All Chapters of I Fell In Love With Two Rogue Brothers On The Run: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Zane "She's not tracking direction anymore," Bram said. "She's tracking behavior." I looked at him. "Meaning what exactly." "Meaning she's stopped trying to find where we're going and started studying how we move. The unit repositioned overnight. They're not behind us. They're beside us." I watched Aldric sit beside Amara last night for twenty minutes and slept approximately three hours and now Bram was standing in front of me with this and I wasn't sure I was handling the whole thing well. Fifteen years of Beta service to Gorin built foundation and three years of rogue life refined it into something that ran without maintenance... keep moving, keep talking, find the interesting thing in every situation and install it in the space where the difficult thing would otherwise live. The system worked. It had carried me through every loss and every close call and every night on a cold road with no purpose and no Alpha. I watched twenty minutes of silence between Aldric and Amara from a

Aldric "Tell us something about Gorin," Sela said to Bram across the fire. "Something small." Bram looked at her for a moment. Then he said, "He made decisions by asking one question. Always the same one." A pause. "He asked what it would cost the person who had the least." Nobody said anything after that. The fire made its sound. Sela nodded once like she understood it. Zane looked at the ground for three seconds and then looked at nothing. I sat with it the way I sat with everything... completely, without rushing toward what it produced. Grief for Gorin did not arrive in waves for me. It was a weight. Constant. Structural. The kind you carry long enough that it becomes part of how you stand and you stop noticing it except in moments like this one when someone describes him in eight words and the weight shifts and you feel the full size of it again. I had not expected tonight to be one of those moments. I had not expected to sit across the fire from an Omega girl who had laid out

Zane I leaned back against the wet trunk of an oak tree, watching the fire. I’ve been staring at the flames for an hour, trying to decide who in our little group needs a blade to the throat. But the list is empty, and that’s a problem I don’t know how to fix. "You’re brooding, Zane," Bram said, not looking up from his sharpening stone. "It doesn’t suit your face. You look better when you’re making fun of my boots." "Your boots are still ugly, Bram," I said, but the joke didn't have any teeth. "I'm thinking about the rat. About how Seraphine knows exactly where we’re going before we even get there." Bram stopped his stone against the steel. "You think it’s one of us?" "I ran the numbers," I said. I ran them just like Aldric would, one by one, cold and hard. "Not you. We’ve bled on too many of the same rocks for it to be you. Not Aldric, because he’s my brother and he hates Corvus more than he likes breathing. Not me, for the same reason." "That leaves Sela," Bram pointed out

Aldric I saw them in the dark, Zane's hand on her face, Amara just sitting there. It hit me hard, and I acted like I didn't see. Now, two hours into my watch, it's all I can think about. I sat by the fire, staring at the flames. I'm not mad at Zane... we've shared everything since we left the pack. But Amara, she's different. I haven't said a word to her about how I feel, just stayed close, matched her steps on the trail, stopped my knife work when she passed by. That's not a claim, I tell myself. It's just watching. "What am I doing?" I muttered under my breath, the words slipping out. The ruin around us is old, full of echoes, and it feels like it's watching too. I remember when Gorin died. I don't smile anymore. Not since that night. So, why does seeing them bother me? "It's not jealousy," I said to the fire, like it could answer. "It's just there." I poked the logs, sparks flying up. "Feels like it's not going away." The truth is, I'm aware of it now, like how I was aware o

Zane I said it by the fire, just blurted it out without thinking, and now it's sitting there like a rock in my gut. She didn't say anything, just looked at me, and that felt like enough. Morning light hit the camp, and I couldn't shake it. I sat by the fire, poking at the embers with a stick. "What did I even mean by that?" I muttered to myself, trying to laugh it off like I always do. But inside, I was going over what I know about Amara. The way she spots exits in a room before anyone else sits down, like she's mapped it all out. Or how she reads the terrain, deeper than someone her age should. "That's not normal," I said under my breath. "And that ruin we were in? She knew it too well, like she's been there before." I remembered how she said an old name once, casual, like it wasn't a big thing. Her words sometimes slip out funny, like idioms from another time, or references that don't fit. And that exhaustion she carries, it's not from just a hard life. It's heavier, like it's be