39. Hollow Lanterns

The longhouse settled into the kind of silence that carries other people's breaths like wind through a field. Hannah stood at the threshold until the last of the embers in the hearth winked to a dim orange, waiting for a shape to step through the door that didn't come. Her chest felt like a room with one window boarded up; after weeks of promises and small visible claims, the board had been nailed back in place overnight.

She moved through the sleeping hall by memory - Marcus’s cloak folded over the peg he always used, the faint cedar-sweat on the rope of his belt - but not his warmth. The ache in her ribs was not new; it had been trained into her like a muscle since the mating ball. What was new was the way patience had turned granular between her fingers, sharp as ground ash. She unrolled the blanket on the bench where he’d once slept and smoothed it with hands that remembered the press of his thumb over her scar. The gesture felt like tracing a map to a place that no longer existed.

At dawn she found him at the drying racks, Cora at his elbow, her belly a soft punctuation in the busy air. Marcus’s jaw held a hard line Hannah hadn’t seen when they stood together on the ridge - too many decisions, too many people to bear. When his eyes found hers, there was a flicker - an apology or irritation, it was impossible to tell - before he turned back to the list he was tracing with his finger.

“Hannah,” he said, voice clipped. The word had the edge of duty more than the warmth of the promise he’d made. She stepped closer until the cape at her shoulder brushed his arm; the brush should have been comfort, but he barely noticed.

“You weren’t there last night,” she said. No opening, no question - just the fact, cold and clean.

Marcus’s mouth tightened. “I stayed with Cora. She needed an extra hand. You know how the elders are about presence.”

“And you know how I need you,” she replied. The words were soft, but the pack around them seemed to still at the note. Cora’s laugh - light and private - rose from a few paces away as she wound a length of yarn. Marcus glanced at her, something like longing in his eyes that Hannah could not pretend was only paternal.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m stretched thin,” he said. “There’s a lot - ”

“There’s you,” Hannah finished, because the truth was taut enough to snap. “I’m not asking for every hour. I’m asking not to be an afterthought.”

His anger flickered then, not directed at her but at the world that kept demanding his steadiness in ways that left him ragged. “You think I want this?” he asked. The question was almost a confession. “Do you think I don’t wake up and curse the timing? I’m trying to hold everything together.”

“You hold things together by leaving holes in me?” she shot back, more raw than she intended. The pack’s daily noises - boards creaking, a child crying - pressed in as witnesses.

Marcus’s shoulders sagged. For a moment he looked younger, undone by obligation. “I - ” He stopped, swallowed. When he spoke again, the distance in his voice was smaller, threaded with something she’d missed: fatigue and fear. “I don’t want to lose what we started. I just don’t know how to be everywhere.”

Cora’s hand found his in a private move that made Hannah’s throat tighten. The two of them exchanged a look that said they were building something necessary and quiet, the sort of thing that settles around you like a home. Hannah watched the way Marcus’s thumb rubbed the curve of Cora’s knuckles with an easy tenderness he hadn’t always given her.

She stepped back, letting the air between them contract into a space she could measure. The honest need in Marcus’s voice had been a truth, but it didn’t bridge the cost of his absence. What she wanted - the small, stubborn claim of being chosen in the night - remained unfulfilled.

“That’s not enough,” she said finally, soft and steady. “I need proof, not promises.”

Marcus’s face shifted - guilt, frustration, and the rawest thing of all: the realization that his habits of duty were fracturing the thing that mattered to him most. He opened his mouth, then closed it as if searching for a way to make amends with gestures rather than words.

She turned away before his next plea. The morning light smelled of cold smoke and pine; it felt like the world between them - bright, visible, but still distant. Hannah walked toward the ridge, each step a quiet claim in itself: she would not dissolve into patience until she had been chosen again, properly, wholly. The cost of waiting had become too loud to ignore, and she would not let her love be reduced to a footnote beside a cradle.

Behind her, Marcus watched the curve of her shoulders, the way she carried the weight of her own resolve. He reached for Cora’s hand and did not let go, but his eyes were fixed on the road she’d taken - an unspoken reckoning settling like ash between them.