Chapter 12

He cancelled everything.

She found out from Marcus — who delivered the information with the expression of a man suppressing strong feelings about it — that Ryder had cleared two council meetings, a military briefing, and a territorial review call with the eastern alliance.

"He never cancels the eastern call," Marcus said, setting her breakfast tray down with pointed care. "Ever."

"I didn't ask him to," Ava said.

"I know." Marcus paused at the door. "That's why I'm telling you."

She sat with that information while the morning light moved across the kitchen floor.

Ryder came in at nine with reading glasses she'd never seen before pushed up on his head and a folder he set on the counter and immediately forgot about. He looked at her empty plate.

"You finished it," he said.

"I was hungry."

Something warm moved across his face so fast she almost missed it.

"Good," he said. He poured two mugs of tea without asking and brought both to the island.

They sat across from each other.

It wasn't awkward the way she'd expected. There was no performance of normalcy, no forced conversation to fill the quiet. He opened the folder and read. She rested her chin on her hand and watched the light change outside. The morning passed in pieces — comfortable, unremarkable pieces, the kind she hadn't experienced with another person in so long that she'd forgotten what they felt like.

"Ask me," he said, without looking up from the folder.

"Ask you what?"

He looked up. "Whatever you've been turning over in your head for the last twenty minutes."

She narrowed her eyes. "How do you know I've been—"

"You press your thumbnail against your bottom lip when you're thinking about something you haven't decided to say yet." He turned a page. "You've been doing it since breakfast."

She dropped her hand.

"The summit," she said. "You said you wanted me to leave before you asked me to stay. What would have happened if you'd asked?"

He closed the folder.

He looked at her steadily.

"I don't know," he said. "I didn't let it get that far."

"But you thought about it."

"Yes." No hesitation.

She held his gaze.

"I thought about it too," she said. "After. For longer than I should have."

The admission sat between them — fragile, slightly exposed.

He reached across the island and tucked her thumb into his palm. Not romantic, not charged. Just his hand holding hers in the quiet morning light, two people who had wasted four months and were choosing to stop.

At lunch she let him watch her eat without commenting on it, which he somehow understood as a form of trust. He heated soup himself — she watched him navigate the kitchen with the focused determination of a man who was not comfortable in it but was refusing to delegate — and set the bowl in front of her with a precision that looked like pride.

"It's just soup," she said.

"I didn't burn it."

"That's a very low bar."

"I'm working up to higher ones."

She laughed, and he smiled at the table — a real one, quick and unguarded, gone before she could fully catch it.

After lunch he sat beside her on the couch with a different folder — pack security updates — and she leaned against the armrest and put her feet up. She didn't intend to put them anywhere near him. But the couch was large, her ankles ached, and apparently her body had developed opinions about proximity.

Her feet ended up in his lap.

She tensed.

He looked down at them. Then up at her.

"Sorry," she said, moving to pull back.

His hand closed over her ankles before she could.

He opened his folder again and began to read, one hand still resting over her feet, absent and warm, as if this were something they had always done.

She stared at him for a moment.

He turned a page.

She let her feet stay.

She was half asleep — the warm, boneless sleep of a body that had been running on adrenaline for too long and was finally, carefully standing down — when she felt his hands wrap around her heel and begin to work through the arch of her foot with slow, firm pressure.

Her eyes opened.

"Don't," he said, not looking up from the folder. "You're going to tell me you're fine. Your ankles have been swollen since this morning."

"How do you—"

"I notice things."

She closed her eyes again.

His thumbs moved in steady circles. The relief was immediate and obscene, the kind that made her want to melt into the couch cushions and not speak for an hour.

"Ryder."

"Mm."

"Why are you doing all of this?"

A long pause. The folder turned.

"Because I should have been doing it since April," he said.

She felt his answer in a place she'd been keeping carefully guarded.

She reached down and set her palm over the swell of her belly, and when the triplets shifted she pressed his hand gently until he was resting against the curve too — the folder forgotten, the city outside going golden and quiet.

She felt him go completely still.

"That's all three of them," she said softly.

His throat moved.

When he finally spoke, his voice was very low.

"I'm not going to be my father," he said. It wasn't for her. It was a vow, said aloud, into the listening quiet. "I'm not going to leave them. Not for politics. Not for the pack. Not for anything."

She turned her head and looked at him.

His eyes were on the space beneath their joined hands.

She didn't answer.

She moved her thumb along the back of his hand once — slow and sure — and that said everything it needed to.