Chapter 9: Two Kinds of Wanting

Nobody slept.

Maren had the pack reinforcing the gate by lantern light within ten minutes of the dispatch’s arrival, voices low and fast, the particular controlled urgency of people who’d done this before and hated that they had to again. I stood in the middle of it feeling, for the first time since I’d arrived, like the danger genuinely was me … not something happening near me, but the whole reason for it.

“Stop that,” Petra said, catching my expression as she hauled a crate of arrows past me toward the wall. “Whatever’s happening in your head right now, stop it. This isn’t your fault for existing. It’s Malachi Voss’s fault for believing your sister over his own son’s evidence.”

“You don’t know that he did.”

“I know he issued an arrest summons in twelve hours instead of waiting for his son to reach him with the truth. That’s a choice he made. Not you.” She kept moving, but the words stayed with me longer than she probably intended them to.

Maren found me a little later, checking the tension on the gate’s outer chain herself instead of trusting the report of it. “You could leave,” she said, not looking at me, testing the links one by one. “Slip out the back trail before dawn, put distance between yourself and Thorneheart before they arrive. Nobody here would think less of you for it.”

“Would you think less of me?”

“No.” She finally looked at me. “I’d think you were being smart. But I don’t think that’s actually a question you’re asking me, is it.”

“No,” I admitted. “I think I’m asking whether running solves anything, or just delays the part where I have to decide I’m done running.”

Something that looked almost like approval crossed her face. “Then get some rest if you can find it. Whatever’s coming, you’ll want your head clear for it.” She squeezed my shoulder once, brief and steady, before moving on to the next section of wall.

“For what it’s worth,” she added, pausing, “I’ve seen a lot of bonds form over the years. Most of them take their time proving themselves. Yours had two days and already looks steadier than half the ceremony-made ones I’ve watched fall apart over less than what’s coming for you both tonight. Whatever happens, that’s worth holding onto.”

It wasn’t much, as reassurances went. It was enough to carry with me across the yard anyway.

I found Kian near the eastern fence line an hour before dawn, checking the same stretch of reinforced posts over and over, hands busy with a task I suspected he didn’t actually need to be doing.

“You should be resting,” I said.

“So should you.” He didn’t stop what he was doing, but he didn’t tell me to leave either. “Couldn’t, if I tried.”

I stepped in close, wrapping my arms around him from behind, resting my cheek against his back, and felt some of the tension go out of his shoulders at the contact … the easy, unthinking comfort of two days of this being ordinary between us, of not having to ask permission for closeness anymore.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“I keep doing the math on how many hours we actually have left before this stops being hypothetical.” He turned in my arms to face me, hands settling at my waist, his forehead dropping to rest against mine. “And I keep thinking about how unfair it is that I only just got you, and the world’s already trying to decide whether I get to keep you.”

“You’re not going to lose me to a retrieval party.”

“I know that, logically.” His thumbs traced slow circles against my hips, grounding himself as much as me. “Doesn’t stop the fear from being loud anyway. Two days, Ivy. I’ve had you for two days, and I already can’t picture what any of this looks like without you in it. That should probably scare me more than it does.”

“Does it scare you?”

“A little.” He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Mostly it just feels true. Like something that was always going to be true, whether I met you two days ago or four years from now. The timing just happened to be inconvenient.”

“I’m scared too,” I admitted. “Not of them, exactly. Of what happens to everyone here, because of me. You didn’t sign up for a war when you offered me a ride at a border marker.”

“No,” he agreed. “I signed up for something a lot simpler than that. Everything after … the war, the treaty, the retrieval party riding for our gate right now … that’s just what it costs sometimes to keep a promise like that. I’d make it again. Tonight, right now, knowing everything I know. I’d still make it again.”

I kissed him then, slow and unhurried despite the hour, despite the danger sitting a few hours off on the horizon … a kiss that felt less like the first uncertain one in the barn and more like a claim we’d already settled between us, one we were simply choosing to make again because we could.

“Whatever happens today,” he murmured against my mouth when we finally broke apart, “I need you to know this wasn’t a mistake. Not the barn. Not any of it. Some things are worth the cost even when the cost turns out to be a war.”

“I know.” I pressed my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat, steady despite everything. “I chose this. I’d choose it again too.”

We stood like that a while longer, wrapped around each other in the dark, neither of us saying anything else, because there wasn’t anything else that needed saying … just the quiet, solid fact of two people who’d found each other four impossible days ago and weren’t planning to let a summons or an army change that.

It didn’t last.

The horn sounded three short blasts a heartbeat later … not the drill signal, not a single rider this time … and when I looked toward the ridge where the mist should have still been sitting heavy and undisturbed, I saw torchlight instead, a long, moving line of it, far more riders than Ironwood should have needed to collect one rejected omega, and behind them, unmistakable even in the dark, a second column of shapes moving fast and low along the tree line that had nothing to do with Ironwood colors at all.

They weren’t just coming for me.

Something else was coming too, and whatever it was, it was moving with a purpose that had nothing to do with treaties, summons, or anything Malachi Voss’s riders had ridden out to collect.

Kian went rigid beside me, his grip on my hand tightening as he registered the second line of movement half a second after I did. “That’s not Ironwood’s formation,” he said, low. “Ironwood doesn’t move like that.”

“Ashen King’s men,” I said, the certainty settling into my stomach like a stone. “They’re not with the retrieval party. They’re using it as cover.”

“Or they’re using it as a distraction, and Ironwood’s about to find out the hard way that they walked into someone else’s ambush by trying to spring their own.” Kian’s hand found mine in the dark, one last time before the horn sounded again, and neither of us said what we were both thinking … that whatever came next, the quiet, stolen hour we’d just spent on this wall might be the last uncomplicated thing either of us got to keep for a long while.