Chapter 20

FREYA

Damien found me on the back porch three days later, a deck of worn cards in one hand and a look on his face that told me he wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“You’ve been moping,” he said, dropping into the chair across from me without waiting for an invitation. “It’s starting to bring down the whole property. My father mentioned it at breakfast. Said the house feels like a funeral.”

“I haven’t been moping.”

“You’ve rearranged the same three books on that shelf in the study twice this week. I checked. Freya, that’s a cry for help.” He started his mouth curved into a worried smile while he shuffled the cards with a practiced ease that suggested he’d spent more of his life doing this than most people spent learning anything useful. “Gin rummy. I’ll even let you win the first round so you don’t feel too bad about how badly I’m about to beat you after that.”

“That’s generous of you.”

“I’m a generous person. Ask anyone.” He dealt the cards out with quick, easy motions, and despite myself I felt something in my chest loosen slightly, some of the tension I’d been carrying around for days easing back just a little at the simple, undemanding presence of him across the table.

I hadn’t laughed properly since the night of the ceremony. I hadn’t done much of anything except drift through Hamilton land feeling like a guest who’d overstayed an invitation nobody had properly extended in the first place, replaying conversations with Dante that never seemed to resolve into anything I could make peace with. Sitting here now, cards in hand, sunlight slanting low across the porch boards, felt like the first ordinary thing that had happened to me in what felt like a lifetime.

“You’re terrible at this,” Damien said, ten minutes later, watching me discard a card I clearly shouldn’t have. “Genuinely terrible. I almost feel bad taking advantage of it.”

“You said you’d let me win the first round.”

“I lied. I lie a lot, actually, it’s one of my more charming qualities.” He grinned at me over his hand of cards, easy and unbothered, and I found myself smiling back before I’d fully decided to. “You should smile more. It suits you better than the tragic wounded look you’ve been wearing all week.”

“I’ve had a tragic wounded week.”

“Fair point.” He laid down a run of cards with obvious satisfaction. “Gin. That’s four in a row, for anyone keeping score, which is nobody, because you’re too busy losing to count.”

“I hate you a little.”

“Everyone does at first. It grows on people eventually.” He gathered the cards back up, shuffling again, and something in the easy rhythm of it, the familiar clatter of cards against wood, made the whole afternoon feel almost normal in a way nothing had felt normal since the night of the ceremony. “Tell me something about yourself that isn’t about any of this. Ashford, Lucian, my brother, none of it. Just something entirely different.”

I thought about it for a moment, turning the request over, surprised by how hard it was to answer. “I used to want to be a healer,” I said finally. “Before all of this. Before the engagement was arranged and my whole life started revolving around being someone’s future mate instead of being anything on my own.”

“What happened?”

“My father decided it wasn’t a fitting use of my time, given who I was supposed to marry. Said Lucian’s future pack wouldn’t need an Alpha’s mate spending her days elbow-deep in herbs and stitches.” I said it lightly, though it still stung somewhere underneath, one more piece of myself that had been decided for me before I’d been given the chance to choose it myself. “I let it go. It seemed easier than fighting for something that clearly wasn’t going to happen anyway.”

“That’s a shame,” Damien said, and something in his voice had gone quieter, more serious than the teasing from a moment before. “You’d probably be good at it. You’ve got that patient, stubborn thing going for you. Half of healing is just refusing to give up on something everyone else has already written off.”

“That’s oddly kind, coming from you.”

“Don’t get used to it. I have a reputation to maintain.” He dealt another hand, and the moment passed as easily as it had come, though something about it stayed with me anyway, warm and unexpected. “Your turn. Tell me something else.”

We played for another hour like that, trading small pieces of ourselves back and forth between hands of cards, stories that had nothing to do with packs or bonds or banishments. He told me about breaking his arm falling out of a tree at eleven trying to impress a girl who hadn’t even been watching. I told him about the summer I’d spent teaching myself to swim in the lake behind the Ashford house because nobody had bothered to teach me properly and I’d been too proud to ask. He laughed at that harder than the story probably deserved, and the sound of it, easy and unguarded, pulled my chest—that had been wound tight for days— loose.

I laughed too, eventually, somewhere in the middle of a story about a disastrous hunting trip that had ended with half his training group stuck up a tree avoiding an irritated boar, and it caught me off guard how good it felt, how long it had been since laughter had come without effort, without the weight of everything else pressing down around the edges of it.

“There it is,” Damien said, watching me with something like satisfaction. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten how to do that.”

“I hadn’t forgotten. I just hadn’t had much reason to, lately.”

“Well.” He set his cards down, looking at me properly now, some of the usual teasing edge softening into something more careful. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here. Not because of the circumstances, obviously, those are terrible, but I mean it. This place has been better with you in it this week, even with all the moping.”

“You’re just saying that because I’m an easy target for your card games.”

“That’s part of it,” he admitted, grinning again. “But not all of it.”

Something in the way he said it made my stomach tighten slightly, some awareness settling in that I hadn’t quite let myself notice before now, how much easier it had become to breathe around him, how much of the last few days I’d spent looking forward to whatever ridiculous thing he’d say next.

“You’re staring,” he said.

“I am not.”

“You absolutely are. It’s alright, I get that a lot.” He winked, and I threw a card at him, which he caught without even looking, and for a moment the whole porch felt lighter than it had any right to feel given everything that had happened to bring me here in the first place.

“Can I ask you something,” he said, after a while, his tone shifting slightly, some of the usual performance dropping away.

“That depends on the question.”

“That first night,” he said. “When I found you at the border. You were barely conscious, in and out the whole walk back, but you kept saying things.” He hesitated, something almost careful in his expression now, like he wasn’t entirely sure he should be bringing this up at all. “You don’t remember any of it, do you?”

“Not really. Bits and pieces. Why?”

He was quiet for a moment too long, something flickering behind his eyes that looked almost like he’d said more than he meant to. “No reason,” he said, too quickly, reaching for the cards again like he needed something to do with his hands. “Forget it.”

“Damien.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, but the color had risen slightly in his face, and his eyes wouldn’t quite meet mine anymore, and something in the sudden shift of him told me it wasn’t nothing at all. “I just remember more of that walk than I probably should. That’s all.”

“What does that mean?”

He looked up at me then, something caught between amusement and genuine embarrassment crossing his face, an expression I hadn’t seen on him yet in all our time together. “It means I remember every single word you said between the border and the front door,” he said. “Every one of them. I could probably recite it back to you if you asked me to, which you shouldn’t, because some of it was…” He trailed off, shaking his head slightly, a small, disbelieving laugh escaping him. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

“Damien, what did I say?”

“Nothing important,” he said, though the flush hadn’t left his face, and the careful way he avoided my eyes told me it had been important enough that he’d been carrying it around for days without saying a word.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting right now.” He busied himself with the cards again, squaring the deck with more attention than the task actually required, and I watched him for a long moment, curiosity and something else, something warmer and harder to name, sitting uneasily in my chest.

“Was it about Lucian?” I asked, because that felt like the most likely explanation, some half-conscious rambling about the engagement, the betrayal, the wreckage of the night I’d been carried away from.

“No.” He said it fast, almost too fast, and then seemed to catch himself, softening it with a small, crooked smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes the way his usual grin did. “It wasn’t about him. Or my brother, before you ask that next.”

“Then what.”

“Freya.” He looked up at me then, and for once there was no teasing in it at all, just something quiet and a little startled, like he’d surprised himself as much as he’d surprised me. “Can we just leave it. Please. I promise it wasn’t anything terrible. It’s just not mine to hand over like that, not tonight, not over cards.”

I wanted to push. Some part of me, the part that had spent the last week fighting for every scrap of truth anyone would give me, wanted to keep pulling at the thread until it came loose entirely. But there was something in his face that stopped me, some rare unguarded honesty that felt too fragile to break with more questions, and I found myself nodding instead, letting it go for now.

“Fine,” I said. “But you owe me an explanation eventually.”

“Deal.” Some of the lightness crept back into his voice, though not quite all of it, a trace of whatever he’d almost said still lingering in the way he looked at me across the table. “Another round? I promise to actually let you win this time.”

“You said that last time.”

“I know. I’m working on it.” He dealt the cards again, and the evening settled back into something easier, though I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something had shifted in the last few minutes, some door left half open that neither of us had walked through yet.

We played until the light went gold and low across the porch, until the cards became harder to read in the dimming evening and neither of us moved to fix it, content instead to let the game slow into something looser, more conversation than competition. By the time we finally called it, my sides ached faintly from laughing and my chest felt lighter than it had in longer than I wanted to admit, and some quiet, careful part of me understood that whatever Damien had almost told me tonight, I wasn’t going to stop wondering about it until I finally got the truth out of him.