UNMARKED

Including Yourself

Bex

He didn't speak to me for the first four days of his oversight, and I refused, out of something too stubborn to call pride, to be the one who broke that first.

I felt him watching, though. Not in the way the rest of the pack watched me. Sideways, suspicious, cataloguing but steady, careful, the way you watch something you're afraid might shatter if you move too fast near it.

It should have unsettled me more than it did. Instead, against every better instinct I owned, it became the one part of my day I found myself waiting for.

On the fifth day, he crossed the yard while I was stacking wet linens, and stood close enough that I had to either acknowledge him or make a visible show of avoiding it.

"You've stopped eating with the others," he said. Not a question. He'd been watching that closely.

"They stopped inviting me." It wasn't entirely true. No one had ever formally excluded me, they'd simply gone quiet whenever I sat near enough to hear, until I stopped sitting near enough to test it. "It's easier this way."

"Easier for who?"

"You keep asking me that." I set down the linens harder than necessary, my raw hands protesting the weight. "Funny, coming from someone who rerouted an entire patrol to avoid being near me."

Something flickered across his face. Not quite guilt, something closer to being caught mid-thought. "I'm here now."

"Watching. Not talking. Not explaining anything." I made myself meet his eyes, because looking away had started to feel like another kind of surrender I wasn't willing to make. "What exactly is the difference, Kade?"

He didn't answer immediately, and in the silence I watched him decide, visibly, not to say something. The same careful withholding I'd seen at the woodpile, the same cliff-edge stillness.

"The difference," he said finally, "is that I'm trying to make sure nothing happens to you that I could have prevented."

"Prevented from who?"

"From everyone." His jaw tightened. "Including yourself."

I wanted to ask what that meant. I wanted to press until the careful wall he kept building between his words and his knowledge finally gave way. But Corwin's second was crossing the yard toward us, and Kade stepped back before I could say anything else, already retreating into the distant, dutiful posture the rest of the pack expected of him.

I went back to the linens. I told myself his answer meant nothing.

I didn't fully believe that either.