15. Quiet Costs, Steady Hands

Hannah wanted, with a single, hot ache, to be the person Marcus reached for without thinking. She waited at the hearth, hands wrapped around the cup of tea until the heat bit into her palms, feeling the bond’s low hum like a pulse under her ribs. Two weeks had smoothed some rough edges - Marcus had shown up more often, his promises less like apologies and more like plans - but the ledger of absence still lived in the margins of her days. You’ve got this, she told herself, soft as a prayer, and let the warmth of the tea soak into her fingers.

He came in with the late light, hair still damp from river rinse, the smell of thyme and the faint medicinal stench that followed him like a shadow. Marcus paused at the doorway and that private recognition slid across both their faces; even after the patrols and the meetings, they could still find one another in a crowded room. He moved to the hearth as if he’d been invited by an old map, dropping his pack, shrugging out of the patrol cloak. “I brought you the last of the chamomile,” he said, and the smaller things - how he remembered, how he softened - made her chest ease.

“Tea, two spoons,” Hannah said, surprising herself with the exactness of the request. She liked that he’d learned to listen to the details. Marcus set the water to boil, elbows brushing hers as he reached for the kettle. The touch was a currency between them now: brief, familiar, alive with unspoken debt and recompense.

They traded small talk like people building a bridge plank by plank - patrol reports, a thin laugh about a pup that stole socks, the way Cora had fussed over an herb bundle until it resembled a crown. Marcus’s hand found hers across the table, thumb tracing the worn crescent hole in her palm. “I promised more hours,” he said, voice low. “I’m trying. I agreed to cut one patrol rotation out next week so I can be here for the dawn that you asked for.”

The relief that folded through Hannah felt almost greedy. “You did?” she asked, and in the question was both gratitude and the old, wary hope. “You know that morning matters.”

“I do,” Marcus said. He let the words sit, then added, “But it’s not always mine to give. The captain has been pressuring me about supply runs. If I have to go, I’ll tell you before the sun hits the ridge.” His fingers tightened once around hers - an anchor. “And I’ll be back.”

She believed him more than she believed the wind. “You’ve got this,” she said, because the phrase had become their talisman, a contract folded into something softer than law.

Two days later, Marcus kept the dawn. They sat on the riverbank with steaming cups between their palms, the light painting his jaw in gold. He kissed her like he’d been rehearsing the future - slow, deliberate, as if to memorize the way her mouth softened. Afterwards, against the hush of river and feathered birdsong, Hannah felt the small, precise contentment of a promise kept. It stitched up a rent she’d been nursing since the mating ball and the attack. It didn’t erase the memory of the silver blade or the way wolfsbane’s threat hummed at the edges of their lives, but it folded that fear into the same room where warmth lived.

Yet duty was a tide, and the next morning it pulled him again. Marcus left with the first edge of light for a patrol that had turned into a three-day run. He bent to press his forehead to hers at the doorway, breath smelling of smoke and mint. “Tell Cora I’ll check the feed stores when I’m back,” he murmured. “I’ll call tonight if I can.”

Hannah watched him go and felt the familiar lee of absence settle. She wrapped the lavender sachet tighter in her fist, a small, stubborn talisman. You’ve got this, she told herself, though the words sounded hollow without him across from her.

The friction started small. Cora’s visits became longer; her hands lingered over Marcus’s arm with the practiced tenderness of a healer who’d spent nights stitching him back together. She praised his work to anyone who would listen, and there was a difference between admiration and ownership that the healer seemed either blind to or willing to blur. One evening, when Marcus had left for patrol and the longhouse hummed with the muted conversations of night, Cora came by Hannah’s seat and did the thing that tightened the marrow.

“You know how worried we all were after the attack,” Cora said, voice sugar-smooth, leaning too close. The faint scent of poultices rolled off her like a cloak. “Marcus has done everything right. He’s been so responsible - so valuable. You should be glad he’s under our protection when he’s not with you. It’s how we keep the pack safe.”

Hannah’s tea cooled in her lap. The words were thin, but the intention glinted: possessiveness wrapped as praise. “He chooses where to be,” Hannah said, because she’d been practicing the phrasing Marcus had taught her - steady, not prickly. “He comes when he can.”

Cora’s laugh was soft and almost kind. “Of course he does. We all have to be realistic. Love makes for poor plans if you forget the pack.” Her eyes narrowed, then she added, sharper: “I just don’t want you to be disappointed when the world calls him away.”

The barb hit harder than Hannah expected. It wasn’t just a warning; it was an accusation dressed as care. Hannah felt heat rise under her skin - anger braided with the hurt of being talked down to. Marcus’s absence felt suddenly exploited, used as a lever to push her off-balance.

“You’ve got this,” Hannah said, more to herself than to Cora, a quiet reclaiming. “I can hold my own.”

Cora’s smile thinned. “We’ll see.” She left like smoke twisting from the doorway, leaving Hannah with the taste of iron in her mouth and the lavender sachet a useless weight in her hand.

That night, Hannah didn’t wait for Marcus to call. She walked to the training yard where he’d said he'd check the feed stores - his promise a compass - and found instead a ledger with his name neatly written across a task list, the pen still uncapped as if he’d been interrupted. The sight flipped something like a switch in her chest: fear spilling into memory, memory into resolve.

She sat on the hay bale and let the cold air find her. The bond hummed - a distance map, taut but not broken - and she let herself admit the vulnerable truth she’d been keeping like a secret: she needed Marcus to choose her not because she feared losing him to the pack, but because being chosen made the memory of the attack and the silver blade feel less like a prophecy and more like a chapter. If he chose her, the threat didn’t disappear, but it had a name she could hold; otherwise it felt like an unmoored threat, waiting to be wielded.

When Marcus returned at dusk, dirt caked at his boots and exhaustion under his eyes, Hannah met him on the threshold and let the confession spill out before she could sculpt it into something polite. “I need you to come back and not make me wonder if I was just filling time,” she said, the words honest and raw. “I don’t want to be careful with my heart because I’m always calculating how long you’ll be gone.”

He looked as if she’d cut into him, but he didn’t flinch. Instead Marcus stepped forward, hands warm on her shoulders, grounding in a way that felt like a homecoming. “You’re not filling time,” he said, voice low. “You’re the place I choose to return to. I can’t promise I’ll never be torn away, but I can promise I’ll tell you when it happens. I’ll take on the cost of being second in the logbooks so I can be first when the lights go out.”

Hannah let out breath she didn’t realize she’d held. The vulnerability had changed the terms between them; it was no longer about keeping quiet to avoid burdening him, or pretending she’d be stoic. It was about the explicitness of ask and answer. “You’ve got this,” she said, and this time it sounded like a pact, not a plea.

Marcus leaned in then, closing the small distance with a kiss that tasted like chamomile and promise. It was not an end to the friction - Cora’s barbs, the patrols, the silver-splintered threat - but it was an earned softening that made the ledger of obligations easier to carry. They retreated to the warmth of the longhouse together, hands linked, both aware that love here meant choosing one another again and again, even when the world demanded otherwise.

You’ve got this, Hannah told herself as they walked, and this time she meant it because he had given her a reason to.