CHAPTER SIX

KNOX

The penthouse smelled like fresh paint and nobody.

I'd bought the building at two in the morning through Grayson's cousin's real estate contact, paid forty percent over asking price in cash, and moved exactly nothing into the top floor except a burner phone charger and myself. No furniture. No sheets. I sat on the bare floor with my back against the wall and stared at the ceiling and listened.

Below me, they were already awake.

I could hear feet — small, fast, two sets — hitting the wood like they were racing somewhere important. Hunter's voice first, all high and urgent: "The T-rex can't eat the stegosaurus because they didn't even live at the same time, Luna, that's not how dinosaurs work—" And then Luna, completely unbothered, narrating something over him in that calm, authoritative little voice she had. Something about the cereal. Something about how the red ones tasted different from the orange ones even though they were the same flavor and someone needed to investigate that.

I didn't move.

I just sat there with my head tipped back and my eyes burning and listened to my kids argue about cereal and dinosaur accuracy at seven in the morning, and I thought about every single day of the last four years that I hadn't been in that apartment below me. Every morning. Every breakfast. Every time Hunter must've asked a question nobody could answer and Riley had to figure it out alone in a kitchen that smelled like paint and coffee and whatever vanilla thing she always used in her hair.

I stayed on that floor for a long time.

Then I got up, grabbed the groceries I'd had sent up at six AM, and went downstairs.

I didn't knock.

The door wasn't locked. I filed that away — talked to Grayson about it later — and pushed it open with my elbow because both hands were full of bags. The apartment was warm. It smelled like Riley. That vanilla thing, yeah, but also coffee already brewing and something slightly crayon-y underneath, the way places smell when kids live in them and you can't ever fully scrub it out.

Hunter found me first.

He came skidding around the kitchen doorway in socks, hit the tile, nearly went down, caught himself on the counter, and stared at me with those big silver eyes — my eyes, God, it still hit me every time — like I was simultaneously the coolest and most suspicious thing he'd ever seen.

"You're back," he said. Not a question.

"Yeah." I set the bags on the counter. "You like eggs?"

He thought about it with the full weight of a four-year-old's judgement. "Depends how you make them."

"Scrambled. With cheese."

"Okay." He held his arms up.

I picked him up without thinking about it. Just... did it. He settled onto my shoulders like he'd been there before, which he hadn't, not with me, but apparently his body didn't know that because he grabbed two fists of my hair for balance and immediately pointed at the stove like a very small general. "That burner. That one's hotter."

"Good to know."

Luna appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later, looked at her brother sitting on my head, looked at me, and then walked very calmly to the cereal bowl she'd apparently abandoned mid-investigation, climbed onto the counter beside me, and started feeding me pieces of cereal one at a time without explanation. Like I was a horse. Or a very large, moderately trusted dog.

I let her.

I was standing there shirtless in Riley's kitchen cooking scrambled eggs with a four-year-old on my shoulders and another one hand-feeding me cereal pieces when I heard the bedroom door. Bare feet on hardwood. Then silence.

I didn't turn around. Kept my eyes on the pan.

"Knox." Her voice was flat and dangerous and about twelve different things at once.

"Morning." I reached for the cheese. "Eggs are almost done."

She didn't say anything for a long moment. I could feel her standing in the doorway. Could feel her trying to decide whether to grab the twins and run or throw something at my head. I kept cooking.

Eventually she walked to the coffee maker, poured herself a mug, and leaned against the opposite counter with her arms crossed and that look on her face — the one where she was furious but also hadn't slept enough to commit to it fully. She looked at Hunter on my shoulders. At Luna on the counter.

She didn't say another word about me being there. Not then.

It was Hunter who broke it.

We were all eating — Luna very focused on arranging her eggs into a specific pattern, me trying to figure out how to sit on a counter stool with knees my size, Riley at the far end of the table staring into her coffee like it owed her money — when Hunter looked up and, completely conversationally, said:

"How come you weren't here when we were babies?"

The kitchen went very quiet.

Luna looked up from her eggs. Riley's coffee mug stopped halfway to her mouth. I set my fork down.

Hunter just waited. He had this patience about him that I recognized because I had it too, this ability to ask the exact thing nobody wanted to answer and then just... sit there. Comfortable. Certain the answer was coming.

I got off the stool and crouched down in front of him so we were eye level.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

"I didn't know you existed," I said. "I didn't know your mom was gonna have you. And that's — that's on me, okay? Not on her. I should've — I made some bad choices when I was younger and one of them meant I wasn't here, and I'm not gonna tell you it was okay because it wasn't." My voice came out rougher than I wanted. "But I know now. And I'm here now. And I'm not going anywhere."

Hunter looked at me for a long moment with those silver eyes.

"Did you know about the dinosaur thing?" he said. "That T-rexes and stegosauruses didn't actually live at the same time? Luna keeps getting it wrong."

I let out a breath that might've been a laugh. "Yeah buddy, I knew that."

"Okay." He went back to his eggs.

I stayed crouched there for a second longer. Looked up at Riley. She was watching from the doorway, arms crossed, and she wasn't saving me from anything — I'd felt that the whole time, that deliberate stillness of hers, watching me struggle through it — but her eyes were wet. Just barely. She looked away before I could say anything about it.

My phone buzzed while I was washing the dishes. Riley had wordlessly handed me a sponge when I reached for the tap, which I chose to interpret as progress.

Grayson: Pack scouts in Seattle. Two confirmed. Elders know about the heirs. Knox I'm not trying to alarm you but the 60 days might be closer to 30 at this rate. Call me.

I dried my hands. Stared at the message. Put the phone back in my pocket.

Sixty days. Thirty. Whatever we had, the clock was running and the elders weren't going to sit on their hands just because I'd told them to. They'd want the twins brought to pack territory. They'd want Riley classified, catalogued, dealt with in whatever way they decided was appropriate for a half-blood who'd somehow produced two Alpha heirs.

Over my dead body.

I said goodbye to the twins. Luna hugged my knee. Hunter bumped my fist very seriously. I grabbed my jacket off the back of the chair and got as far as the door before I stopped.

There was a shoebox on Riley's counter. She'd shoved it half under a dish towel, but the lid was slightly off — I'd noticed it when I came in. I'd recognized my own handwriting on the top envelope.

She'd kept them. All fourteen letters I'd written her between sixteen and nineteen. She'd carried them across the country and put them in her kitchen and covered them with a dish towel like that was the same as not keeping them.

I reached into the box. Pulled the top one out. Set it on the counter where she'd see it. Not under the dish towel. Just out. Just there.

Then I left without saying a word about it.

I was halfway up the stairs when I heard it.

Not a sound, exactly. More like the absence of one — that particular quiet that happens when someone sits down on a floor and doesn't get back up.

I stood in the stairwell with my hand on the railing and I waited, and I listened, and I didn't go back down.

But I didn't go all the way up either. Not for a while.