Chapter 180: AFTERMATH

AMARIS

The pack house breathed out all at once.

I felt it before I heard it — two hundred people releasing a breath they had been holding for two hours, the floor of the east corridor vibrating with the collective exhale. The threat had been at the gate. The gate had held. Victor’s men had walked away slow and unbothered and it should have felt like a win.

It did not feel like a win.

I had spent two hours inside doing absolutely nothing useful and I would like everyone to know that is its own torture. Nia had tried very hard. She had brought pack correspondence for the Luna’s signature and I had signed three things without reading them because my eyes kept drifting to the window and the window kept showing me the north wall where Rowan was and Ryker was and thirty armed men were standing at a tree line not moving.

Three things I signed without reading. With my name. As Luna.

I have almost certainly approved something terrible.

I was halfway down the east corridor when I saw him coming from the direction of the rampart stairs. Still in the clothes he had been wearing all day. No radio in his hand for the first time in hours. The set of his shoulders carrying something it had not been carrying that morning.

My chest unknotted.

I did not think about it. I just walked straight at him and got both arms around him and held on.

He went still for a second. Just one. Then his arms came up and I felt him breathe out against the top of my head and I closed my eyes and pressed in closer.

Say it enough times and it becomes true.

"We’re okay," I murmured into his chest.

His hand came to the back of my head and stayed there and he did not answer me back and I was grateful for that. I did not need anything from him. I just needed the weight of him and the proof that he was still standing.

When he pulled back his eyes went over my face. My forehead. My cheeks. Then my mouth. He cupped my face in both hands and his mouth found my temple first, slow, deliberate, and then moved to mine and I pressed up into it and let him. He was not in a hurry. Neither was I. I kept my hands in the front of his shirt and held on.

When he pulled back his thumbs were still at my jaw.

Neither of us named it. It was there in the corridor with us anyway — the field full of men who had walked away like a message, the twenty minutes on the wall, the thing Ryker knew that Rowan had not been told yet. Sitting between us in the space where a different conversation needed to happen.

Not yet. Not with his thumbs still warm on my jaw.

"Go change," he murmured. "He’ll want to see his Luna when he comes back."

He’ll want to see his Luna.

I almost laughed out loud at that. Presenting as Luna was a significant ask for a woman whose dress currently held the memory of rain and pine trees and a decision she had made against a corridor door two nights ago. Corvin’s nose was going to do the math before I opened my mouth and there was not enough perfume in my room to fix that and we both knew it and neither of us was going to say it.

"Right." I let him go and turned down the corridor toward my room.

Nobody in this house is ready for the next hour. Including me. Especially me.

I walked quickly. Past the sentinels at the corridor junction who nodded when I passed. Past the linen room that always smelled like lavender. Past the narrow window facing the training yard, where people were moving again, voices coming back slowly, the pack rearranging itself back into something that resembled normal.

I pushed my door open.

Freya was sitting on the edge of my bed.

Hands folded in her lap. Red hair loose around her shoulders. Her eyes on me before the door had fully opened.

I stopped.

I had met Freya in a kitchen when she was mid-slap and had pivoted into making me tea instead, so my baseline for unnerving Freya was already reasonably high. This version, the one sitting completely still on my bed watching the door, was new.

I stepped inside and closed the door.

She tipped her chin toward it. "I knocked. You were not here."

"I can see that." I kept my back against the door. "Is there a reason you are in my room instead of your own."

Freya’s eyes moved over my face. Whatever she read there she kept to herself. She unfolded her hands and set them on her knees and when she opened her mouth her voice had no softening in it.

"Victor is not gone."

I pushed off the door slightly. "His men walked away. I felt it through the whole—"

"He repositioned." She did not shift her weight or change her posture. "Victor does not retreat. He never has. What happened today at the gate was reconnaissance. He came to watch Rowan perform under pressure without Corvin. Without Ryker. He needed to understand the shape of what was here." She paused. "He has that now."

I kept my back against the door.

I kept my voice even. "The next time he comes, he comes knowing exactly how this pack responds when its Alpha is absent."

"Yes." She tilted her head. "And he comes for something else."

I waited.

Freya held my eyes across the room and did not fill the silence.

She pressed both hands flat on her knees. "He did not come today for me. Whatever is being discussed right now in this pack house about what happened at that gate, Victor Hale’s real target was never me. It has not been me for a long time." She kept her eyes on mine. "You should know that before Corvin comes back. Before anyone has a chance to let you believe the version where I was the threat and today was a near miss."

The corridor felt very far away suddenly. Rowan’s hands at my jaw. The sentinels nodding. The floor vibrating with two hundred people breathing out at once.

I pushed off the door completely. "Then what did he come for."

Freya did not blink. She did not drop my eyes or shift or prepare the answer.

The word came out of her quiet and flat.

"You."