The Second Vow

Chapter 2: The Man I Buried

Josephine's POV

I folded the note twice more, small enough to fit inside my sleeve, and told myself I would think about it later.

Later did not come. Later got swallowed by Carol fussing over my hem, then by the car ride to Colter's Crossing, then by the low murmur of a room full of pack elders who all turned to look at me the second I stepped through the doors of The Long Table. By the time I sat down across from him, the note was a hard, folded weight against my wrist, and I had exactly zero answers about who wrote it or why.

I looked up.

Griffin was watching the door behind me, not me, his jaw set the way it always was in a room full of people who wanted something from him. Then his eyes came to mine and something in his face rearranged itself into the version he wore for guests.

"You made it."

"I did."

Three words each. That was apparently what we had left after everything I remembered and he didn't.

I studied him the way I would study a report from a border patrol. Every angle. Every tell. The man across from me had let his fated mate rip my throat out the first time this dinner happened, and I wanted proof of that on his face, some crack, some tell that would let me hate him clean and simple.

He reached across the table and moved a dish of roasted something toward the far end, without a word, without looking at me twice.

I hated cilantro. I had told him that once, in a version of this life he hadn't lived yet.

My hand still went around my water glass. An ache opened low under my ribs, sharp on one side, and I could not tell if it belonged to the man who remembered a thing he shouldn't remember or the woman who used to love him for exactly this kind of small, unasked for kindness.

"You're staring," he said.

"You moved the cilantro."

"You made a face at it during the engagement dinner. Months ago." He said it like it cost him nothing to admit, like remembering small things about me was just something he did. "Did I get it wrong?"

"No."

"Then why do you look like I did something wrong?"

Because you did, I thought. Because you will. Because I have already buried you once in my head and you have no idea you're standing on the grave.

"Long day," I said instead. "Carol and the sleeves."

"Ah." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "The sleeves."

An elder two seats down leaned in to ask him something about border patrols, and he turned that same practiced attention outward, voice dropping into the register he used for pack business. I watched his hands instead of listening to the words. Steady hands. No tremor. Nothing like a man who had a secret eating him from the inside, which meant either he didn't have one, or he was better at hiding it than I remembered.

I wanted him to be guilty. That would have been simple. Instead I sat there relieved just to watch his chest rise and fall across the table, and underneath the relief, close enough to touch it, was the exact same grief I woke up with three days ago. He was alive. He was also, in this precise unbearable moment, still the man whose silence got me killed.

Both feelings sat in my chest at once and refused to cancel each other out.

"You went somewhere," Griffin said, low, just for me, while the elder beside him argued with someone else about a fence line.

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize." He turned his water glass a quarter turn, an old habit I remembered and he had no business having yet. "Just tell me where you went."

I never actually told anyone where I—

"You don't have to," he said, before I could finish deciding what lie to hand him. "I know brides get like this before the wedding. My mother did, apparently. Threw a vase at my father a week before."

"Comforting."

"Wasn't trying to comfort you." A flicker of something almost like humor crossed his face. "Just telling you it's normal."

It was not normal. Nothing about this was normal, and there was a note folded against my wrist that said someone else in this life already knew that.

The elder beside him laughed too loud at something. Griffin's eyes flicked toward the sound and away again, back to me, quick, like checking a door was still locked. I noticed it and filed it away with everything else I couldn't explain yet.

We ate in a version of silence that wasn't silence at all, full of clinking glasses and low pack business and somebody's toast about the merger of two territories that made my skin go tight. Griffin didn't say much else to me. I didn't push. There was a whole conversation happening under the one we were actually having, and neither of us named it.

I set my fork down.

He noticed.

Neither of us said anything about it.

That was when the doors at the end of the hall opened without a knock, without an announcement, hard enough that every elder at the table turned at once. I felt Griffin still beside me before I even looked, his whole body shifting into something coiled and careful, the way he never once looked at any other guest all night.

Vivienne Lark walked in like she owned the floor under her feet.

I watched Griffin's face do something I had never once seen it do, not in this life, not in the one before it. Something closed all the way down, fast, like a door slamming somewhere behind his eyes before he could stop it.

Vivienne's gaze swept the table once, unhurried, and landed on me.

She didn't look away.