ThorneVale

chapter fourteen

It took Wren four days to actually spot one of them, which she considered, once she noticed, either a testament to their skill or evidence that she hadn't been paying nearly enough attention to her surroundings since the rite.

The car was parked at the far edge of the ridge road, tucked half behind a stand of trees in a way that would have been invisible if she hadn't happened to glance out her bedroom window at exactly the right angle in the early morning light. She watched it for a long moment, waiting to see if it moved, and when it didn't, she pulled on a jacket and walked straight down the driveway toward it before she'd fully thought through what she intended to say once she got there.

Del was in the driver's seat, a paper coffee cup balanced in one hand, and she rolled down the window with an expression that suggested she'd been half expecting exactly this confrontation for days.

"You could have parked somewhere I wouldn't see," Wren said, arms crossed against the morning cold.

"I could have. I also could have just told you where I'd be, since apparently my brother's finally figured out that hiding things from you tends to blow up in his face." Del took a sip of her coffee, unbothered. "Want to sit? I've got a spare cup in the back if you want to make Marcus's morning slightly more awkward by joining a stakeout."

Wren got in, mostly out of curiosity, and settled into the passenger seat with the strange sensation of having stepped sideways into a life she still hadn't fully adjusted to being part of. "How long has this been going on. The watching."

"Since the night the scout got caught. We rotate, few of us taking shifts, mostly just making sure nothing approaches the property without someone noticing." Del handed over the promised coffee, still warm. "I know it probably feels invasive. I'd feel weird about it too, strangers watching my house without me being able to see them most of the time."

"It's strange," Wren admitted. "Though I think I'd feel stranger if nobody was watching, now that I know what's out there." She wrapped both hands around the cup, the warmth grounding in a way she'd started to appreciate more than she used to. "Can I ask you something. About Callum. About before all this."

"You can ask. I might not answer everything, but ask."

"What was he like, before your mother died. Del said it changed him, and I've pieced together enough to understand that much, but I don't have a real sense of who he was before he built all these walls."

Del was quiet for a moment, watching the road, something soft and distant crossing her expression. "He was different. Not a completely different person, he's always had that serious streak, but looser. He used to laugh more. I remember him teaching me to swim in the lake past the eastern boundary, and he'd splash me and laugh like an actual kid, which is hard to picture now if you've only known him since the wall went up." She shook her head slightly, like she was setting the memory down carefully. "After Mom died, he got quiet. Careful. He was only eleven, but he started acting like the world was something to be managed rather than lived in, and it only got worse once he took the Alpha mantle. I think some part of him decided that being careful enough, controlled enough, disciplined enough, would be a kind of armor. If he never let his guard down, nothing could ever get close enough to hurt him or the people he loved the way it hurt our family."

"That sounds exhausting. Being that careful all the time."

"It is. I've watched it exhaust him for years." Del glanced over, something assessing in her expression. "Which is why what's happening with you actually matters to me, beyond just wanting my brother to be happy in some abstract sense. I haven't seen him let his guard down around anyone the way he's starting to let it down around you. Even scared, even careful, even doing everything wrong at first, there's something different in how he talks about you than how he talks about basically anything else in his life."

Wren didn't have a ready response for that, the warmth of it settling somewhere she wasn't entirely prepared for, tangled up still with the lingering hurt of the rejection and the fear of everything Del had just described about the fragility underneath his control.

"I don't want to be someone he has to be careful around," she said finally. "I don't want to be one more thing he manages instead of actually lives with."

"Then tell him that." Del's voice had gone gentle, an older sister's particular blend of protectiveness and honesty. "He's trying, Wren. Genuinely trying, in the clumsy way of someone who's never had much practice at it. That's worth something, I think, even if it's not everything you deserve yet."

They sat together in the quiet car a while longer, watching the empty road, and Wren thought about the man who'd crouched at the edge of her garden four days ago and told her the truth before she had to go looking for it herself, and found that whatever careful distance she'd been maintaining since the rite had gotten a little harder, this morning, to hold onto quite as tightly as before.