Chapter 207 SOMETHING ANSWERED

AMARIS

The birds woke me. Or she did. I still cannot say which.

The room was grey at the edges, that hour before the pack house remembers itself, and I surfaced out of sleep all at once with my heart going quick and my hand already pressed flat against my own sternum, and I lay there in the tangle of three people’s warmth trying to work out what had pulled me up.

Then I remembered, and I stopped breathing for a second on purpose, and I reached in.

The way you press your tongue against a tooth. The way you pat a coat pocket in the street to feel the key.

I have a wolf.

I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing out loud in a bed containing two unconscious men, because the last thing this situation needed was me cackling at the ceiling at five in the morning, and also because if I started I was not entirely confident it would come out as laughing.

I know that hollow. That is the thing nobody in this house fully understands about me, not even Nia. I grew up inside the hollow. Every full moon of my childhood I stood in the Stormshadow yard in my nightdress while the whole pack came apart into fur and joy around me, and I reached into my own chest and knocked on the door of the empty room, and nothing ever answered. Darius used to shift ten feet away from me on purpose. He would finish, shake out his coat, and then howl, long and theatrical, aimed straight at me, and the yard would laugh, and my father would examine the moon like a man checking his watch.

I got very good at smiling through it. I built a whole personality on the smiling. Ask anyone.

Twenty-three years of knocking on an empty room.

And last night, in the middle of everything, with Ryker’s rhythm in my blood and Rowan’s mouth at my throat and the moon lying silver across all three of us, something in that room rolled over, opened one eye, hummed once through my bones loud enough that both men stuttered at the same instant, and went back to sleep.

She did not scream this time. The first time, the dream, my first night in this house, she arrived like a fire alarm, shrieking mate into every nerve until I woke up soaked and shaking. Last night she arrived like someone coming downstairs in their own home. Unhurried. Certain of the floor plan.

I turned my head to the left, slowly, so the mattress would not creak.

Ryker was flat on his back with one arm flung across his face, dead asleep, breathing like a man with no enemies, which is the single most inaccurate thing his body has ever done. There was a pillow crease running down his cheek. I studied it for a long moment and filed it away carefully, because Ryker Grave with a pillow crease is ammunition, and a woman living with three dangerous men gathers ammunition where she finds it.

I turned my head to the right.

Rowan slept facing me. Of course he did. Even unconscious the man is deliberate. One of his hands rested at my waist, not holding, just posted there, a sentry that had fallen asleep on duty and would deny it in the morning. His face in sleep was younger and less arranged than I ever get to see it awake, all the calculation smoothed out of it, and I lay there and shamelessly memorized it, because he would never permit the viewing during business hours.

I eased out from between them one limb at a time.

It took four minutes and a level of core strength I did not know I possessed. Ryker frowned in his sleep when my warmth left his side and turned toward the space I vacated. Rowan’s hand followed my hip for six inches, found only sheet, and flexed once, disappointed, before going still. I stood beside the bed with my heart in my mouth until both of them settled, and then I pulled a blanket around my shoulders and crossed to the window.

My spot. My glass. The grounds below were blue and silver, the last of the full moon dissolving into the tree line, the training yard empty, one lamp still burning by the north wall.

I sat on the sill and put my hand back on my chest and tried an experiment.

Hello, I thought, feeling like a lunatic. Are you there.

Nothing moved. No hum, no flicker, no answer. She was asleep again, gone back down into wherever she lives when she is not needed. But the difference, and I sat there a long time trying to find words for the difference, is that the room she went back down into is no longer empty. I could feel her the way you feel that a house has someone home in it even when they are being perfectly quiet. The air in me was inhabited.

I pressed my forehead to the cold glass and let myself cry a little, quietly, in an organized fashion, three tears, maybe four, the amount I could afford before the sniffling woke a wolf or a man.

Then I laughed anyway, once, into the blanket.

Twenty-three years. Darius and his theatrical howling. My father checking his watch against the moon. An entire childhood of the yard laughing, and the empty one, the wolfless one, the daughter with nothing inside her but air and embarrassment, is sitting on a windowsill in the Gravemoon pack house with two fated mates asleep in her bed and a wolf breathing slow and warm behind her ribs.

I wish they could see me. I am mature enough to admit that. I hope it keeps Darius up at night.

Behind me, the sheets shifted.

“Amaris.” Rowan’s voice, thick with sleep, one eye open, his hand flat on the warm place where I had been. “It’s cold. Come back.”

“In a minute.”

“You’re sitting on a stone sill in November.” A pause while his brain came further online. “Is something wrong.”

I checked, one last time. Pressed my palm to my chest. Felt the quiet, occupied warmth of her, sleeping, home.

“No,” I whispered. “Nothing is wrong.”

And for one entire morning, before the drawer and the math and everything the daylight was bringing, it was even true.

I crossed the cold floor and climbed back in between them, and Rowan’s arm came around me and Ryker turned into my back without waking, and I lay in the middle of all that breathing and held the new fact against my chest like a coal.

A door had opened in the dark.

And something had come home.