Toren

Kira*

The forest doesn't look the same going back.

Fear sharpened every branch and shadow on the way in, every root a potential threat, and now, walking between two men who could tear apart anything that came at us without much effort, the same stretch of trees feels almost ordinary. Almost.

"You keep looking at the trees like they've done something to you," Elias says, breaking the quiet we've been walking in for several minutes.

"Habit." I glance at him sideways. "You spend enough time out here alone, you start reading everything as a threat until proven otherwise."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is." A beat. "It's also why I'm alive."

He doesn't answer right away, and I watch something complicated move across his face, admiration tangled with something darker, something that looks almost like anger on my behalf, though I can't imagine why a stranger would feel that on my account.

"How long were you tracking that rabbit," Rhys asks from my other side, his tone deliberately light, like he's trying to ease whatever weight just settled over the conversation.

"An hour. Maybe more." I allow myself something close to a rueful smile. "I don't usually lose track of borders like that. I've gotten good at knowing exactly where I am at all times. It's not a luxury I can afford to lose."

"But you lost it," Rhys says. Not an accusation. Just an observation, quiet and precise the way everything he says seems to be.

"I was hungry." Something uncomfortable sits in saying it plainly, in front of two men who've clearly never once gone two days without eating. "Hunger makes you sloppy. I know better. It happened anyway."

Elias's jaw tightens, that same reaction I noticed in the hall when I mentioned Toren waiting alone. I'm starting to recognize it as something specific to him, a kind of visible restraint, like he's holding back words he doesn't think he has the right to say yet.

"Say it," I tell him, surprising myself with how direct I feel capable of being. "Whatever's sitting behind your teeth right now. Say it."

He looks at me, startled, like he hadn't expected to be caught so plainly. "It's not my place."

"You've known me for two hours and you're already worried about whether something is your place. That's new." I keep my voice light, but there's an edge underneath it, testing him.

"Fine." He exhales, and when he speaks again his voice has gone rougher. "It's not right, that you've been going hungry. That you've been out here for eight months with a child depending on you and no pack behind either of you. It's not right, and I don't have anywhere to put that feeling, because I only just found out about it an hour ago and it already feels like something I should have fixed."

I don't know what to do with that, the raw honesty of it landing somewhere I hadn't braced for. "You didn't cause it. You don't owe me guilt over something you had nothing to do with."

"I know that," he says. "It doesn't change how it sits."

Rhys, walking quietly on my other side, glances between us with an expression I can't quite place, something thoughtful, filing the exchange away the way I'm starting to suspect he files everything away.

"You're very careful with your words," I say to him, partly to shift the conversation somewhere less raw, partly because I'm genuinely curious. "More than your brother."

"Someone has to be," he says, and there's the faintest hint of dry humor in it, enough that I almost smile.

"And the third one? The one who stayed behind?"

"Kai," Rhys says. "He's careful too. Just not with words. He's careful with everything else, and uses words to hide it."

That strikes me as unexpectedly perceptive, a small window into a dynamic I haven't had time to observe firsthand. "You've clearly thought about this."

"We're triplets," he says, as though that explains everything. "You spend that many years sharing a womb and then a childhood, you learn each other's patterns whether you mean to or not."

We walk on, the trees thickening slightly as we move deeper away from Ashwood's cleared land and back toward the wilder stretch where Toren and I have been surviving. I'm more aware than I want to be of the two men flanking me, the strange, unsettled hum beneath my skin that I still haven't found a name for beyond the one all four of us agreed on back in that cell, the one I'm still not sure I believe.

"Can I ask you something," Elias says, after a stretch of quiet.

"You can ask. I don't promise an answer."

"What made you keep going. Eight months, alone, with a child to protect, no pack, no guarantee any of it would work out. Most people would have given up somewhere in there."

I consider the question longer than I mean to, unused to anyone asking me something that actually requires an honest answer instead of a defensive one. "Toren," I say finally. "That's the whole answer. I didn't have the luxury of giving up, because if I did, there wasn't anyone else standing between him and whatever came next."

"That's not nothing," Elias says, quiet, something in his voice that sounds almost reverent.

"It's not heroic either," I say, uncomfortable with the weight he seems to be placing on it. "It's just what you do."

"Not everyone," Rhys says. "You'd be surprised."

Something in the way he says it makes me glance at him, but his expression has gone carefully neutral again, whatever thought prompted the comment tucked back behind that quiet, watchful stillness.

We crest a small rise, and my chest tightens with something that isn't quite relief yet, recognition of the terrain, close now, close enough that if I called out Toren might actually hear me.

"We're close," I say, quickening my pace slightly. "Just past this ridge."

"Kira." Elias's voice, low, stops me for a moment. I turn back to look at him. "Whatever happens with the council, whatever gets decided about you and this bond, I want you to know your brother will be safe here. Regardless of anything else. That's not a condition. That's just true."

I study his face, looking for the catch, the unspoken price attached to a promise like that, and find nothing but the same raw sincerity that's been sitting behind his eyes since the hall.

"Thank you," I say, and mean it more than I expect to.

We start walking again, faster now, and I slow slightly as the reality of the next few minutes settles over me. "Toren doesn't know either of you. He's going to be frightened. He's learned not to trust anyone he doesn't recognize, and I taught him that myself, so I can't exactly blame him for it now."

"We'll follow your lead," Rhys says. "This is your reunion. We're just here to make sure it happens safely."

"Stay back a little, if you can. Let me go first. Let him see me before he sees either of you."

"Understood," Elias says, already slowing his own stride.

I press forward through the last stretch of trees, the smell of old smoke reaching me before I see the camp itself, faint but unmistakable, and beneath it, the sound I've been straining to hear since we started walking.

Toren's voice, low and careful, talking to no one, the way he does sometimes to keep himself calm when he's alone too long.

I break into a run the last stretch, branches catching at my sleeves, and burst into the small clearing to find him crouched by the low fire exactly where I left him, a stick in his hand that he's clearly been using to feed it in careful, measured increments.

"Kira." He's on his feet instantly, relief flooding his face before he catches himself and schools it into something more guarded. "You said you'd be back before it was fully light."

"I know." I cross the clearing and pull him into a hug he only halfway resists, his small frame stiff for a moment before he softens into it. "I'm sorry. Something happened."

He pulls back to look at me properly, eyes narrowing as they take in the state of me, the raw skin at my wrists, the dried blood at my lip. "What kind of something?"

That's when he sees them.

I feel him go rigid in my arms, and I turn slightly, keeping one arm around him, to see Elias and Rhys standing a respectful distance back at the tree line, exactly where I asked them to wait.

"Who are they?" His voice drops low, and he's already put himself half a step in front of me, small as he is, chin jutted out in that same defiant way he wore this morning arguing about hunting.

"Toren, it's alright."

"You said it's alright about a lot of things that weren't alright."

I crouch down to his eye level. "Their names are Elias and Rhys. They're from a pack called Ashwood. I crossed onto their land by accident this morning, chasing that rabbit."

"You got caught," he says, understanding arriving fast, the way it always does with him.

"I got caught. And I want you to listen to me, because what I'm about to tell you is going to sound strange." I keep my voice steady. "There's a bond, between wolves and their mates. I don't fully understand it myself, but somehow, both of them, and a third brother who isn't here, they're all my mates. All three of them, at once."

His face does something complicated, disbelief and fear tangled together. "That's not possible. How can you have three?"

"Apparently you can. It's rare. They took me to their pack's alpha. I told him about you. He's letting me bring you back inside their walls, where you'll be safe and fed, while everyone figures out what happens next."

"And what if this is like the last time?" Real fear in it now, thin and sharp under the bravado. "What if we get somewhere and it turns out they don't want us there, and we have to run again?"

Something cracks in my chest, the memory of Thornvale sitting between us without either of us needing to say the name. I take his hand. "I don't know for certain. But I believe them. And I wouldn't bring you somewhere I didn't believe was safer than out here, alone, in the cold."

He looks past me, toward the two men still waiting patiently, and something in their stillness seems to register with him even through his fear.

"Fine," he says. "But I'm not calling either of them anything except by name until I decide I trust them."

"That's fair," I say, and mean it, fiercely proud of the wariness he's learned to carry even as it aches that he needed to learn it at all.

I straighten and turn toward the tree line, and Elias and Rhys begin to approach, slower than they need to, clearly conscious of not wanting to spook him.

"This is Toren," I say, when they're close. "My brother."

"Toren." Elias crouches slightly, bringing himself lower, less imposing. "I'm sorry about your morning. I imagine it's been a long one."

"You're the one they think is her mate?" Toren sizes him up with an intensity that seems almost comical on someone so small.

"One of three, apparently," Elias says, something wry in it. "It surprised us as much as it's surprised you."

"And what if this is a trick?"

"It's not a trick," Elias says, meeting his eyes directly, no flinching, no talking down to him. "I understand you have no reason to take my word for that. But I'll tell you what I told your sister. You're safe with us, regardless of anything else that gets decided. You can watch me prove it instead of just believing it."

Toren studies him for a long moment. "Okay. I'll watch."

Rhys steps forward now, crouching too, looking at the small, hastily assembled camp. "You built this well," he says, nodding toward the shelter. "The drainage channel. That's smart thinking."

Toren blinks, clearly not expecting praise about something so mundane. "Kira taught me that."

"She taught you right," Rhys says, and something in his quiet, matter-of-fact approval seems to land better with Toren than anything else that's been said so far.

"Did you build camps like this too?" Toren asks, curiosity creeping past his suspicion.

"Something like it," Rhys says. "I used to track for the pack. You learn to read ground quickly, or you learn nothing useful at all."

We break down the small camp quickly, years of practice making short work of it, and within minutes the four of us are walking back the way I came that morning, Toren pressed close to my side, watching the two brothers with the same wary attention he'd give any unfamiliar threat.

"How much farther is it?" he asks after a while, his small legs working harder than the adults' to keep pace, though he's refused, predictably, when Elias offered to carry him.

"Not far. Twenty minutes, maybe less."

"And there's food there?" The question comes out smaller than the rest, more vulnerable.

"There's food there," Elias confirms before I can answer, his voice gentle in a way that surprises me. "As much as you want, whenever you want it. Nobody's going to make you ration it."

"You promise?" Toren asks, and something in the plainness of the question, the way he asks it like he already expects to be disappointed, makes my throat tighten.

"I promise," Elias says, no hesitation in it at all.

He's walking. He hasn't run, hasn't refused, hasn't made me choose between him and whatever this bond turns out to mean. And for now, with the morning's chaos finally beginning to settle into something that almost resembles a plan, I let myself hold onto that small, fragile relief as we make our way back toward Ashwood's walls, my brother's hand still tight in mine.