Chapter 14 014

Chapter 14 014


Dominic's POV

My father asked me to take her out on patrol.

Not told. Asked. My father didn't ask for things — he never had, that wasn't how he operated — so the fact that he used that word told me two things. How much the conversation had cost him. And how much he meant it.

Take her out, he said. Let her see the land. She needs to know what she belongs to now.

I didn't argue with a dying man.

I told her at breakfast. Kept it short — we leave at eight, wear something you can move in, it'll take most of the day. She looked at me across the table and nodded. No questions. No face about it either way.

I'd noticed that about her. She didn't make faces about things.

Eight o'clock she was already outside. Not early enough to be making a point of it, just ready, standing in plain dark clothes with her hair back and her hands in her pockets looking out at the tree line like she was already thinking about what was past it.

We took the south path out of the grounds and into the forest and neither of us spoke for the first stretch. Cold morning, frost still holding in the shadows, the kind of quiet that sits in a forest before it fully wakes up. I kept the pace steady and watched her from the side without making it obvious.

She kept up without working at it. Didn't ask where we were going. Just walked and looked around her — not the way someone looks when they're waiting for something to happen but the way someone looks when they're actually taking things in and putting them somewhere.

.....

East ridge took about an hour.

I stopped at the top and she came up beside me and we stood there with the whole valley spread out below. Pack lands rolling south, the river cutting through the middle, the border forest dark in the distance.

"That tree line," I said. "Eastern border. Forty minutes on foot, twenty if you run."

She looked at it. "What's past it."

"Three miles of neutral land. Then Ashford territory."

"Friendly?"

"Neutral."

She looked at me sideways. "Those aren't the same."

"No," I said. "They're not."

She went back to looking at the tree line. "The other borders."

"North is ours for another two hours on foot. South we share with the Crane pack — allied, thirty years. West is the mountain line."

"What's past the mountains."

"Nobody knows. Nobody that went to find out came back."

She took that in without blinking. Stored it away the same way she stored everything — no drama, just filed it.

We stood there in the cold and I didn't mind the quiet which wasn't unusual except that it was her quiet and that part was newer than I wanted to look at directly.

,......

We worked along the ridge and down into the valley.

I showed her the three eastern border markers. Walked her through the patrol rotation, the schedule, the gaps in the tree line where visibility dropped and you had to go on scent. She didn't interrupt. Asked two questions the whole time — both of them sharp, the kind that only come from someone who listened to the whole thing and caught what mattered underneath it.

Midday we stopped at the river.

She sat on a flat rock at the water's edge. I stayed standing. We ate what Petra had packed and the river was running hard from the week's rain, loud enough that talking over it took effort, which maybe explained why we didn't bother for a while.

I watched the water.

"Can I ask you something," she said.

"Go ahead."

"The girl." A pause. "Three years ago. At the edge of the forest."

I went still.

She wasn't looking at me. Eyes on the river. "Sera told me," she said. "I asked her. It wasn't gossip." She picked up a stone from beside her and turned it in her fingers. "I'm not asking you to talk about it. I just wanted you to know I know the real version. Not what went around." She set the stone down. "That's it."

I looked at the side of her face.

No angle to it. No waiting to see what the information would get her. She'd said what she came to say and now she was just sitting there watching the water like the conversation was already done if I wanted it to be.

"She asked me not to tell it," I said. First time I'd said that to anyone.

Zelyne nodded slowly. "I figured." She was quiet for a second. "That part says more than the rest of it I think."

I looked back at the river.

We sat there a while after that. The water loud, the cold coming up, neither of us saying anything else about it. And somehow that was the most comfortable this whole day had been

She asked about the pack on the way back.

Not the politics of it, not the alliances or the borders. The people. Who'd been here longest, what the older ones remembered, who the children belonged to. The kind of questions you only ask when you actually want to understand a place rather than just get the layout of it.

I answered more than I meant to.

Told her about Sera — how she'd come here young, how she'd outlasted three Alphas, how the pack trusted her in that particular way they trusted people who never seemed to want anything. About the family in the east building whose name was in the founding records. About the two youngest soldiers who'd grown up inside these walls and were good kids who just needed a few more years.

She listened without filling any of the gaps.

"You know them," she said at some point.

"They're my pack."

"Those aren't the same thing," she said. Same thing she'd said about neutral and friendly.

I looked at her.

She wasn't pushing it. Just saying the true thing plainly the way she did.

"You're right," I said. "I know them."

She nodded like she'd already thought that was the answer. No reaction beyond that, no making a thing of it, and something about the absence of that — the way she just took the honest answer and moved on without doing anything with it — sat with me the rest of the walk back.
......

We got to the gate as the sun was going.

She stopped just inside it and turned and looked back at where we'd come from. The ridge dark against the sky, the valley below it, the border forest gone purple in the last light. She stood there and looked at all of it for a long moment the way you look at something you're deciding what to do with.

I stood beside her.

Didn't say anything. Didn't need to.

Then she turned and walked inside and I stayed another moment looking at the same view and I don't know what it was about watching her look at it that made me see it differently. Like I'd been looking at this land my whole life and taken most of it for granted and she'd been here two weeks and was looking at it like it mattered and something about that moved in me somewhere I hadn't expected.

I went inside.

Didn't think about it.

Tried not to think about it.

Thought about it anyway the whole rest of the night.