Midnight soup-c

It was a coward's question. She knew it the moment it left her mouth. But something relaxed in his shoulders, and she hated herself for that, and hated him a little too.

"It was my mother's," he said. "Before she married my father. Her family kept it for hunting season, and she used to come up here when she needed to be alone." A faint, crooked smile. "She told me once it was the only place in the territory where nobody could find her. I was about eleven. I thought that was the saddest thing I'd ever heard."

"And now?"

"Now I think it's the only place I can keep you safe."

"That's not the same as wanting me here."

"No."

"Do you want me here?"

The question was out before she could swallow it. It hung in the warm air between them, naked and small.

Dante looked at her. It was the first time all night that he'd really looked, with the walls down, and what she saw was so unguarded she nearly flinched.

"I want you everywhere," he said, very low. "In every room I walk into. At every table I sit at. I want to wake up and hear you in the next room, humming that off-key thing you hum when you think you're alone. I want to go to the council and say *this is my mate* and let them do what they will." His voice cracked. "I've wanted it since the day you stitched my arm. And I can't have it, and I've spent six weeks pretending that wanting wasn't the same as having, and I was wrong, and I'm sorry."

Lyra's heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

"That's not an answer, either," she whispered. "It's a speech."

"It's all I've got."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

She wanted to be furious. She tried. She reached down for the anger she had been feeding all day, and found, to her horror, that it was thin and tired and had gone gray at the edges.

"You're going to marry her," she said.

"Yes."

He said it plainly. She was grateful for that.

"And I'm going to be here. In this cabin. Having your baby."

"Yes."

"And you're going to come and bring me soup."

His mouth worked. "If you'll let me."

"That's the cruelest thing you've said to me yet."

"I know."

"No, you don't." She pulled the quilt tighter. "You don't know, Dante, because you get to go home. You get to walk out that door and be an Alpha, and sit in meetings, and kiss someone's hand at the midwinter feast. I'm the one who stays here and *waits* for the truck." She was shaking. "I'm going to listen for it every night. I already know I will. I'll lie in that bed and hear gravel and pretend I'm not hoping. And you're going to know. And you're going to let me."

He didn't answer. His eyes were bright.

"So here is my condition," she said. "I'll stay. I said I would. But you don't get to come here and be kind to me and then tell me it's the best you can do. Either it's real, or it isn't. If it isn't, don't come back. Don't peel me oranges. Don't remember what I said about the tea."

"It's real."

"Then prove it."

"How?"

"I don't know!" She laughed, and it hurt. "I don't know how to prove it. I've never had anything to prove. I just know that if I'm going to sit here for eight weeks and hold on, I need to believe it's not for nothing."

He stood. For a moment she thought he was leaving. Instead he crossed the room and knelt in front of her chair again, and laid one hand, so carefully, flat against the quilt over her stomach.

He did not say anything. He just held it there. His palm was huge and warm even through the wool, and under it, deep inside, something small and fierce seemed to answer.

"That's real," he said, roughly. "That, and you. Those two things are the only real things I've got."

Lyra shut her eyes.

She should push him away. She knew that. She should stand up and open the door and let the cold in. Instead she put her own hand over his and let her head tip forward until her forehead touched his shoulder. He smelled of cedar and snow. His heartbeat was hammering, fast and unsteady, and it took her a long time to understand it was just as frightened as hers.

"Stay a little longer," she heard herself say.

"I can't."

"I know. Just a little."

He stayed.

When he finally left, the sky had paled to the color of dishwater. The stove had burned down to coals, and the quilt had slid half off her shoulders, and she had fallen asleep in the chair with her cheek on her arm. She woke to the sound of the door and found him standing in it, in his coat, with his hand on the latch.

"Lock it," he said.

"I will."

"I'll be back tomorrow. After midnight."

"I know." He paused. She thought he was going to say something else, something that mattered. She saw it move behind his eyes. And then, as always, the door swung shut inside him.

"Eat the bread," he said. "Don't let it go stale."

Then he was gone.

She locked the door. She set the bar across it, as Rhys had told her to. She stood for a long moment in the thin gray light, and then she crossed the room and went to the window.

It was a small window, set deep in the log wall, with glass so old it rippled. Beyond it the valley was a clean, blue-white sheet, unbroken except for the black line of the truck's tracks and the deep prints of Dante's boots going down the porch steps. She watched him walk to the truck. She watched him stop beside it and look back, a dark shape against the snow, and raise one hand.

She raised hers.

The engine turned over. The headlights swung across the trees, and the truck pulled away up the track and out of the valley and was gone. The quiet came back.

It was only then, as she turned from the glass, that something snagged at the edge of her vision.

She stopped.

His boot prints led to the porch steps. She could see them clearly, the big ones, the heavy tread, still sharp in the gray light. They came from the truck to the door in a straight line, and went back the same way. She'd watched him make them.

But there was another set.

They didn't start at the truck. They didn't start anywhere. They came out of the tree line on the left side of the cabin, narrow and shallow, a smaller boot than his, a lighter step. They crossed the white slope to the house in a slow, curving arc. They circled the porch. And they stopped, a few feet from the window where she stood, in a place where the snow lay deep and unbroken on every side.

There was a single print there, pressed deep, the toe pointed toward the glass. As if someone had stood in that spot, still and patient, and looked in.

Lyra stared at it. The frost on the pane was fogging with her breath.

The edges of that print were still sharp. The snow hadn't begun to blur them.

Whoever made it had been standing there while she cried. While she ate. While she put her hand over his and asked him to stay.

And it had not been made an hour ago.

It had been made *just now.*

She took one step back from the window. The bar on the door felt very thin.

Then, out in the white silence, past the last prints, past the trees, something moved: a small gray shape detaching itself from the dark of the pines, and, for one instant, lifting a pale hand in the air.

Not to wave.

To wave her closer.