Cassia | The Space Between Trees

He's waiting with both horses at Theron's gate.

He's untethered mine from the post where I left her and is standing between both animals in the dark with his hand on her neck and his eyes on the tree line, and there's something in the picture of it, the easy and unconscious patience of it that catches in my chest before I can stop it.

I walk past him and take her reins without comment.

We ride out in silence.

The Ashwood forest is different to Blackridge's at night, the trees are broader here, the canopy lower, filtering the moonlight into something diffuse and silver. Our horses' hooves are quiet on the pine-needle ground. Neither of us speaks, which should feel tense and mostly just feels inevitable.

It takes twenty minutes before the rain starts.

The sky opens its cold borders and within thirty seconds we're both soaked through.

"There's a shelter," Kade says, the first words either of us has spoken since the gate. "Maintenance cabin, half a mile northeast. We used it for the eastern border patrols before the route changed."

I consider the rain, consider the alternative, which is an hour's ride through it.

"Lead," I say.

The cabin is small, just one room, a fireplace, a stack of dry wood under an oilcloth that someone has maintained out of habit or duty. There's a lantern on the shelf with oil still in it, two coat hooks by the door and a wooden bench along one wall.

Nothing else.

Kade gets the fire going while I see to the horses under the cabin's lean-to, and by the time I come back inside there's real warmth building in the small space and the lantern is lit and he's standing in front of the fire with his jacket steaming, water still running from his hair.

I hang my jacket on one of the hooks and sit on the bench, as far from the fireplace as the room allows, which is approximately six feet. The fire crackles mingling with the sound of rain as it comes down hard on the roof, a relentless drumming that makes the cabin feel sealed.

Kade stays standing, his back to me, his hands braced on the mantelpiece watching the fire.

The silence has a different quality now. Outside, in the dark, on the path from Theron's door, it was something we were moving through. Here, in four walls and firelight and rain, it's something we're inside.

"You're not going to ask," he says.

"Ask what?"

"What happened in there, between Theron and me."

"I was there."

"You were in the doorway." He turns. The firelight catches one side of his face, the scar, the jaw, the eye that runs gold in this light. "You didn't hear what he said before you whistled."

I look at him. "What did he say?"

"Nothing." He turns back to the fire. "That's the point, he didn't have to say anything. Neither did I. We just," he stops.

"Occupied the same room," I say.

"Yes."

The rain continues.

"I know what that looks like," I say. "Two Alphas in a room, I grew up in a pack, remember. I've seen it all before."

"Then you know it doesn't always end well."

"It ended fine."

"Because you whistled."

A pause.

"Yes," I say. "Because I whistled."

He makes a sound that could almost be called a laugh. He turns from the fire and leans against the mantelpiece now, facing me, and in the confined space of the cabin the full weight of his attention is… a lot. It’s always been a lot. I've been managing it since the gate and I've gotten better at it but four walls and no exit and an hour of rain doesn't help.

"I used to be better at this," he says.

"At what?"

"At not," he stops and looks at the ceiling briefly, then back at me. "At not showing it."

I hold his gaze. "Showing what?"

He looks at me for a long moment.

"All of it," he says. "Any of it."

The fire pops and the rain finds a gap somewhere in the eave and drips in a steady rhythm against the outside sill.

I should say something that puts distance between us, something that reminds both of us where we are in this story. I'm good at that. I've been doing it for six years and I've been doing it since the gate and I know exactly which words to use.

I don't use them.

Instead I say "What was it like? After I left."

"Wrong," he says finally. "Everything felt slightly wrong. Like when a tooth is pulled, the shape of the space where it was is more present than the tooth ever was."

"You had a pack to run."

"Yes."

"You had responsibilities. Structure. Duty."

"Yes."

"You had Sasha waiting in the wings."

Something crosses his face. "Sasha was never,"

"I know," I say. Quieter now. "I know she wasn't. I'm not," I stop. Try again. "I used to tell myself she was. It was easier."

He looks at me.

"I didn't touch her," he says. "After. Not once."

"You don't have to,"

"I know I don't have to." His voice is low. "I want you to know."

The rain drums on the roof. The fire settles lower, throwing longer shadows.

I look at my hands in my lap. At the scar on my left palm that I got on the third week of running, climbing through a broken fence in the dark with Leo strapped to my chest, before I'd figured out how to carry both of them at once without losing my grip on things.

"What was it like for you?" he says.

"Running?"

"Yes."

I consider not answering. Consider the wall, the mask, the useful distance.

"Consuming," I say. "Every day was the same, find food, shelter, safe routes, safe people. The twins were small enough that they needed everything constantly and that was," I pause. "That was good, actually. There wasn't room for anything else. There wasn't room to feel what I would have felt if I'd had the space for it."

"And when they got older," he says carefully. "When there was more room?"

I look at the fire.

"Then I got angry," I say. "And I stayed angry because it was cleaner than the alternative."

"What's the alternative?"

I don't answer that and he doesn't push.

The cabin breathes around us. The rain eases, not stopping, just settling into something more sustainable, less absolute. The horses shift in the lean-to. The fire needs another log and neither of us moves to add one.

"Cassia."

"Mm."

"I need to ask you something."

I look up.

He's crossed his arms, and it reads unusually for him, as containment. He's holding himself in place through the structure of it.

"The twins," he says. "I need to know," he starts again. "I need you to say it. Not with hints, I need the actual words."

The fire crackles.

The rain drums.

The horses shift.

My heart’s doing something complicated in my chest that I have spent six years training into silence and which is, at this particular moment, being extremely uncooperative.

This is not the moment I planned for this. I planned a moment with leverage and legal standing and the hearing behind us, with the council's attempt broken and my position established. I planned to tell him from a position of strength, when it couldn't be used against me, when it was mine to give rather than something extracted.

This is a rain-soaked cabin in someone else's forest at night and he's looking at me like the answer is the only thing in the room.

I open my mouth.

The bond pulses low, slow, the bruise of it pressed.

"They're yours." I say finally.

The words land in the space between us dropped from a great height. Kade doesn't move, doesn't speak, doesn't do anything at all. He just absorbs it, and I watch it move through him, watch the thing he's been circling for seven days finally land with full weight, and his face does something I've never seen it do.

It opens. Just for a moment, completely.

Then he looks away to the fire. And I watch him put himself back together, piece by piece, with the slow deliberate care of someone handling something very fragile.

His jaw works.

"I know," he says, his voice barely making it out.

"I know you know," I say.

"I just needed to hear it."

The rain drums.

The fire crackles.

The specific silence of two people sitting with something that has finally been said after years of not being said, and finding that the saying of it is both lighter and heavier than they expected.

He doesn't look at me for a long time.

When he does, his eyes are darker than usual, both of them, the gold and the blue, doing something I don't have a clean name for.

"Thank you," he says.

Two words that are completely inadequate and he knows it.

"Don't thank me," I say. Quietly. "Just don't miss any more of it than you already have."

"I won't," he replies.

I believe him.

That might be the most dangerous thing that's happened all night.

The rain begins to ease properly, the drumming on the roof softening to something gentler. The fire needs a log. I get up and add one, and when I sit back down the bench feels shorter than it did before, the six feet between us collapsed to something that is technically the same distance but doesn't feel like it.

Neither of us moves back.

We ride home in the early small hours, when the rain has fully stopped and the forest smells of wet earth and pine. The horses are rested. The sky is beginning to consider the suggestion of light at its eastern edge.

We don't speak much.

We don't need to.

The thing that has been unsaid is said now, sitting between us like a stone turned over, not resolved, not fixed, not the beginning of anything easy. But real, out of the dark and into whatever comes next.

When Blackridge's lights come into view through the tree line, I feel the bond pulse once more, different to how it's felt since I came back. Not a bruise this time.

Something closer to recognition.

I don't say anything about it.

But I don't shut it out, either.