Chapter 34 *

Chapter 34 *

Emery’s POV

Raised. Mid-reach. Like they were already moving toward something just past the top of the frame.

I stood very still.

Here's the thing about Easthaven: nobody ever asked. Not once in three years did anyone say you used to fight, what was that like, do you miss it. My fight record was a resume item that predated my becoming Keaton's mate, and once I became his mate it stopped being relevant.

I had stopped thinking of myself as someone who won things.

I hadn't noticed I'd done it. That was the part that got me now. I hadn't made a decision to give that up — I'd just slowly, incrementally stopped expecting to be seen as that person, and then stopped seeing myself that way, and the whole thing had happened so quietly that I'd missed it.

Those gloves were aimed at the ceiling like they were about to punch through it.

Something moved in my chest. I don't have a better word for it than moved — not pain exactly, not grief. More like when a joint that's been locked pops back into place. The feeling before you decide how you feel about it.

I stood there and breathed through it and waited for it to settle.

Logan pulled off the apron. He braced both hands against the edge of the counter and looked at me across it.

"Your favorite flower," he said. "And your fight." A pause. "So — can you drop that look?"

"I don't have a look," I said.

I did. I knew I did. But I was annoyed, and it came out anyway.

He didn't respond to that. He just waited, in the particular way he had of waiting that made silence feel like a position.

From the doorway, barely under the threshold of being meant to be heard: Damon's voice.

"Doesn't this look like he's courting her?"

The driver: "Isn't he?"

Damon: "If you asked him, he'd say he's providing support services to a disadvantaged pack member."

Silence.

"...That does sound like him."

I didn't turn around. I was looking at the gloves and thinking about what Damon had said. Whether he meant it as a joke, and what it meant that I wasn't sure which answer I was hoping for.

I looked at the cake for a long time before I spoke.

"You made this for me."

Logan didn't answer. But something shifted in the set of his jaw and I'd been paying enough attention lately to know that was the answer.

The warmth that moved through me had a texture I recognized. I knew exactly what it was. Three years of living in Easthaven had made me very good at exactly one thing: feeling bond sparks at the edge of my awareness and pressing them back down before they registered as real. I did it now. Pressed down, held. The way you press on a bruise to make sure it's still there.

It was still there.

That was different from before. Usually when I suppressed it, I could pretend afterward that there'd been nothing to suppress. This time I knew what I'd done.

I picked up the box and I gave him the real smile.

"Thank you, Logan."

He lifted one finger and pressed the tip of it, just barely, under my left eye. The touch was so light I almost didn't feel it.

"Still red," he said. "I don't understand what you're grieving. Not for someone like him."

"It wasn't for him."

He waited.

"It was for his parents." I kept my voice even. "The Remington elders. They were kind to me. From the beginning."

Damon opened the partition the moment we got back in the vehicle.

Logan sat beside me. I spoke first.

"I know what you're going to say." I held the box on my lap and looked out my window. "You're going to tell me they weren't really on my side. But I was there, Logan. I saw Miriam Remington cry when she found out what Keaton had done. Elder Remington sat with me for two hours and helped me understand the rejection process. That wasn't performance. That was real."

Logan didn't say anything. He just waited.

"They chose to act," I said. "Nobody made them help me. That has to count for something."

Still nothing. He had a way of being quiet that made you keep going — like the silence was a space you were supposed to fill, and eventually you started filling it and then you heard yourself, and that was when you understood what he'd been waiting for.

"They accepted you while you cost them nothing."

I opened my mouth.

"When Keaton violated the mate bond, what they responded to wasn't your grief. It was the breach of their pack code."

I closed my mouth.

"If you had physically harmed Keaton — even in defense, even with justification from the Council — do you think the Remington elders would have stood between you and pack law?"

I didn't answer.

The window was cold against my forehead when I leaned my head back.

"You can be grateful," Logan said. "There's nothing wrong with that. But gratitude and trust are different ledgers. Don't keep them in the same account."

I didn't say you're right. But I didn't argue again. I turned to the window and looked at the passing streetlights. That was my version of conceding — closing my mouth when I still had things to say, because I'd run out of ground to stand on.

I had lost that one.