FORBIDDEN BY BLOOD,CLAIMED BY FIRE

THE RIDGE

Saturday came in gray and cold, fog sitting low over the tree line like the forest hadn't decided yet whether to let anyone in.

Wren was on the porch at six, coffee in hand, half-convinced he'd changed his mind. Then she heard the door, and Colt stepped out in a flannel jacket and worn boots, a small pack already slung over one shoulder, looking like a man who'd been up for hours and regretted none of it.

"You came," she said.

"I said I would."

"People say a lot of things."

Something flickered across his face — not quite hurt, but close enough that she wished she could take it back. "I don't," he said simply, and started walking, leaving her to catch up or not.

She caught up.

The trail climbed steadily through dense pine, the kind of quiet that wasn't empty so much as full — full of birdsong, full of their footsteps, full of the things neither of them was saying. Colt walked a half-step ahead of her at first, scanning the trees out of habit more than necessity, until she deliberately slowed her pace and forced him to notice.

"You don't have to do recon," she said. "It's a hiking trail, not a hostile zone."

He glanced back at her, something rueful tugging at his mouth. "Old habits."

"Beau said you don't really talk about it. What happened."

His jaw tightened, and for a second she thought she'd overstepped, pushed too hard, too fast. Then, quietly: "Not much to say. We were pinned down longer than we should've been. Lost two guys I'd known since basic. I got out with a medical discharge and a list of things I'm apparently supposed to feel about it that I haven't figured out how to feel yet."

"That's not nothing."

"It's not something I know how to talk about at breakfast either." He kept walking, but his voice had lost some of its edge. "You're the first person who's asked and not flinched when I actually started answering."

"I don't flinch easy."

"Yeah," he said, glancing at her sideways. "I'm starting to notice."

The ridge, when they reached it, was worth the climb — fog burning off below them to reveal the coastline stretched out gray-blue and endless, the little town a scatter of rooftops in the distance.

"Okay," Wren admitted, breathless from the climb. "This is more than decent."

"Told you. We ration our enthusiasm so it hits harder when we use it."

She laughed — really laughed, the sound surprising them both — and he watched her with an expression she hadn't seen on him yet. Something unguarded. Something that looked dangerously close to wanting.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing." He looked away first, out at the water. "I just haven't— " He stopped himself, shook his head like he was recalibrating. "It's been a while since I brought someone up here."

"Should I be flattered?"

"You should be careful," he said, but there was no bite in it. "I'm not exactly a safe bet, Wren."

"Nobody asked you to be a bet."

He turned to look at her fully then, close enough that she could see the exact moment his resolve started slipping — the war between what he'd promised himself and what he actually wanted playing out in real time behind his eyes.

"You're my stepsister," he said, like he was reminding himself, not her.

"Technically. By marriage. Zero blood, zero history, married about a minute and a half ago."

"Doesn't change what people would see."

"Since when do you care what people see?"

That landed somewhere. She watched it land — watched something in him crack open half an inch wider than it had on the porch steps, wider than it had at sunrise with the coffee.

"I don't," he admitted, voice low. "That's the problem."

The air between them went taut, charged, the kind of silence that has weight to it. For one suspended second she thought he might close the distance completely — and then his phone buzzed in his pocket, sharp and intrusive, and whatever had been about to happen folded itself back up and disappeared.

He checked the screen. His whole body changed — shoulders squaring, jaw setting, the soldier snapping back into place like a switch had been flipped.

"What is it?" Wren asked.

"Nothing." He was already turning back toward the trail. "We should head back."

"Colt."

"It's nothing, Wren." But his knuckles were white around the phone, and the easy quiet between them had curdled into something tense and watchful, his eyes sweeping the tree line the way they had that first morning — like he was cataloguing threats again.

She didn't push. But she filed it away, the way she was starting to file away everything about him — the flinches, the silences, the walls he built and rebuilt like his life depended on it.

She was starting to suspect, for him, it once had.