Chapter 185 Gio and Luna
Gio POV
Week 14
I pack light now. It's one of the things that changed after Jolie touched me and broke something open—I used to travel with the weight of everything I might need to prove, and now I take what fits in two bags and leave the rest.
Luna is more efficient than I am. She's had three bags packed by the door since yesterday morning, and this morning she's reorganizing mine while I'm still deciding what goes in them, which should bother me and somehow doesn't.
"You don't need three tactical jackets," she says, pulling one out and setting it on the bed.
"What if"
"You have me. I've gotten out of worse situations than Nightshade Pack with no jacket at all." She folds the one she's keeping and tucks it in with a precision that makes mine look amateur. "Two is enough."
I let her. That's another thing that changed—I let people help now. It was excruciating at first, the yielding, and now it mostly just feels like honesty.
Through the window I can see Petra and Colm loading the trucks. Nightshade wolves, both of them—the ones who stayed, who chose to come back and forth with me these past weeks when most of the others had already scattered to relatives or neutral ground. Petra's been doing structural assessment on the eastern cabins, the ones the fire didn't reach. Colm handles the wolves who are still angry, which is most of them, which is a skill I've come to respect more than I used to respect strength.
We've made seven trips between here and Nightshade Heights in the last month. Seven times loading materials, seven times walking through what's left of the estate and deciding what can be salvaged and what needs to come down entirely. The main house is gone. The formal hall where my father used to hold pack meetings, where he sat at the head of the table and decided what everyone's lives were worth—gone. I told Petra to prioritize the residential cabins, the medical building, and the communal kitchen. Start with what people need to live. The legacy can wait.
The legacy. I'm still working out what that means now that it isn't what he said it was. We're supposed to leave at noon. I find myself standing outside Jolie's cabin an hour before, not entirely sure how I got there.
She's sitting on the front steps with a cup of tea, her small belly visible now under her shirt, silver glow soft in the morning light. She looks up when she hears me coming and doesn't say anything, just moves over on the step to make room.
I sit. For a while we just watch the compound move through its morning—wolves crossing from the cabins to the main building, Knox directing something near the training yard, the distant sound of Phoenix's keyboard through an open window. It's a real place now, this compound. It took me a while to see it. The first time Jolie brought me here I saw outlaw infrastructure and chaos held together by Ryder Kane's reputation. Now I see what she was already seeing then: a pack. Messy, unconventional, scarred, and real.
"I am going to miss you while you're gone," Jolie says.
Something moves in my chest. "Good." I keep my eyes on the yard. "You should."
Another minute passes. The thing I came to say is taking a while to find the front of my throat. "What if I become like him?" I say finally.
Jolie doesn't react with surprise. She was waiting for it, or something close to it, because she knows me in the particular way that only people who've seen your worst self and stayed can know you.
"Dominic," I say, because I can say his name now without the automatic reverence that was trained into me, though it still doesn't feel uncomplicated. "What if I take Nightshade and I think I'm doing it right and then I look up twenty years from now and I'm him. Controlled, afraid. Willing to trade his daughter to mining rights to protect his reputation."
"You won't," Jolie says.
"You can't know that."
"I can." She turns to look at me, and there's something in her face that is completely certain, completely without performance. "Because you're asking. He never asked. Not once, not ever. He never once sat on a step and said "what if I'm wrong—he just decided he was right and made the world accommodate it." She pauses. "You choose to feel now. That choice changes everything."
I think about the day she did it—touched me and opened something up that I'd kept sealed so long I'd stopped knowing it was there. The first wave of it was overwhelming and terrible, all the harm I'd done landing on me at once, years of cruelty I'd told myself was necessary suddenly wearing the faces of the people it had cost. I'd wanted to be angry at her for it. Couldn't sustain the anger because every time I reached for it I felt the weight of why she'd done it, felt her intent, felt that she was trying to give me something rather than take something from me.
"Luna thinks you'll be good at it," Jolie says.
"Luna is biased."
"Luna has excellent judgment. That's why I trust her with you." She bumps my shoulder with hers. "She'll tell you when you're wrong. Let her."
"She already does," I say, which makes Jolie smile.
We sat for another moment. I'm remembering something she said to me about months ago, right at the beginning when I'd come to her uncertain about any of this—uncertain about leaving Iron Fangs territory, uncertain about going back to a place that was still smoking in places, uncertain about whether Nightshade was something worth saving or just the elegant casing around everything that had gone wrong.
She'd caught me in the main yard as I was heading out for what I'd said was a quick supply run and we both knew was me delaying. She'd put her hand on my arm—not the empathy touch, just her hand—and said, Gio. I love you. I'm glad you're here and I will always be glad you're here. And then, quieter: But don't you think you should go home? It's our family's legacy. Someone who knows what it cost should be the one to rebuild it.
I stood there for a moment not knowing what to do with being told I was loved by the person I'd spent years treating like a liability.
You'd trust me with it? I'd asked.
And she'd looked at me with that particular Jolie expression, the one that is patient and a little exasperated and underneath both of those things completely sincere: I trust you with my pack when I need backup. I trust you with my child. Yes, Gio. I trust you with the pack.
I started going back the next day. "Petra says the eastern residential block is structurally sound," I say now. "We can have families back in those cabins within two weeks if the weather holds."
"And the pack?"
"Thirty-seven confirmed who want to rebuild. Fourteen still undecided." I pause. "Eight who said no and meant it. I'm not chasing them."
She nods like she expected that number or something close to it. "And you?"
"I'm not chasing the eight," I repeat, because I need her to hear it. "That's—that's new, for a Nightshade alpha. The expectation used to be that you hold the pack together regardless of what it costs everyone. You don't let wolves leave. It's a failure of leadership if they go." I exhale. "I'm letting them go."
Jolie is quiet for a moment. Then: "What made you decide that?"
"You," I say simply. "Watching how Ryder runs this place. Watching you. Nobody here is forced to stay. They stay because they want to, because there's something worth staying for. The pack my father built—half of it was held together by fear of what would happen if you left, not love of what you'd lose." I look at the compound again, the ordinary morning motion of it. "I want to build something people actually choose."
She makes a soft sound, not quite a word, and I realize she's trying not to let her face do something it's doing anyway.
"Don't," I tell her.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're being proud of me and it's uncomfortable."
She laughs, sudden and real, and the light in her skin pulses briefly. "Fine. I'll be quietly proud of you inside where you can't see it."
"Thank you."
Another minute of easy quiet, the trucks are loaded now. Luna has appeared in the cabin doorway behind us, two bags over her shoulder, scanning the yard with the calm tactical assessment she does automatically, and when she meets my eyes she tilts her head slightly toward the gate. Time.
I stand. Jolie stands with me, slower with the weight she's carrying, and before I can think of the right thing to say she steps forward and wraps her arms around me.
It's still strange. Being held by her. For so long I thought of Jolie as something to manage, an inconvenience, a problem with a face, and now she's my sister, actually, in the full sense of the word—the person who cracked me open and handed me back something I didn't know I was missing.
I hold her back, careful of the pregnancy, and for a moment I let myself feel what it is to be leaving somewhere that became unexpectedly safe.
"Call when you arrive," she says against my shoulder.
"I'll be back in a few weeks."
"I know." She pulls back and looks at me. The silver glow is very close, very warm. "Don't try to fix everything at once. Start with the cabins and let the rest come."
"That's what Colm keeps saying."
"Colm is smart. Listen to him."
"I listen to people now," I remind her. "It's a whole new character trait I have."
Luna finds me a few minutes later after I finished loading, smiling at me. A few months ago, I would have described our relationship with careful, managed language. Something like partnership or understanding. But last week she sat across from me in the Nightshade advance house while I was going through old pack records and said, very quietly, I think you're the most genuinely changed person I've ever watched, and I looked at her and felt something I didn't have a protected word for anymore.
So I said: "I love you."
And she looked startled for exactly half a second and then said: "Obviously. I love you too. Now help me with these files."
We worked for another three hours. It was the best three hours I can remember.
Luna goes inside to do a final check on the bags as Jolie comes to say her final farewell."Take care of your pack," she answers.
"Take care of my niece," I say.
Her hand comes down over mine for a moment but I pull my hand back, because if I stay much longer I'm going to do something undignified. Luna and I leave at noon. Jolie and Ryder stand at the gate to see us off, and I watch Ryder's hand go to Jolie's back the way it always does.
The road toward Nightshade territory opens ahead of us, and Luna rides beside me.