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Then he ran. He couldn’t do anything else, so he ran around the compound until he was out of breath.
He found Caitlynn in the kitchen garden, kneeling by a row of something green with Elianna strapped to her chest, humming a tune he didn’t recognize. She looked up when his shadow crossed her.
“You look like you slept in a chair,” she remarked with a lifted brow.
“I slept in a chair.”
She sat back on her heels and studied him, the way she’d studied ward configurations and enemy patrol patterns and every other problem she’d ever taken apart with her hands. “Sloane.”
“She had a nightmare. Sounded like a bad one. I woke her, and she told me to get out.”
“So you sat outside her door all night.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because that’s what you do.” Caitlynn pulled off one glove, brushed dirt from her knee, and reached up to steady Elianna, who had started to fuss. “You’ve been doing it your whole life. You did it for me.”
Chris sat down on the low stone wall beside the bed of herbs. “She wouldn’t even look at me by morning.”
“She looked at you. You just don’t know how to read her yet.” Caitlynn rocked gently, and Elianna quieted. “Do you know what it was like, living with Kahn the first month?”
“You’ve never told me.”
“Because it wasn’t a good story.” She pulled the other glove off, set both in her lap. “I hated him. Not the way you hate an enemy. The way you hate someone who scares you because some part of you already wants to trust him and you don’t know what that will cost. He’d come into a room, and I’d find a reason to leave it. He’d ask me a simple question, and I’d answer it like he was cross-examining me. I threw a book at him once.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did.” She smiled, small and private. “I spent two months treating the best thing that ever happened to me like a threat, because my body didn’t know the difference between danger and intimacy. Nobody had ever gotten close enough to be either.”
Chris looked down at his hands. “That’s her. Exactly that.”
“I know.” Caitlynn’s voice softened. “The mind protects itself first. It doesn’t care what’s good for you; it cares what’s survivable, and for a long time survivable meant alone. That doesn’t change because someone sits outside your door for one night.”
“Then what does it take?”
“More nights.” She looked at him steadily. “The bond doesn’t argue with the mind. It just waits. It’s patient in a way people aren’t, because it isn’t afraid of anything, and eventually the mind gets tired of fighting something that never leaves. That’s not romantic. It’s just true. I fought Kahn for two months, and the bond didn’t budge an inch, and one night I stopped fighting because I was too exhausted to keep it up, and do you know what was standing there when I stopped?”
“Him.”
“Him. Still there. Same as always.” She shifted Elianna higher on her chest. “The bond is stronger than the mind, Chris. It has to be, or none of us would survive what the mind does to protect itself. You staying in that hallway matters more than you think it does, even if she can’t say so yet. Especially because she can’t say so yet.”
He sat with that for a while. The garden smelled of turned earth and rosemary, and somewhere past the wall a patrol wolf called once and went quiet.
“She left the door open a crack,” he said. “When she went back in.”
Caitlynn’s mouth curved. “There it is.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole sign?”
“That’s a woman who has spent her entire life locking doors, leaving you an inch.” She stood, settling Elianna against her shoulder, brushing dirt from her knees with the back of one hand. “Take the inch. Don’t ask for the mile. She’ll close the gap herself, in her own time, and if you try to rush it she’ll bolt the whole thing shut again, and you’ll be back to square one.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can just wait.”
“You’ll find out.” Caitlynn touched his shoulder as she passed him, brief, warm. “That’s what the rest of us did. Ask Viktor sometime how long he waited for Olivia to let him in. Ask Kahn how long he waited for me. Nobody in this pack got the easy version, Chris. You’re not special in that. You’re just late to the club.”
She walked back toward the compound with the baby against her chest, humming again, unbothered by the chill still hanging in the morning air. Chris stayed on the wall a while longer, turning the inch of open door over in his mind like something he could hold.
It wasn’t much.
