FORBIDDEN BY BLOOD,CLAIMED BY FIRE

TOO CLOSE

Colt didn't sleep that night. He told himself it was the coffee, the leftover adrenaline from the ridge, anything other than the truth — that every time he closed his eyes he saw two things on a loop: Dale Whitfield's face the last time they'd spoken, and Wren's hand closing over his arm like she had every right to be there.

He was in the kitchen at 2 AM, laptop open, scrolling through Whitfield's public social media for the hundredth time, when he heard footsteps on the stairs.

Wren appeared in the doorway in an oversized t-shirt and sleep shorts, hair a mess, blinking against the light. "You're still up."

"Go back to bed, Wren."

"You first." She dropped into the chair across from him instead of leaving, nodding at the laptop. "That him?"

He should've closed it. He didn't. "Yeah."

She leaned over to look, and he caught the scent of her shampoo, something warm and vanilla, entirely too close to the part of his brain that had spent all night trying not to think about the ridge. Whitfield's last post was three days old — a rambling paragraph about betrayal, about brothers who turned their backs, about making things right. No location tag. No names. But Colt had read enough of these over the past eight months to recognize the specific, escalating tone of a man running out of patience.

"That doesn't sound like nothing," Wren said quietly.

"No," Colt admitted. "It doesn't."

"So what's the plan?"

"There isn't one yet. I've got a friend from the unit trying to get a location on him. If he actually shows up here, I call the police, I get a restraining order, I—" He stopped, jaw tight. "I do whatever it takes to keep everyone in this house safe. That's the plan."

"Everyone. Or me specifically?"

The question hung there, more honest than either of them expected. Colt looked up from the screen, and whatever careful distance he'd been keeping all week slipped for just a second.

"Both," he said. "But if I'm being honest — yeah. You especially."

"Why me?"

"Because you're the one he doesn't know yet. Beau's been in my life the whole deployment, my dad too — Whitfield's had time to build up whatever twisted narrative he's got about them. You're new. Unpredictable. If he wants to hurt me the way he thinks I hurt him, going after the person I—" He cut himself off hard, like he'd almost said something he wasn't ready to say.

"The person you what?"

Silence stretched between them, taut and electric. Colt closed the laptop slowly, like it gave him something to do with his hands other than reach for her.

"The person I can't stop thinking about," he said finally, low and rough, like the words had cost him everything he had left. "Which is a problem, because you're my stepsister, and I've got a man out there who might already know your name, and neither one of those things is supposed to matter as much as it does right now."

Wren's breath caught. She hadn't expected him to just — say it. Not after a week of silence and walls and four-word answers.

"Colt—"

"I know how this sounds." He dragged a hand through his hair, and for a second he looked less like the soldier and more like a man who hadn't figured out how to want something without also fearing it would be taken from him. "I know I should be pushing you away right now. Not pulling you closer. I've spent eight months making sure I don't need anybody, and then you show up asking questions nobody else bothers to ask, and I—"

"You don't have to finish that sentence if you're not ready."

"I'm not," he admitted. "But I don't want to not say it either."

The kitchen felt smaller than it had a minute ago. Wren reached across the table, not quite touching him, just close enough that the choice was his to make.

He made it.

His hand covered hers, warm and steady despite everything crashing around inside him, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all — because some things didn't need words, not when the silence between them had finally stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like something neither of them wanted to break.

It was Wren who finally spoke, voice barely above a whisper. "For what it's worth — I'm not scared of Whitfield. And I'm not scared of this. Of whatever this is."

"You should be," Colt said. "I'm not exactly the safe option here."

"I never asked for the safe option."

Something in his face shifted — resolve cracking into something softer, something that looked a lot like hope fighting its way through years of armor. He lifted her hand, pressed his lips to her knuckles, brief and careful, like he was testing whether the world would end if he let himself have this.

It didn't.

"Go back to bed," he said again, but this time it wasn't a dismissal. It was closer to a promise. "I'll figure out Whitfield. I'll keep you safe. I just need you to let me."

"Only if you stop trying to do it alone."

He almost smiled — the real one, the one she'd only seen a handful of times, and it did something dangerous to her chest.

"Deal," he said.

She left him there in the kitchen light, laptop closed, phone silent, and for the first time in eight months Colt Reyes sat with the quiet and didn't feel like he was bracing for an ambush.

He felt, for one fragile moment, like a man who had something worth protecting — and someone worth letting in.

It wouldn't last.

Three days later, Dale Whitfield would cross the Maine state line, and everything Colt had built to keep her safe would be put to the test.