42. Wishful Thinking

Hannah stood with her back to the ridge and the longhouse like a hinge that had been slowly forced. She wanted Marcus to find her in the dark because he wanted to, not because an elder insisted or a midwife needed steadiness. The desire sat under her ribs, warm and sharp; she could almost taste cedar on it and the echo of the hand that had first claimed her at the mating ball.

Below, voices drifted up - linen scraping, someone humming a half-remembered tune - and Marcus moved through them, visible, intentional. She had watched him thread kindness with Cora like a seamstress repairing a garment, and she understood the stitch. But understanding hadn't lessened the ache of being a second hand. She remembered the weight of his thumb over the silver-scar on her wrist, the way it had steadied and stung all at once. It had been a promise then. Now she needed to know what that promise kept.

He found her before she planned to find him, appearing at the foot of the ridge with a cloak half-buckled, breath clouding the air. Up close, the cedar-sweat and smoke of his presence rolled into something intimate and dangerous. He didn't offer the scripted words of duty this time; instead his gaze searched hers like a man looking for a map he'd misplaced.

"Hannah," he said. The name held a dozen unsaid things - apology, explanation, demand. It was not enough.

"You promised proof," she answered, the cold in her voice shaped by the frost in her boots. "Not every audience sees you, Marcus. I asked to be chosen when it's just us."

He inhaled, and the sound was small; the ridge ate it. "I know," he said. "I've been... pulled. But I don't want you to think I'm making you an afterthought."

She could hear the tremor under his control, the fatigue that threaded his words. "Then show me how you'll choose me," she said. "Show me a night when your first thought isn't a task."

Marcus stepped closer; the space contracted to the measured heat between them. His fingers hovered near her scar, then curled into a fist. "Two weeks," he offered, cautious as a man setting a fragile plan on a table. "Two weeks where I disappear from the public places. No council duties I'll pretend are unavoidable. I'll be where you are."

Hannah wanted to laugh - at the conditionality, at the debt this sounded like - and she wanted to sob from relief. "Two weeks?" she echoed. "That's a start. It doesn't erase the things already lost."

"I know," he said, voice rough. "I can't undo the nights I wasn't here. But I can be here now. You don't have to keep patien - " He stopped himself, a half-word swallowed. "We can try."

There, beneath the thinning sky, she felt the old thread between them tug. It wasn't a seal; it was a hand extended across a chasm. It asked for work. It asked for trust on both sides.

"Okay," she said finally, and the word was small and fierce. "Two weeks. But you don't get to vanish into 'what the pack needs' and call it sacrifice. You come find me. You come when it's quiet, when I'm afraid. You show me."

Marcus closed the remaining distance with a gesture that was more than public pledge - a thumb brushing the scar on her wrist, a lingering press that anchored both his promise and his hunger. The contact burned with memory and kept no neat answers. Outside, the pack moved on, unaware of the fragile contract formed on the ridge.

"I will," he vowed into the space between them. "You'll have me."

She let herself accept the small truth for now, knowing acceptance could be a trap or a beginning. The cost of this compromise was visible: two weeks to prove priority, and the remainder of their lives to sustain it. The consequence settled like frost on the leaves below - beautiful and perilous.

As Marcus turned to leave, Hannah didn't call him back. Instead she watched the line of his shoulders, stored the cadence of his retreat, and felt, for the first time in a long while, that her place in the pack might be something she had to claim as much as receive.