Chapter 211 RYKER FIRST

RYKER

The training post takes the hit wrong and jars my wrist, and that is how I know I am distracted, because I have not mishit that post since I was nineteen.

Then I see why.

Amaris is crossing the grounds toward me. At seven in the morning. Dressed, hair pulled back, hands buried in the front pocket of that grey hoodie she steals from whichever room she slept nearest. And here is the thing about Amaris at seven in the morning: she does not exist. Amaris at seven is a rumor. Amaris at seven is still two cups of tea away from agreeing to be a person. I have watched Nia negotiate her out of bed like a hostage situation.

So the woman walking toward me across the wet grass, on purpose, with her chin set and her eyes carrying a full night of no sleep in them, is not here casually.

I set the post down and turn to face her, and I wipe my hands on my thighs, and I wait.

She stops an arm’s length away. Close enough that I can see the exact shade of tired under her eyes. Far enough that she has kept herself room to retreat, which she does not know she does, and which I have never once told her I notice.

“I need to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

“I found out yesterday.” Her hands work inside the hoodie pocket. Her chin comes up another degree, the way it does when she is about to walk into weather. “I am pregnant.”

The words land in the yard between us.

And she watches my face. She is not subtle about it. Her eyes go over me fast, checking, hunting, and I know exactly what she is hunting for, because there is one question standing in this yard with us, invisible and enormous, and it arrived the same second the word pregnant did. She has been braced for it all night. I can see the bracing. It is in her shoulders and her jaw and the white of her knuckles through the hoodie fabric. She stood in front of a mirror at some black hour of this morning and rehearsed her answer to the question, and the answer is that she does not have one, and she came here anyway, prepared to stand in this yard and deliver I don’t know to my face.

She came to me first. With no answer in her pocket. At seven in the morning.

The bravest person I have ever shared a room with, and I have shared rooms with people who kill professionally.

I do not ask the question.

I cross the distance instead and take her face in both hands, and her breath catches, and I tilt her tired face up and just hold it there a second, reading it, the exhaustion and the fear and the stubborn lift of that chin, and something in my chest that has been sitting crooked since the full moon slides flat.

“Mine or not,” I tell her, “it’s ours. You’re ours.”

Her mouth opens. Whatever she had loaded, some deflection, some joke with a tremor in it, I do not let her fire it. I kiss her with both hands still framing her face, and she makes a small broken sound against my mouth and her fists come up and twist into the front of my shirt, and I kiss her long enough and thoroughly enough that the rehearsed answer and the question and the whole sleepless night dissolve out of her grip, and when I finally pull back she has to actually take a breath, which I count as a victory, because making Amaris run out of words is a competitive field in this house.

I rest my forehead against hers.

Her eyes are closed. Her fists are still in my shirt. Around us the yard is waking up, boots on gravel somewhere behind the armory, a sentinel’s laugh carrying from the wall, and none of it is invited into this arm’s length of morning.

“I love you, Amaris.”

Her eyes open.

“I should have told you before this.” I keep my hands where they are so she cannot look anywhere but at me. “That’s not a confession. It’s a correction. I’m good at doing the plain things. I stand on walls for you and I drive through the night for you and I put my arm across my brother’s chest for you, and I let the doing talk because the doing is easier. It wasn’t enough. So: I love you. Filed. On the record.”

She stares at me, and her eyes have gone very bright, and the tremor finally makes it out.

“You picked a moment.”

“I meant it before this. I just put it on the record now.”

She laughs. Small, wet at the edges, entirely real, the unmanaged version, and she drops her forehead against mine and I hold her face in the cold morning air while the laugh shakes itself out of her.

A child.

Mine, or my brother’s, or my father’s. That sentence should detonate something in me. I sit with it deliberately, holding her, waiting for the blast, and the blast does not come. What comes instead is the settled thing, flat and solid and finished, the same thing that settled the night I watched her come down a staircase between me and Rowan and understood the shape of my life had already changed without requesting my signature.

The wolf in my chest is not confused either. He took one look at her crossing the grass and lay down.

Hers. Ours. Filed.

I press a kiss to her hairline and keep my mouth there.

“You haven’t slept,” I murmur into her hair.

“I stacked minutes instead. It’s a system.”

“Terrible system.”

“It got me here.”

“Then it can retire with honors.” I pull back enough to see her face. “Have you told the others.”

“You’re first.” She watches me register that, and lets me have every ounce of what it does to me, and then, because she is Amaris, she immediately sabotages the moment. “Don’t make it a trophy.”

“Too late. It’s engraved.”

“Ryker.”

“Already commissioned the case for it.”

She laughs again, fuller this time, and swats my chest with one hand and then leaves the hand there, flat over my heartbeat, and we stand in the middle of the training yard while the pack house behind us clatters into its morning, dishes and doors and somebody shouting about boots, all of it carrying on without the slightest idea that the whole world just reorganized itself on the wet grass by the training posts.

Mine or not.

I hold her, and I mean it all the way down.