Chapter 186 Cass and Celeste's Hope

Chapter 186 Cass and Celeste's Hope
Ryder POV 
Week 16
I find Cass in the garage at midnight, which would concern me less if this were the first time this week. He's working on the flat-six he's been rebuilding for months, hands deep in the engine, methodical in the way he gets when he needs something to be fixable. I grab a stool and sit at the edge of his light and don't say anything, because Cass will talk when he's ready and pushing him gets you nowhere.
The garage sounds like tools. Then: "Three months."
I wait.
"We've been trying for months." He doesn't look up. His jaw is set in a way that costs him. "Nothing."
I've known something was wrong, you spend years being someone's closest person, you learn the shape of their silences, and his has had an edge to it for weeks—an edge he smooths out around Jolie, around the pack, keeps contained enough that only someone looking for it would see it. "Is Celeste"
"She thinks it's her." He sets down the wrench but doesn’t pick anything else up. "She thinks the conditioning—that what they did to her—broke something that can't be healed. That she can feel now, and love now, and all of that—but what if they took this too? What if the program didn't just damage her emotions, what if it" He stops then breathes loudly. "She won't say it out loud. But I know what she's thinking."
The breeding program—the Council's project—was designed to produce emotionless, obedient operatives. It conditioned wolves starting in childhood, systematically dismantling everything natural and replacing it with utility. What Jolie's healing restored was the emotional architecture. But healing is different from reversing, and restoration is different from reconstruction, and the body carries trauma in ways that don't always show up in the places you think to look.
"What did Doc say?" I ask.
"He ran every test he had. Physically, everything looks normal. No structural reason they can't conceive." Cass picks up the wrench again, turns it in his hands without using it. "He thinks it might be psychological. Trauma in the body. Something in her nervous system is still operating from the old programming, still treating the idea of pregnancy—of new life, vulnerability, anything that looks like a next generation—as a threat."
"Makes sense," I say, though it's a brutal kind of sense. The Council built their operatives to be weapons. Weapons don't need offspring. The conditioning would have worked against it.
"He suggested more sessions with Jolie. Targeted work—not fixing anything physical, but helping Celeste reconnect to her own body. Her own autonomy." Cass exhales. "Celeste agreed. She's been thinking about it for weeks. She just" He pauses. "She doesn't want to be a project, she wants to be a person trying to have a child."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"No. But it feels like it, sometimes."
Jolie starts the sessions that week. I don't sit in on them—that's between the two of them, and Doc who monitors for safety—but I watch Celeste in the days after, reading the gradual changes in the way I read anything I need to understand. She's quieter, not in the withdrawn way she was before healing but in a processing way, like someone sorting through a room they've been avoiding.
She cries more. That's actually the positive sign, Doc tells me. She's grieving things she had no access to before—choices the Council made for her body before she was old enough to object. The loss of years she spent as a weapon, years her body spent as a means to an end in a program that never asked what she wanted.
"Your body is yours," Jolie tells her in one session—I catch the tail end of it passing through the hallway, not trying to listen but not moving fast enough. "Not theirs. Whatever they designed it for doesn't matter anymore, you decide what it's for now."
Through the door, a silence. Then Celeste's voice, rough: "They took my choice. Even now—even knowing all of this—I'm letting them control me. The way I try to force it, like I have to prove I'm fixed, like I have to produce something to prove the healing worked"
"That's them talking," Jolie says quietly. "Not you."
Another silence. Then: "I don't know how to make it stop."
"You don't have to make it stop, you just have to keep noticing whose voice it is."
I told Jolie about the conversation in the garage a few weeks later—not to solve it, just to say it out loud. We're lying in bed and she's quiet for a moment, her hand resting on her belly where our daughter has been practicing kicks all evening.
"The session helped," she says finally. "I can't promise outcomes, I can't fix what was taken—but she's starting to feel the difference between what they programmed and what she actually wants. That's real."
"Is it enough?"
"It's everything. Wanting something in your own voice, for your own reasons—that's the whole thing." She shifts toward me. "Whatever happens with conception—whether it takes time or it takes intervention or it happens tomorrow or it takes years—Celeste is healing. Her body is hers again. That's not a consolation prize."
I'm in the common room when I hear them. Celeste's voice, then Cass's, Just talking, I decided to mind my business and keep walking.
That evening, Celeste comes to find me in the yard. She looks tired in a way. "Watching Jolie," she says, unprompted, looking across the compound to where Jolie is sitting with her hand on her belly, talking to Doc about something. The silver glowed at her skin catching late light. "She's so—luminous. Not just the power. The way she carries it." Celeste pauses. "I didn't think healing could look like that. That is complete. But watching her made me believe it." She turns to me. "If a divine wolf can carry life after everything the world puts her through, then maybe a wolf they built into a weapon can do it too."
"Maybe," I say as she nods once and leaves.

Late that night, Cass finds me on the back porch of the main building, two beers and the quiet I've been looking for since afternoon.
He sits and takes one of the beers without asking. We drink in comfortable silence for a while.
"Whatever happens," he says finally, looking at the dark treeline. "I'm grateful. She can feel now. She can love. She chose me when she didn't have to and she keeps choosing." He sets the bottle down. "That's already a miracle and I know that."
I think about what it means to have built a life worth living inside the wreckage of a life that wasn't—what it costs and what it gives back and how the two things don't always feel proportional. I think about Jolie laughing in the garage when she told me we were having a daughter. I think about Shadow's certainty, that animal surety that recognized something worth protecting before I even had the words.
Some victories aren't the thing you were aiming for. Some victories are surviving long enough to aim at all.
I put my hand on the back of Cass's neck the way you do with the people who were there before everything else, the ones you trust with the versions of yourself you don't show anyone. "Yeah," I say. "It is."