side to side, her chin resting on my head. She doesn’t offer empty platitudes. She just lets me cry. When my sobs subside into shaky hiccups, she pulls back, cupping my face in her flour-dusted hands. Her thumbs wipe my tears. Her eyes search mine, seeing everything. The lonely girl, the new Alpha, the terrified partner.
“You listen to me, Brielle Ember,” she says, her voice firm but so, so gentle. “You can’t keep people by holding on tighter, Bree. That’s not how love works…”
'“It’s the ground you stand on while they choose to stay. You can’t control their choices. You can only make your own ground solid.” She brushes my hair back. “You have solid ground in you. I felt it. It’s why the storm greeted you. It recognized one of its own.” A sad, knowing smile touches her lips. “You’re not leaving anyone. You’re building a home. And that, my strange and wonderful girl, is the bravest thing of all.”
The dream begins to fray at the edges. The scent of bacon fades, replaced by woodsmoke. The yellow light dims. I cling to her, desperate. “Don’t go.”
“I’m always right here,” she whispers, pressing a kiss to my forehead. Her voice is growing distant, an echo down a long tunnel. “In the quiet between heartbeats. Now wake up, Alpha. Your home is waiting.”
I jolt awake with a sharp, silent gasp. The cottage is dark, the fire reduced to embers. The solid, warm weights of James and Kai are still pressed against me. Their breathing, that steady lullaby, continues. Uninterrupted. My face is wet. I lie perfectly still, letting the truth of the dream, and her words, settle into my bones like stones in a riverbed. *The ground you stand on.* I look at the shadows of their faces, feeling the profound responsibility of it, and the quiet, fierce joy. I am not leaving. I am building. And for the first time, the weight of that feels like strength, not a sentence. I close my eyes, and this time, sleep comes not as an escape, but as a return.