KEISHA’S POV

I didn’t know why I said it.

That was the honest answer. I stood there on the pool deck after the words came out and felt Callum’s go still and Dane’s shock and thought— where did that actually come from?

Like something had been sitting at the back of my throat for months and Vanessa walking in with her swimming wear and her future Luna talk had finally loosened whatever was keeping it in place.

Except I did know where it came from.

Vanessa was going to be Luna.

She was going to stand beside Callum at formal pack events and be introduced by name and hold a position that I had been pretending I didn’t want for months. She was going to walk these grounds and sit at that table and be the official answer to a question the pack had been asking since his wife died and I was going to watch all of that happen from the communications office where I worked and the residential house where I lived and the borrowed bed in Nadia’s room where I had been sleeping for three days.

And Dane.

I couldn’t even have Dane too.

Dane had hurt Lyra.

He had walked away from her without an explanation and left her to spend eighteen months putting herself back together and I had held her hand through that from a distance and promised myself I remembered what that looked like.

Every time he showed up at my door and sat on my sofa and pressed his lips to my forehead, I had been forgetting it a little more but standing there in his jacket on the pool deck. I felt like I was forgetting something I owed her.

"Go inside." Callum said quietly. "You’re cold."

I was cold, so I didn’t argue and I went inside.

I changed out of the swimming wear and into real clothes and sat on the edge of the guest bed where I looked at the wall for a while.

The words I had said were still in the air around me— what am I, actually?— and they weren’t going anywhere.

Oh my god. Why did I say that?

I was there for a long time, just thinking about what I had just said.

I picked up my coat and went back out eventually.

The pack grounds were dark, cold and quiet the way they were in the late evening when most people had gone in and only the patrol wolves were moving. I walked without thinking about where I was going and I started moving towards my residential house on impulse.

Just to see.

Someone was there. My steps slowed as I saw who was there.

Dane was there.

He had another man with him, someone I didn’t recognise, mid-thirties maybe, with the incredible build of someone who worked with his hands.

They were fitting the new door. It was solid and significantly more substantial than the one that had been broken and they were securing the frame, tools out, conversation low between them.

Dane had his back to me. His jacket was off and he was working with the man, assisting him with tools and everything.

So, this was where he came to after the whole pool incident.

I stopped, watched from where I was and thought about Lyra.

She had been completely, embarrassingly, wonderfully crazy about him. That was the only accurate description. Lyra who was guarded about almost everything and kept most people at a careful distance had looked at Dane Wolfe like he hung something in the sky and she wasn’t even subtle about it. She talked about him constantly. Not in the breathless way some people talked about people they liked, more in the way you talked about something that you were utterly obsessed with.

And I had been there through it all.

She laughed differently around him. I noticed that before anything else. Her whole face changed when she spoke about him.

I remembered a Saturday when I was sixteen. They had taken me to the cinema because Lyra had been feeling guilty about spending every available hour with Dane and not enough with me. It was her idea, her way of balancing things, and I had been genuinely excited about it right up until we got there and I realised very quickly that I was not exactly a guest so much as a chaperone nobody had asked for.

I had sat between them with my popcorn.

They talked over my head and laughed at things I wasn’t part of and held hands across my lap like I was an armrest that had been inconveniently placed. Lyra had kept turning to check on me with that guilty bright-eyed look and I had kept saying I’m fine even though I wasn’t.

I had been so jealous.

Not of him. Not of Dane specifically. Of what they had. The ease of it all. The way they existed around each other without effort or performance.

Sixteen year old me had sat in that cinema with my arms crossed and my popcorn going stale and my expression was one of determined indifference that I was absolutely certain was convincing but which had fooled precisely nobody because Lyra had leaned over at some point and apologised to me.

I smiled at the memory now, standing in the dark on the residential path.

I was sixteen and furious about someone else’s happiness.

The man with Dane said something and Dane stepped back to look at the door from a different angle, assessing it, and I watched him and thought about how he had walked away from Lyra without explaining himself and how she had called me from Coldridge eight months later still not entirely okay.

I still didn’t have an answer.

Maybe that was part of what had come out on the pool deck.

Not just the Vanessa of it. The Lyra of it too. The guilt of standing in a pool with a man who had broken my sister and not wanting him to stop.

Dane looked up.

His eyes went to the tree line where I was standing and I stepped back into the shadow and didn’t breathe.

He held his gaze on that spot for a moment. Then he looked back at the door and said something to the other man and they went back to work.

I exhaled, turned and walked back toward the mansion.

The air was very cold and I pulled my coat tighter, walked and thought about what I had said and what hadn’t been said back and the silence that had followed which I still didn’t know how to read.

Callum’s face had gone completely still. Dane had stared at me like I had said something he wasn’t expecting. Neither of them had answered.

What did that mean?

Was the answer so obvious they didn’t feel the need to say it? Or was it so complicated they couldn’t find the words quickly enough? Or was it something in between that I was going to have to wait for and I had never been good at waiting for things that mattered.

The mansion was cool when I pushed the door open. I went upstairs without stopping in the kitchen because I wasn’t hungry nor was I thirsty and what I needed was to sit somewhere quiet and let my brain settle.

I pushed Nadia’s door open.

She was on the bed with her phone held in both hands and her face was filled with shock. What was she looking at?

She looked up when I came in and her expression didn’t change.

"What?" I said immediately.

She looked at me and looked at her phone with her jaw open.

"You won’t believe this." She gasped.

Now what?