[Kira’s POV]
The twins are safe at Shadowpine. Magnus is still here, attending councils, coordinating the Broken Crown mop-up as though nothing has changed. The normalcy is suffocating.
Reports arrive from Shadowpine through Malik’s channels: encrypted, folded inside routine intelligence dispatches, each one carrying the particular weight of information that travels through hostile territory.
“The twins are adjusting,” Malik tells me during our morning briefing. “Castiel has bonded with Theron. He follows the Alpha around the keep, mimics his walk, and tries to lift training swords that weigh more than he does.”
“And Theron tolerates this?”
“He’s been carrying Castiel on his shoulders during morning rounds. Spent an hour teaching the boy to stack firewood — Castiel kept crushing the logs, and Theron showed him how to control the pressure without losing patience once.”
“Theron Nightshade… Patient with a toddler!”
“People change, and Theron most of all,” Malik pauses. “Lyra is quieter. She clings to the wolves I assigned and asks for you every evening. Ciri reads to her at night — northern folk tales that seem to help. The routine is settling, but she knows you’re not there.”
“How does she ask?”
“She says ‘Mama’ and points at the door every night before bed. Ciri told me she holds the doorframe afterward, like she’s waiting for you to walk through it.”
“And Ciri handles this?”
“With more tenderness than I expected from a former intelligence operative. She braids Lyra’s hair the way Celeste apparently braided hers — some family tradition. Your daughter falls asleep mid-braid most nights.”
“Ciri reads to her,” Celeste’s sister reading bedtime stories to my daughter — the symmetry of it sits in my chest with a weight I can’t decide is beautiful or unbearable.
The woman who arrived at Shadowpine as a spy, who was sent to destroy the Alpha who killed her sister, now soothing my child to sleep with stories in the same territory where her own story fractured and rebuilt itself.
“There’s something else,” Malik produces a small, folded parchment from his dispatch folder. “From Castiel.”
I unfold it. A drawing — charcoal on rough paper, scribbles and shapes. But in the center, two figures connected by what might be joined hands. At the bottom, in shaky enormous letters someone guided his hand to form: K.
K for Kira, for the mother he reaches for every evening and doesn’t find.
The tears come before I can stop them — not quietly, not with composure, but with the ferocious force of a mother separated from her children for reasons that are rational and necessary and absolutely unacceptable to every instinct she possesses. The sound that escapes is raw, animal, the cry of something fundamental being denied its most basic need.
Malik stands by the door and lets me break, because he understands that this breaking is not weakness. It’s the pressure that builds when you send your children away and pretend the silence doesn’t scream.
I fold the drawing against the skin above my heart, wipe my eyes, and straighten.
“Council in twenty minutes,” I say.
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