Shit. I’m in my feels again.

🍓Fictional men ruin my sleep schedule. Mom life by day, slow burns by night. Cozy, dramatic, occasionally feral, always heartfelt. Welcome to my little kitchen. 🍰

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Chapter 83. No Going Back

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Chapter 83. No Going Back

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[inkmonster21]

I'm Just Next Door

Captain John Price x WifeReader

Series Masterlist

The truth begins to unfold across the world as John confronts General Shepherd in the dark.

83. No Going Back

You called his phone. Not because you thought he'd answer. Because your hands needed something to do besides shake.

The call rang once.

Twice.

Then voicemail.

You hung up and called again.

And again.

And again.

By the tenth time, Margot had started saying, "Where's Dada?" in that questioning little voice that made your chest feel split right down the middle. Peach set the football down and moved closer, her eyes huge.

"Mommy?"

You turned away from them because you could not let them see your face yet. Not fully. Not until you had something. Anything. A text. A stupid explanation. A call in. A dead phone. Anything that made this something other than what your body was already telling you it was.

Your thumb shook over the screen.

Anne first.

She answered on the second ring, breathless, like she'd been moving around her kitchen. "Hi, love. Everything alright?"

Your mouth went dry.

"Have you heard from John?"

A pause.

Not long. Just enough.

"No. Why?"

You looked at the empty back door. The silent hall. The place by the wall where his bag should have been. "He's gone."

"What do you mean, gone?"

You laughed once, a small broken sound you did not mean to make. "I mean I came home and he wasn't here. His duffel's gone. There's no note. He's not answering his phone."

Anne's voice sharpened immediately. "When did you last see him?"

"At lunch. Before the park. He said he had work things to handle while I took the girls out."

"And he hasn't answered since?"

"No."

Margot started wriggling in your arms. You set her down before you dropped her, and she toddled straight for the lower cupboard because of course she did. Peach stood very still beside the table.

Anne took one controlled breath. "Maybe he got called in. Maybe it happened fast."

"That's what I'm telling myself."

But even as you said it, the words felt thin. Not a lie. Just not enough.

"Well don't panic, love," Anne said. "You keep trying him."

You nodded before remembering she couldn't see you. "Okay."

The line went dead.

You called Clare next.

No answer the first time.

She called back thirty seconds later. "What's wrong?"

No preamble. That should have helped. It didn't.

"John's gone."

"Gone where?"

"I don't know."

The silence on her end hit harder than words.

"When did you last see him?" she asked, echoing her mother exactly.

"Before the park. He was home. Everything was normal. And then I came back and he was just..." You swallowed. "Gone."

"Have you called him?"

"Over and over."

"Anyone from base?"

"Not yet."

"Call them."

"I'm calling everyone."

Clare's voice softened around the edges without losing any of its force. "Okay. Do that. We'll figure it out."

You wanted to believe that.

You thanked her. Hung up. Called again.

His phone rang.

Rang.

Voicemail.

Peach climbed onto a kitchen chair so she could be closer to you. "Mommy, is Daddy at work?"

You looked at her.

At her little flushed face from the park. Her hair half-falling out of the ponytail you'd done this morning. The way she was already bracing for your answer because she knew something was wrong, even if she could not name it yet.

"I don't know, baby."

That was the first true thing you'd said out loud since walking into the house.

Peach's mouth turned down. "Why are you scared?"

God.

You crossed the kitchen in two steps and pulled her into you. She came without hesitation, all warm child weight and trust and confusion.

"I'm just trying to find him," you whispered into her hair.

Margot made a loud, indignant sound from the floor because Slinky had walked away from her again. The sheer normality of it nearly knocked you over.

You called Simon next.

Ghost answered on the third ring with no greeting at all. "Yeah?"

It almost made you laugh. Almost.

"Simon. Have you heard from John?"

Silence.

Then, sharper, "No."

Your hand tightened around the phone. "He left."

"What?"

"He told me to take the girls to the park while he handled work things. I came back and he was gone."

Ghost did not speak for one full second.

When he did, his voice had gone flatter somehow. "He contact you at all?"

"No."

"No message?"

"No."

Behind you, Peach had started rubbing your back in little awkward circles the way she did when she thought someone might cry. You closed your eyes.

Ghost swore once under his breath. "I haven't heard from him. Neither has Gaz, unless he's hiding it badly."

"You'd know if he was, right?"

"Yes."

That answer came too fast to be comforting.

"Can you call him?"

A beat. "Already am."

You pressed your free hand over your mouth.

If Simon was calling too, then whatever this was had spread outside your panic now. It was real enough to belong to other people.

"I'll let you know," he said.

"Please."

He hung up without saying goodbye.

You called Gaz.

No answer.

Called again.

This time he picked up, breathless, voice low. "Hey."

"Kyle. Have you heard from John?"

His silence was different from the others. Immediate and wrong.

"No."

Something inside you sank harder. "No?"

"No. What's happened?"

You repeated it again. The park. The empty house. No note. No answer.

By the time you finished, Gaz had stopped breathing normally too.

"I've not heard from him," he said carefully. "Not since..."

He stopped.

"Since what?"

Another beat.

"Not since earlier."

Earlier when?

The question sat there, huge and terrible and unanswered.

You gripped the edge of the counter because your knees suddenly did not feel trustworthy. "Kyle. Please."

He lowered his voice further. "I'm trying not to jump to conclusions, alright?"

You almost snapped that you were already there. Living in them. Drowning in them. But Peach was still pressed against your side and Margot was now trying to climb the open dishwasher.

Instead you said, "Please just tell me if you know something."

"I don't," he said, and you believed him. That was the problem. "I'd tell you if I did."

He would. Gaz would not lie to you. Not like that.

"Okay."

"I'll keep trying him."

"Okay."

You hung up and the kitchen seemed to tilt a little.

Peach looked up at you, frightened now because your fear had become too obvious to hide. "Mommy?"

You swallowed and forced your voice to steady. "Can you please go sit on the couch with your sister for a minute?"

"I wanna stay with you."

"I know, baby. I'm just a little— just—Please?"

She nodded because she was a good girl and because she could feel the edge in you. She climbed down, took Margot's hand with grave determination, and led her into the living room.

Margot followed for exactly three steps before sitting down hard on the rug and yelling at a toy truck.

You stared at your phone.

Johnny.

You shouldn't. He was still recovering. Still hurt. Still not supposed to be handling everyone else's panic.

You called him anyway.

He answered on the third ring sounding half asleep and entirely confused. "Hello to you, Mrs. Price."

The second you heard his voice, you almost cried.

"Johnny."

He went alert instantly. "What's wrong?"

"Have you heard from John?"

Silence.

Then, too sharp, "No."

Your grip on the phone became painful. "Okay, so. No one has."

"What d'you mean no one has?"

You said it all again. You were beginning to hate the sound of your own voice saying those words. He left. No note. Not answering. Gone.

By the end of it Johnny had stopped sounding sleepy altogether.

"That's not like him."

No.

No, it wasn't.

That was the knife under all of it.

If he had been called in, he would have texted. Left a note. Told Anne. Told Ghost. Told somebody.

He would not have just vanished.

"He was weird all week," you said before you could stop yourself.

Johnny was quiet.

"Different," you pressed on, because now that you'd started you couldn't bear the weight of it alone. "Soft. Too attentive. He took me out last night and he was... Fuck... I don't know. Emotional. I thought it was just the kids and the op and everything, but now..."

Now it looked like goodbye.

You did not say that.

Johnny did not either.

But something changed in his breathing.

"Kate," he said suddenly.

You straightened. "What?"

"Call Laswell."

Your mouth went dry all over again. "Why?"

"Because if anyone knows where the bloody hell he is, it'll be her."

Fear shifted shape then. Not smaller. Sharper.

Because of course.

Of course.

Not some accident on the road. Not some dead phone. Not paperwork at base that had swallowed his time.

Something else.

Something with edges you couldn't yet see.

Johnny must have heard the silence on your end because his voice softened, rough with pain and frustration and something close to guilt. "Bonnie, call Kate."

You nodded before remembering again that no one on the phone could see you. "Okay."

"Call me after."

"Johnny, you should be resting."

"Don't start that shite."

That almost sounded like him. Almost.

You hung up.

For a second you just stood there in your own kitchen with your own house around you and felt humiliation begin to pulse in the edges of the fear. Not fully formed yet. Not named. Just the first ugly suggestion of it.

What if he had chosen this?

No.

No. Immediate call in. Emergency movement. Something mission-related and fast and stupid and ugly. There had to be an explanation. There had to.

You opened your contacts and hit Kate.

She answered on the first ring.

That alone made your stomach drop.

"Laswell."

Her voice was clipped, professional, and not at all surprised to hear yours.

"It's me."

"I know."

You closed your eyes.

Peach had turned the television on for Margot in the living room. Some bright cartoon voice sang about vegetables while your whole world narrowed to the sound of Kate breathing at the other end of the line.

"Where is he?" you asked.

No hello. No pretense. No room left for it.

Kate was silent for one beat too long.

Then: "I can't answer that right now."

The humiliation arrived then, full force and burning.

Not because of what she said.

Because of what it meant.

She knew.

She knew something.

And no one had told you.

You gripped the phone so hard your fingers hurt. "Goddamn it, Kate!"

Her voice softened by less than an inch. "I'm coming over tomorrow."

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

As if tonight was something you were just meant to survive in the meantime.

"I need to know where my husband is!"

"I know."

"No," you snapped, all the fear finally turning sharp enough to cut. "You clearly fucking don't!"

There was movement on her end. A door shutting. The sound of her stepping somewhere quieter before she spoke again.

"I'm not doing this over the phone."

Your breath caught. "Doing what?"

Another pause.

Not long.

Long enough.

"I'll be there by tomorrow morning."

The room blurred for a second.

You stared at the dark kitchen window, at your own reflection there. Hair half fallen out. Park bag still on the floor by the back door. One child in the living room trying very hard not to listen and another too little to understand but old enough to feel panic humming through walls.

"What the hell am I supposed to tell the girls? Is he working? Why couldn't he tell me?"

Kate did not answer immediately.

That was answer enough too.

Finally she said, "Tell them Daddy's away for work. That part is true."

True.

The word made you feel sick.

You swallowed hard enough to hurt. "Tomorrow?"

"Yes."

Then the line went dead.

You stood there with the silent phone in your hand and did not move.

Fear before humiliation.

That was the shape of the night.

Not grief yet. Not anger clear enough to carry. Just fear. Raw and bright and directionless, filling every room in the house before whatever came next could settle on top of it.

Peach appeared in the kitchen doorway in her socks, trying to look brave and not managing it at all.

"Mommy?"

You looked at her.

At your daughter.

At the child who still believed adults knew how to make sense of things if given enough time.

You knelt and opened your arms and she came to you instantly. You pulled her in so tight she made a little startled sound.

"Is Daddy okay?" she whispered.

You shut your eyes.

There had to be an explanation.

There had to.

"He got called into work again," you said, because it was the only truth anyone had given you to work with. "Auntie Kate's coming tomorrow."

Peach pulled back enough to search your face. "Why?"

You could not answer that.

Margot wandered in behind her clutching a toy spoon, took one look at both of you on the kitchen floor, and began chanting, "Mama. Mama. Mama," in worried little waves.

You reached for her too.

And on the kitchen tile, with both girls in your lap and your husband nowhere and no one willing to say why, you held them while the night pressed in and told yourself over and over that there must be an explanation.

There had to be.

Tomorrow, maybe, someone would finally say it aloud.

Across the world, General Shepherd stepped inside his office.

Only the thin wash of Washington lights bled through the tall window behind the desk, turning the glass into a dull mirror and cutting the room into shadows. The city beyond glowed cold and distant, traffic moving in silent streams far below. For a moment, Shepherd said nothing. He just shut the door behind him, loosened the collar of his uniform, and stared out over D.C. like a man admiring something he believed he still owned.

Then he crossed to his desk.

His boots were quiet on the floor. His movements were calm, practiced, unhurried. A man too used to power to imagine fear waiting for him in his own office.

He sat down, reached for the lamp, and switched it on.

Warm light spilled across polished wood, paperwork, a pen, an open folder.

And the man sitting in the chair opposite him, half buried in shadow.

Shepherd froze.

Price leaned forward just enough for the light to catch the hard line of his face. His hat was low, his expression unreadable, but his eyes were clear under the brim. Flat. Tired. Done.

Shepherd's surprise lasted only a second.

"John."

Price's voice came back quiet and rough. "General."

The room seemed to tighten around them.

Shepherd leaned back slowly, one hand resting on the desk. "How did you get in here?"

Price tilted his head a fraction. "Mutual friend."

Recognition flickered in Shepherd's face. A dry, humorless little smile touched his mouth. "Hm. Laswell."

Price didn't answer.

He didn't need to.

Shepherd looked him over in the low light, reading the shape of him, the set of his shoulders, the silence. There was no outrage in Price now. No heat. No raised voice. Just a stillness that was somehow worse.

"You look tired, John," Shepherd said.

Price stood.

The movement was smooth and unhurried. When he stepped into the light, the suppressed pistol in his hand caught a dull gleam. He brought it up with steady ease, not theatrical, not hesitant, and Shepherd's eyes dropped instinctively toward the weapon before rising again.

His own right hand shifted slightly beneath the desk.

Price noticed.

"Eh-eh."

That was all he said, but it stopped Shepherd cold.

Price walked to the front of the desk, the pistol level, his boots silent against the floor. He stopped close enough now that the desk no longer felt like much of a barrier between them.

For the first time, Shepherd's face lost some of its easy composure.

Not fear, exactly.

Calculation.

"You're better than this, Cap'n."

Price gave the faintest huff through his nose. Not quite a laugh. Not even close. "Hm. We both were."

Shepherd studied him. "You've been digging."

Price said nothing.

"That's the trouble with you," Shepherd continued. "You always had too much conscience for the work. Makes you dangerous in all the wrong ways."

Price's jaw tightened. "You sold out your own men."

Shepherd's expression hardened. "I made hard calls."

"You handed good men over to die."

"This job," Shepherd snapped, tapping a finger once against the desk, "is about making sacrifices for the greater good."

Price's eyes did not move from him. "Agreed."

The word landed strange in the room, cold and final.

Shepherd narrowed his eyes. "Then you understand."

"No." Price took one small step closer. "I understand men dyin' in the field. I understand risk. I understand making ugly calls when there's no clean option left." His voice stayed calm, and that calm made it cut deeper. "What I do not understand is a man sacrificin' others to save his own skin."

A flicker. Brief. Mean.

Shepherd settled back in his chair, trying to recover ground. "You think this is simple because you're angry? Because one of your boys got hurt?"

At that, something shifted behind Price's eyes. Not enough to lose control. Enough to show there was something alive and vicious beneath it.

Soap in a hospital bed.

Blood.

Ghost and Gaz, silent and sharp as blades.

You at home, unaware, still looking at him with trust in your eyes.

He kept the pistol steady.

Shepherd saw it. Saw he'd struck bone.

"You've got a body count of your own, John," he said, voice quieter now. "You don't get to stand there and pretend you're clean."

"I've never pretended that."

"No?" Shepherd leaned forward. "You've buried men under your command. Sent them through doors they didn't come back out of. You think the ghosts skip you?"

Price's mouth flattened. "No."

"They sure don't." Shepherd's tone turned almost conversational. "And they won't stop with me. It'll come back to haunt you. Men like us, we don't get to walk away. Not ever."

He let the silence sit for a beat, then went on, softer still.

Price didn't blink.

Shepherd's gaze sharpened, cruel and probing. "You think this ends in this room?"

Something cold slid down John's spine, but his face didn't change.

Shepherd noticed that too. Of course he did. He was a predator to the last.

"There it is," he murmured. "The real nerve."

He leaned back slightly, eyes glinting. "Laswell told me enough. Not details, no. Kate's too smart for that. But enough."

Price's voice dropped. "Watch yourself."

Shepherd ignored him.

"You built yourself a little life, didn't you?" he said. "A house. A wife. Couple children."

The word hit like a strike to the ribs.

Price's hand did not shake.

It wanted to.

Shepherd kept going, because he knew he had found the knife and now he wanted to turn it.

"You pull that trigger, and you make yourself a problem no one can ignore." His voice was low, measured, almost patient. "Maybe I'm gone, but the machine stays. Investigations. Questions. Repercussions. Men with badges and clipped voices asking where Captain Price was and why. People start poking around. At your records. At your contacts. At your home."

Price took one step closer.

The muzzle of the suppressor was now aimed straight between Shepherd's eyes.

But Shepherd was not done.

"You think your wife stays untouched by that?" he asked quietly. "You think your little girls do? You think they won't suffer for whatever you decide to do in this room?"

That did it.

Not in a wild, explosive way.

The opposite.

Something in John went still. Entirely still.

The last uncertain thing in him locked into place.

He saw your face.

Peach laughing in the kitchen with syrup on her cheek.

Margot's tiny hand tangled in his shirt.

The life he had built with blood still drying under his skin.

And the man sitting in front of him had dared to make them part of his bargaining.

Shepherd must have mistaken the silence for hesitation, because a smug little edge crept into his voice.

"That's what I thought." He spread his hands slightly on the desk. "You're not here for justice, John. You're here because you're hurt. Because you're emotional. But once you calm down, you'll understand what I did. Men like us do the ugly work so the rest can sleep."

Price spoke at last.

Very softly.

"Don't."

Shepherd frowned. "Don't what?"

"Talk about my family."

The air in the office seemed to drain out.

Shepherd held his stare, then made the mistake of smiling.

"Oh, I see." He shook his head once. "That's your weakness, then. Should've known. A soldier starts playing house and suddenly he thinks he's got somethin' to lose."

Price's thumb tightened along the frame of the pistol.

Shepherd saw it and took one last swing.

"You do this, and whatever happens after is on you. On your wife. On those girls. Every consequence. Every bit of fallout." He lifted his chin. "That's the sacrifice, Cap'n. So what's it going to be?"

Price exhaled once through his nose.

Slowly.

There was no rage in his face now. No visible fury. Nothing hot or messy.

Just judgment.

"You're right about one thing," he said.

For the first time since entering the office, Shepherd looked unsure.

Price's voice was low and even. "This job is about making sacrifices for the greater good."

Shepherd opened his mouth, maybe to answer, maybe to twist it again, but Price went on.

"You stopped being part of the greater good a long time ago."

The silence that followed was absolute.

Then Shepherd gave a small, disdainful sniff and sat back in his chair like he was above all of it.

"Oh, I'm not going to beg for my life," he said. "Not from you. Not from anybody else, Cap'n."

Price's finger settled.

"Wouldn't do you any good."

The shot was muffled by the suppressor.

A small, ugly sound in a quiet room.

Shepherd jerked once, the back of his head snapping against the chair as blood sprayed the leather and the papers behind him. Then he collapsed forward over the desk, one shoulder slumping awkwardly, the lamp casting a warm pool of light over the body.

For a second, John stood there and watched him.

Not triumph.

Not relief.

Only the hard, exhausted emptiness that came after a line had been crossed because there was nothing left to do but cross it.

He lowered the pistol.

The office smelled faintly of gunpowder and blood and hot lamp metal.

Outside, the city kept moving.

Inside, General Shepherd was dead over his own desk.

John looked at him one last time, then turned and walked to the door.

His hand rested on the handle for half a beat.

Not because he regretted it.

Because he knew exactly what waited on the other side now.

No going back. Not really.

Not after this.

He opened the door, stepped into the dark hallway, and pulled it shut behind him.

The latch clicked softly into place.

Then Captain John Price walked away a fugitive.

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[inkmonster21]

Sweet on You has a brand new chapter fresh out of the oven, babes!! 🍓🖤✨

Come get your serving of Ghost, sugar, and a little emotional damage! It is warm and ready 😌🍰

Chapter 69. The Dog at the Door

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[inkmonster21]

Sweet on You has a brand new chapter fresh out of the oven, babes!! 🍓🖤✨

Come get your serving of Ghost, sugar, and a little emotional damage! It is warm and ready 😌🍰

Chapter 69. The Dog at the Door

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Sweet on You

Simon “Ghost” Riley x BakerReader

Series Masterlist

As you struggle through the numb, angry weeks after your rescue, Simon’s attempt to protect you from afar by sending something that only sharpens the truth everyone else already sees: safety means nothing if he refuses to come home.

69. The Dog at the Door

Weeks do not pass cleanly after something like that.

They clot.

They drag.

They blur at the edges and then suddenly hit you all at once when you realize it has been seventeen days since you washed your hair properly or twenty three since you touched the mixer at the bakery or long enough that the sourdough starter in the back of the fridge has gone from neglected to definitely dead.

That one, weirdly, nearly breaks you more than some of the bigger things.

You notice it one afternoon while looking for butter you do not even end up using. The jar sits at the back against the backsplash, greyish at the top, hooch separated, the smell sharp, rancid, and wrong when you crack the lid.

You just stand there in the kitchen in one of Simon's hoodies and fuzzy socks and stare at it.

Your sourdough starter.

The one you named because it's bakers law. The one you have kept alive through moves, holidays, rough weeks, bad flour brands, business owner exhaustion, and one bout of the flu so miserable you thought you were hallucinating.

Dead.

Because you forgot. Because you have not been baking. Because your whole life split open and apparently even the things that used to live because of your hands can die quietly in the dark if you stop looking at them long enough.

You put the lid back on and burst into tears right there in front of the fridge.

It is not graceful.

It is not one dramatic sob and then done.

It is that ugly, exhausted crying where your whole body folds in around the grief of a thousand little things that are not actually about sourdough at all.

The bakery is still closed.

Not permanently, everybody keeps saying. Just for now. Just until you are ready. Just until the systems are in place. Just until the threat assessment changes. Just until.

You hate "just until" almost as much as you hate silence.

You do not bake. You do not even pretend to try most days.

The thought of the kitchen there, with its metal counters and hooks and the back bell that did not ring and your apron left hanging like a skin somebody shed, makes your stomach drop in a way that is immediate and physical.

So you stay home. Or in the house, anyway.

Home is a harder word now.

The mornings are the worst. You wake up with that split second of confusion where your body has not remembered yet, and then it all pours back in. The room without windows. The rescue. The safe house. Simon not coming to bed. Simon not coming home. The shape of his distance like another locked door in the house.

You stop opening the curtains some days.

You stop answering texts unless they are from Price because somehow his check ins feel less like pity and more like something solid you can lean against without collapsing.

He calls every other day at first.

Never too long. Never prying.

Just enough to ask if you ate. If you slept. If the house systems are holding. If you want a security contact adjusted or a car sent if you need to go somewhere.

You begin to realize, in a quiet way that hurts and helps at the same time, that Price is doing what Simon should be doing.

Not in the husband way. Not emotionally.

In the practical, steady, I am not leaving you to float kind of way.

"Any issues at the house," he asks one afternoon while you sit on the floor in the living room with Percy in your lap like he is some kind of emotional support fern.

"No," you say. "Unless we are counting the fact that I have eaten dry cereal for dinner twice this week."

Price is quiet for half a beat.

"That's not dinner, Riley."

"It was in a bowl."

"That does not make it a meal."

You huff a tiny laugh.

"Bossy."

"Yes," he says. "Order something hot. I'll ask again tomorrow."

He hangs up before you can argue and you do order something hot because apparently being told what to do by one stern British man is still enough to move your body when nothing else is.

Johnny and his wife come over twice a week.

Not scheduled. Never announced as help. They just appear with groceries or takeaway or wine or too much energy for your sad little house, and between them they keep it from becoming a tomb.

Johnny sprawls across your couch and talks utter nonsense until you laugh by accident.

His misses cleans your kitchen without making it feel like an indictment. She folds laundry while telling you stories about Johnny being impossible at twenty one and the first time she nearly left him over a fishing trip and how men are dramatic little bastards when they think love means they have to become martyrs.

You do not ask her directly if she means Simon.

She does not say his name directly either. She does not need to.

Once, when Johnny is outside pretending to check the car for something and very obviously giving the two of you privacy, his wife sits beside you at the table and pushes a mug of tea into your hands.

"You're angry," she says.

You blink at the steam curling up.

"I'm a lot of things."

"Yeah," she says gently. "But you're angry too."

You laugh once, sharp.

"He left me after I got home."

Her face tightens in that sympathetic, furious way only another woman can wear without it feeling patronizing.

"I know."

"No," you say, because now that the words are coming they are not stopping. "No, I don't think anybody really gets how insane it feels. I was taken. I was the one in that room. I'm the one who wakes up shaking because a floorboard creaks. I'm the one who cannot even look at pastry dough without feeling sick. And somehow I'm also the one left here while my husband decides from a safe distance that he loves me too much to come home."

Your throat burns.

She reaches across and covers your hand with hers.

"You're allowed to hate that."

The relief of hearing that nearly makes you cry again.

Because yes. Yes!

You love him. You understand pieces of why. You know his fear has logic inside it.

You still hate it!

Kyle starts coming over too.

Always with pizza and bad movies. Always with the kind of energy that says he is trying very hard to be easy company and not another person checking whether you are okay.

It works more than he probably knows.

He sits on the floor with a paper plate balanced on one knee and lets terrible action films scream in the background while you eat three slices of pepperoni pizza in silence and slowly start feeling like a person with a body again.

One night, halfway through a movie so stupid it circles back around to genius, he pauses with a slice halfway to his mouth and looks at you over it.

"You know you're allowed to be furious with him, right?"

You stare at the television.

The hero has just jumped a motorcycle through a greenhouse for reasons that make no narrative sense.

"I know."

Kyle lowers the slice.

"No, I mean really. I fucking am. You don't have to keep making him noble in every sentence."

That one lands.

You pull your knees up under the blanket and rest your chin there.

"I am pissed, but I also know why he's doing it," you say.

"Yeah," Kyle says. "And it's still a crap thing to do."

You let that sit. He does not push after. Just hands you another slice and presses play like that is enough said.

Maybe it is for tonight.

Simon asks Johnny for updates.

At first it is almost subtle. A text here and there.

How is she?

Eating.

Sleeping.

Has she left the house?

The kind of clipped little questions that would almost read as practical concern if Johnny did not know him well enough to hear the desperation pressed flat inside them.

Then it stops being subtle at all.

Johnny is halfway through cleaning his rifle at his kitchen table one evening when Simon appears in his doorway looking like a man who has slept approximately never and has no business pretending otherwise.

Johnny's wife glances up from the stove, takes one look at his face, and says, "You can come in, but I'm not making you tea unless you stop standing there like guilt in human form."

Johnny snorts. Simon steps inside.

There is a bruise yellowing along one side of his ribs still. The cut under his eyebrow has mostly healed. None of it makes him look less tired.

He leans against the counter but does not sit.

"How is she?"

Johnny keeps working on the rifle for another second just to be irritating.

"Oh, your missus? She's fuckin' brilliant," he says. "Opened the bakery, started a sourdough cult, ran a marathon, punched Price in the throat. What d'you think?"

Simon's jaw flexes.

"Johnny."

Johnny's wife sets a mug down in front of him anyway, because she is not heartless.

"She's a fuckin' mess," Johnny says, more serious now. "She's barely eating unless somebody puts food in front of her. She's not baking. She cried over a jar last week. Gaz's gone over twice with pizza because she'll actually eat if he pretends it's just a film night."

Simon closes his eyes for half a second.

Johnny watches him.

"You should go home, Simon."

Simon says nothing.

Johnny puts the rifle part down with a little clack.

"I'm serious," he says. "This is ridiculous."

"It's not safe."

"It's not safe for her to think you've decided she's too damaged to share a bed with, either," Johnny shoots back.

Simon's head comes up fast. "That's not what this is."

"No," Johnny says. "But that's what it feels like to her."

The room goes quiet.

Johnny's wife does not look up, but she is listening to every word.

Simon drags a hand over his face. "She needs protection," he says, voice low and strained. "She needs eyes on the house. She needs someone there if something happens."

"She needs you, Simon," Johnny says.

"That's the fuckin' problem."

Johnny stares at him like he has genuinely never wanted to hit a friend and hug him in equal measure more than this exact second.

"No," he says slowly. "That's the point. She's terrified. She needs to feel protected, not managed from a distance like some asset. She needs affection. Reassurance. Her husband in the house. In the bed. Acting like she survived something and still gets to have him after."

Simon's expression closes again, that horrible controlled thing he has been using like armor.

"If I'm there, I'm the reason the target stays on the house."

Johnny looks like he might start chewing glass. "She's already the target, mate."

Simon flinches.

That lands because it is true. Because nothing he is doing now can rewrite what already happened.

Still, he cannot seem to let it through.

"Protection," he says again, quieter now, like he is trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. "She needs to feel safe."

Johnny's wife finally turns from the stove.

"You know what makes a woman feel safe after a man took her from her own life," she says.

Simon looks at her.

"Not being abandoned by the one she came back for."

The room goes dead silent.

Simon takes the hit. You can see it land in the set of his shoulders, the way his mouth tightens. But then that same terrible self punishing logic settles back over him.

Johnny sees it happen and swears softly.

"He's not hearing us."

"No," she says. "He's hearing us. He just hates we're right."

Simon says nothing for a long time. Then, eventually, "I can arrange support."

Johnny stares at him. "Support?"

"Security. Presence. Someone with her."

Johnny opens his mouth and closes it again because there are too many wrong things in that sentence to choose only one.

Johnny's wife shuts her eyes briefly like she is praying for patience she was not born with.

"You're going to send fuckin' support," Johnny says finally, in the tone one might use on a man confessing he plans to fix a marriage with a lawn ornament.

Simon's jaw sets. "If she needs protection."

Johnny laughs, one ugly bark of disbelief. "She doesn't need a guard detail, you idiot. She needs you. Her husband."

Simon looks away. And that is how Johnny knows he has already made the choice.

Three days later, there is a knock at your door just after noon.

You are still in yesterday's leggings and one of Simon's old shirts. Your hair is in a knot that gave up trying hours ago. You were halfway through making toast you did not really want because Price asked if you had eaten and apparently that now means something in your brain.

The knock is firm. Professional. Not a neighbour.

Your stomach twists immediately.

You check the camera first.

A woman in a dark jacket. Another man behind her. And between them, sitting at perfect heel with a level of stillness that catches every breath in your body all at once, is a German Shepherd.

You unlock the door and open it slowly.

The dog lifts his head.

Beautiful. Dark saddle. Intelligent amber brown eyes. Ears pricked. Harness on. Calm in the way only highly trained animals can be.

You know that dog.

Not well. Not from petting and play. But by reputation and a handful of visits to base and the stories the boys tell when they get nostalgic and stupid over old operations.

Riley.

The trainer smiles politely.

"Mrs. Riley?"

That alone nearly makes you slam the door.

"I'm sorry," you say, already confused and raw. "What... what's this?"

The woman glances at a clipboard in her hand.

"I'm Ava. This is Marcus. We've been authorized to transfer K9 asset Riley into temporary personal protection assignment under your care."

You just stare at her. The dog sits there, patient and gorgeous and real.

Your brain catches up in ugly pieces.

Simon.

Of course. Of course he would.

Of course this is how his mind would solve protection. If he cannot come home, then he will send something that can watch the door and hear footsteps and make the house feel occupied. Something loyal. Armed in its own way. Something he trusts because it has worked beside men like him before.

You feel your face change before you can stop it.

Ava clocks it instantly and softens a fraction.

"We can come back at a better time," she says carefully.

"No," you say, because your voice is suddenly too sharp and because if you do not let this absurd little parade in right now you might actually scream on the front path. "No. It's fine. Come in."

Riley enters first on command, moving through your hallway with that smooth, quiet confidence that makes it obvious he has seen stranger places and worse things than your little house with the half dead fern and the too many throw blankets.

He stops in the living room and sits.

Waits.

Watches.

Your stupid traitor heart loves him on sight.

That makes it worse.

Ava walks you through everything in the kitchen.

Commands. Hand signals. Feeding times. Alert behaviours. How he positions himself if he senses someone at the door. What "watch" means versus "guard." How not to issue contradictory commands when you are upset.

You nod because your body knows how to learn a list.

Riley lies on the floor by your feet while she talks, head on his paws, looking like the very definition of safety if safety had fur and military training.

Marcus opens a crate bag and lays out bowls, leash, vest, paperwork.

Paperwork.

Of course there is paperwork. Simon has replaced himself with excellent paperwork and a highly trained dog.

The thought is so ridiculous and so painful you have to grip the edge of the counter to stay upright.

Ava notices.

"You alright?"

That nearly makes you laugh in her face.

"Did he send you?"

The question comes out flatter than you intended. You clear your throat and try again, "Lieutenant Simon Riley. Did he put in the request?"

She hesitates just enough to answer anyway.

"Yes, ma'am. He did make the request," she says. "Command approved it."

You look at Riley.

At the broad head and the calm eyes and the body built to intervene if the world goes wrong.

Your throat burns.

You hate that some part of you wants to kneel down and bury your face in his neck and cry because he is warm and alive and here and he came from Simon's world with Simon's trust wrapped around his harness.

You hate it because it is not enough.

When the training is done, Ava leaves you with a final packet of instructions and a number to call if anything changes.

Marcus carries the spare crate to the utility room.

Then it is just you and Riley in the sudden quiet.

The dog sits by the kitchen table and looks at you.

You look back.

Then, because apparently this is your life now, you say, "So he'll send a dog but not himself."

Riley blinks.

No opinion.

Good for him.

You sink down onto a chair and press the heels of your hands into your eyes. The tears come fast and hot. Anger this time more than grief.

Because this is thoughtful.

That is what makes it unbearable.

It is thoughtful. Protective. Logically kind.

And underneath all of that, it feels like a knife.

Simon knows you are afraid. Knows you need company. Knows you are not sleeping right and jumping at sounds and checking locks with a shaking hand.

And instead of coming home, instead of being a husband with a body in your bed and a voice in your kitchen, he has sent a brilliant, loyal, professionally trained stand in.

A dog.

A beautiful, innocent dog.

A replacement for his absence with perfect recall and command response.

You laugh once, a horrible sound.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Riley gets up and comes closer.

He rests his chin on your knee.

That nearly ruins you outright.

You stare down at him, teeth clenched against the fresh wave of tears.

"Don't," you whisper. "You are too cute for me to be mad at you."

His tail gives one quiet thump against the floor.

You scrub a hand over your face and pull your phone from the table.

Your hands shake so hard you mistype his name the first time.

The message field opens.

You stare at it.

Then you type.

You will send a dog but not come home yourself?

You stop. Delete it. Type again.

Really, Simon? A fucking dog?

Delete that too.

Too emotional. Too easy to dismiss as heat.

You want it to land. You want him to feel the shape of what he has done. You type carefully this time.

I'm glad Riley is here. He's beautiful and I know what he's trained for. But if you think sending me a service dog is the same thing as coming home to your wife, you've lost your fucking mind.

You stare at the words.

Then hit send before you can make them smaller.

Riley leans harder into your knee.

You drop the phone on the table and put both hands in his fur because there is no one else here to hold onto and because none of this is his fault and because the house is quiet again except now the quiet breathes beside you.

The message shows delivered.

No reply.

You sit there in Simon's kitchen with Simon's dog at your feet and anger burning clean and bright through the numb places for the first time in weeks.

Good.

Maybe that will keep you alive too.

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[inkmonster21]

New chapter of A Song for the Clown is up, my crew ☠️🩷

The tide has shifted, the music is louder, and your next chapter is waiting at the shoreline.

Chapter 14. No Music at All

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[inkmonster21]

A Song for the Clown

Buggy x Princess!Reader

Series Masterlist

After a painful misunderstanding pushes you into silence, Buggy’s unexpected willingness to stay beside you without performance or excuse begins to reveal something neither of you is ready to name.

14. No Music at All

Buggy avoided you like a man trying to outrun a fire he had started himself.

Not elegantly. Not well. Not even convincingly.

That was the trouble with avoiding someone aboard a ship. There was only so much ocean and not nearly enough room aboard for dignity. You still heard him. Still felt the shape of him moving through the deck above. Still caught flashes of blue hair and red nose and the bright swing of his voice at the edges of hallways before he turned another way too quickly to call accidental.

He stopped coming near your door.

That was the clearest change.

No more abrupt visits under bad excuses. No more prowling the corridor outside as though he had simply happened to remember some practical concern that required immediate personal oversight. If you came above deck, he found reasons to be elsewhere on the ship. If you crossed paths at all, he passed you in bright captain form, all orders and swagger and no room left in him for anything quieter.

It was ridiculous. And effective. Only not in the way he likely hoped. Because distance did not erase the kiss. It sharpened it.

The absence of him became its own kind of presence. You noticed where he was not. The empty patch of deck near the rail where he might have been leaning. The silence in corridors where you had begun, against your better judgment, to half expect his voice. The fact that the day felt different when he was not in it at all.

You resented that. Resented more that missing him arrived before you could name it honestly enough to reject it.

You tried to keep busy. You worked on fabric. Helped in the little ways the crew had begrudgingly begun to accept because it was less exhausting than fighting you about every cup and blanket and scraped table. You stood at the rail and watched the sea. You fed the birds when they came and did not name any more rats because that had apparently become too intimate a pastime to repeat lightly.

Still, his absence kept finding you.

By the afternoon of the second day after the kiss, it had become unbearable. Not because you were fragile. Because you were not.

You had spent too much of your life in a kingdom where feelings were taken seriously to pretend this one would vanish if starved of speech. Silence did not solve pain. It only taught it new shapes.

So when you found him at last below deck, you stopped in the narrow stretch of lantern light and said his name before he could turn away.

"Buggy?"

He paused. Only because the corridor was too tight to pretend he hadn't heard. Then he looked over one shoulder at you with all the false casualness he could gather. "Princess."

You took one step closer. He did not move, though you saw the impulse in his shoulders.

"We need to speak."

Buggy's mouth twitched. "Do we?"

"Yes."

"That sounds ominous."

"That is because you are being impossible."

He turned properly then, arms folding over his chest as if the posture alone might armor him against whatever truth you had come carrying toward him.

"I am many things," he said. "Impossible isn't even in the top five."

Ordinarily, that might have drawn a smile from you. It did not today.

Your face remained steady enough to make the little joke die on its feet. Something in his own expression tightened in answer.

The ship shifted beneath you both, the lantern swinging gently overhead, the corridor close with wood and salt and the familiar scent of him that your body had become much too quick to recognize.

You spoke before courage could decide to behave more cautiously.

"Did that kiss mean anything?"

Buggy's eyes went blank so fast it was almost impressive, "No!"

The answer came too quickly. Too cleanly. You heard it at once. So did he.

But Buggy had always preferred a bad lie delivered boldly to a good truth handled honestly, and the habit did not fail him now.

"It was a trick," he said. "Haven't we already done this? Sheesh!"

You held his gaze. "No. That is not what I meant."

He pushed off the wall then, irritation brightening over the emptiness in his face because anger was always easier to wear.

"It kept suspicion off us. That was the point!"

"You kissed me as if the point had teeth."

Buggy's jaw tightened. "That is a dramatic way to describe deception."

"It is an honest one."

The silence after that stretched thin. He hated you in moments like this.

Not truly. Not in the useful, simple way hatred usually came to him. He hated the sensation of being pressed against honesty until even his best tricks looked cheap under it.

You took another step nearer, "Was that truly all?"

"Yes," he said.

Again too quickly. Again too hard.

You looked at him for one quiet second that felt far longer.

"I do not believe you."

Buggy laughed then, sharp and bright and wrong for the corridor.

"That seems like your problem."

You did not recoil. That, more than anything, seemed to aggravate him. Because you just stood there in that handmade dress with your hands at your sides and your face full of wounded sincerity, refusing to let him turn the conversation ugly enough to escape it.

"It mattered," you said softly.

"No."

"Yes."

"It was a tiny moment."

"It was not only that."

His frustration broke across his face before it hit his voice.

This was why he had been avoiding you. Because every time he got near you now, you dragged him toward the exact place he least wanted to stand: the one where he might have to admit something mattered and mean it plainly once it was spoken.

He pushed a hand over his head hard enough to drag the striped cloth askew. "You do not get to decide what things mean for me!"

"No," you said. "But I know what I felt."

Buggy let out a rough, disgusted breath and looked away from you down the corridor, as though the wall had become suddenly more reasonable company.

That should have been where the conversation ended. Where either he walked away or you did. Instead it broke open. Because pain, when boxed too long, does not stay tidy.

He turned back to you too fast, irritation and fear and want and all the things he had been trying to outwalk since the dock finally tangling into one sharp-edged line.

"Maybe," he said, "that's just what happens around you!"

The words landed strange enough at first that you only blinked.

Buggy saw that and, horribly, kept going. "You sing," he said, his voice too flat now, too controlled in the way that meant he was close to saying something he could not undo, "and people forget how to think straight!"

The corridor went still. Not the ship. The ship creaked and breathed and shifted around you as always. But the air between you stopped.

You had not thought that. Not really. Not in full.

It had lived under your skin, yes. In the quiet corners. In the old unspoken fear shaped by a life too full of softened faces and rooms that changed when your voice entered them. But fear unnamed is different from fear spoken aloud by someone you have begun, disastrously, to trust.

Your mouth parted. No sound came at first.

Buggy heard the damage the second the sentence finished.

Too late.

He saw it move through your face in one slow, awful wave. Confusion first. Then recognition. Then hurt so clean it made his own chest go tight with immediate regret.

But you asked anyway. Because of course you did. You always asked the wound directly.

"Do you think that's what I do?"

The question came very quiet. That made it worse.

Buggy's anger vanished all at once, burned through by the truth of what he had hit.

"No," he said immediately.

But now he sounded too fast in the other direction, and the denial carried none of the force his cruelty had.

You stared at him. Tears did not come. That would almost have been easier.

Instead your whole face went still in the way grief sometimes stills when it becomes too exact to spend itself quickly.

"My whole life," you said, and your voice had become so careful it made the corridor feel smaller, "I have wondered how to know whether affection belongs to me or to whatever my voice does when people hear it."

Buggy did not move.

You looked past him rather than at him now, because looking at him would have made the humiliation too bright to bear.

"And you think," you said, "that perhaps any feelings you have towards me are fake? That I manipulate people?"

"No."

This time he stepped toward you. You stepped back. The refusal in the movement hit him harder than any shouted insult could have.

"No," he said again, rougher now. "That's not—"

"Do you think that's what I do?" you repeated, turning your eyes back to his at last, and there was no anger in you. Only pain. "Make people feel things that are not truly theirs?"

He had no answer fast enough. No answer clean enough. No answer that could erase the line he had already thrown between you like broken glass.

Your hands curled at your sides. For one second you looked as though you might say more.

Instead you only drew one careful breath and said, "Please go."

Buggy stood frozen in the lantern light.

The corridor felt suddenly full of all the things neither of you knew how to repair.

"Princess—"

"Please, Captain."

He had heard fear from you. Outrage. Grief. Bright laughter. Quiet honesty. Music. But this was the first time he had heard your voice sound emptied.

That frightened him in some ugly private way he would have died before naming. He backed up one step. Then another.

Looked as though he might try once more. Thought better of it. And left.

You did not sing that evening. Not on deck. Not below. Not in your cabin with the door shut and the little room wrapped around you in lavender and ship-noise and all the strange half-kindnesses Buggy had left there with his own hands.

No announcement. No dramatic declaration. Just silence.

It settled over the ship slowly enough at first that no one noticed. A missing hum in the corridor. No little morning verse at the rail. No soft private line while you worked needle through fabric or fed crumbs to birds. Nothing.

By the time night deepened, the absence had shape.

The ship felt emptier than expected. Crewmen who had once complained now found themselves glancing toward your door and then away again without understanding why. The rats came and went more quietly. The birds landed at the rail and did not stay. Even the deck seemed larger in the wrong way, all the roughness of it suddenly unsoftened by your voice moving through it.

Buggy noticed most of all. Of course he did.

He stopped in the corridor outside your cabin once after dark and stood there, saying nothing, because there was nothing left he knew how to say that would not arrive too late and carrying damage of its own.

Inside, there was no song. Only silence.

And for the first time since he had taken you aboard, that silence hurt.

By the next morning, even the crew noticed.

Not in the poetic way your kingdom would have noticed. Not with shared glances over breakfast tables or some collective, aching understanding that a house sounded wrong when its brightest voice had gone quiet.

Pirates noticed more crudely.

One of the younger deckhands stood at the rail with a cup in hand, frowned toward the stern where the birds had gathered without much purpose, and muttered, "Why are they just sitting there?"

Another answered, "How should I know?"

The first squinted. "They used to do more."

"They're birds."

"Yeah, but her birds."

That was met with a silence too uncomfortable to keep.

The rats noticed too, in their own little way.

They still came near your door. Still waited some mornings by the threshold or peered from under the washstand with whiskers twitching as if hoping you might remember whatever gentle nonsense had made this ship briefly less ugly. When nothing came, they lost interest faster than people did, because animals at least knew better than to linger where warmth had withdrawn.

You noticed all of it. And kept your mouth shut anyway. That was the hard part. Not the silence itself. Choosing it. Because song sat so close beneath your skin that silence felt less like absence and more like holding your breath underwater and refusing the body's every instinct to surface.

You had not stopped because you wished to punish the ship. You had stopped because you needed to know.

Needed the air stripped clean of melody and all the strange softening it could bring. Needed your own voice gone long enough to see what remained around you when no music touched it. Needed, in some private wounded place, to prove to yourself that you could exist in this world without turning every reaction suspect in your own mind.

So you became quieter. Not cold. That would have been easier for everyone and less true to you.

Just more guarded. More deliberate. You moved through the ship with your tasks and your dresses and your small, orderly habits, but without song laid over any of it. You fed the birds without humming. You offered crumbs to the rats and smiled when they climbed your skirts, but did not fill the space around them with melody. You scrubbed a cup because it needed scrubbing, folded fabric because it needed folding, sat by the rail because the sea still looked like the sea even when your own heart felt less certain inside it.

And all the while Buggy noticed. Not at first in ways anyone else could see. He simply grew more irritable.

A crate tied wrong earned a shouted threat. A knot left too loose got an entire speech about useless hands and decorative incompetence. Cabaji made the mistake of humming under his breath near the quarterdeck and got such a withering look for it that even Richie lifted his head from where he'd been dozing and decided to be elsewhere.

Buggy passed your space three times before noon. Not because he had business there. Because he had apparently developed an acute and inconvenient inability to leave a stretch of deck alone if you were standing in it.

The first time, he came by to inspect the line coils near the mast and glared at the men doing it as though the rope itself had insulted him. The second time, he found fault with a lantern bracket just within sight of where you sat mending a cuff near the rail. The third time, he crossed the deck with no reason at all and then had to invent one on the way.

You noticed. He noticed you noticing. Which, naturally, made him worse at it.

By afternoon, the hovering had become almost offensive.

He circled. Paused. Started toward you once, then barked at a crewman instead and changed direction so abruptly the man nearly dropped a bucket. He loomed at the stern for several seconds doing absolutely nothing useful while you stood by the rail with one hand resting lightly on the wood and the sea wind pulling at the loose strands of your hair.

Nothing.

No hum. No little private line. No bright comment to the birds. The quiet around you had shape now.

Buggy hated it. He hated more that he was beginning to understand he hated it because he missed it. That was ugly. Pathetic. Entirely against his own interests.

Which was why, just before dusk, after a whole day of prowling uselessly around your silence like a man trying to challenge fog to a duel, he finally shoved open your cabin door and came in.

You looked up from the chair by the porthole.

He stopped in the doorway, one hand braced high on the frame in that old habit of his, but there was no bright mockery on him this time. No obvious line prepared. Only a kind of brittle impatience that looked suspiciously like discomfort if one was rude enough to examine it.

He glanced around the room, found nothing practical to insult, and settled at last on the simplest attack.

"Why'd you stop?"

You knew at once what he meant. Still, you made him say it.

"Stop what?"

His mouth twitched once, not amusement. Irritation at having to put a feeling into plainer language than he preferred.

"Singing."

The word hung between you.

You set down the bit of fabric in your lap and folded your hands over it, looking at them before you looked back at him.

"I did not wish there to be any suspicion," you said, "about what belonged to me and what belonged to songs."

The room went still.

Buggy felt that sentence all the way through. Because it took his worst line, the one he had thrown in frustration and fear and self-protection, and revealed what it had done.

Not only hurt you. Changed you.

He looked at you for a second too long. Your expression did not accuse him. That made it far worse. It was only tired. Honest. Fragile in ways you were trying not to let show too much.

"I grew up very loved," you said quietly. "That was a beautiful thing. It was also... confusing, once I was old enough to wonder whether what softened in people was always truly theirs." You gave the tiniest smile, sad and without much light. "I thought perhaps silence would answer more kindly than song."

Buggy had no ready line for that. No sneer, no joke, no flourish sharp enough to hide behind without making himself monstrous all over again. So he said nothing.

Which, for him, was already more than most people ever got.

He could have left then.

The question had been asked. The answer had been given. The room held no trap he could not escape by sheer force of swagger if he chose.

He did not leave.

Instead he moved inside, let the door swing almost shut behind him, and sat on the chair by the little table without asking whether he was welcome.

The act startled you enough that you forgot to hide it. Buggy noticed that too.

"What," he said, a little too defensive for the situation to justify, "am I not allowed to sit down on my own ship?"

You almost smiled. "Of course you are."

"Good."

He leaned back in the chair and looked everywhere except at you for a moment.

The light from the porthole had gone softer now, evening blue beginning to gather at the edges of the room. The lavender near the wall hook stirred faintly. Somewhere above, the ship muttered through rope and wood and distant footsteps.

No song. No performance. Still he stayed.

You were the one who spoke next. Perhaps because the room had already crossed one uncomfortable boundary and no longer remembered how to keep to safer ones. Perhaps because when someone finally sits with your wound instead of dancing around it, some part of you always wants to answer that with another truth.

"My mother used to tell me," you said, eyes on the porthole, "that voices are not only for beauty. They are for courage. For comfort. For truth."

Buggy made a low noise that might have been acknowledgment.

You went on. "When I was little, the birds came before I understood what that meant. The hounds would sleep against my skirts. Nervous horses gentled when I sang. The palace staff smiled at me so easily that I thought all the world must naturally work that way." You drew one slow breath. "I did not know then that anything lovely can become a question if it is given to you before you are old enough to ask whether it was yours."

Buggy looked at you then. Not long. Just enough.

"There were always people," you said, "who adored me. People who felt better after speaking with me. People who answered every song and every softness. And I was grateful. I am grateful. But sometimes..."

You stopped. He waited.

"Sometimes I think being loved before understanding why can leave one very lonely."

That landed harder than you expected. Or perhaps exactly as hard as it should have.

Buggy's face gave almost nothing, but one hand had tightened on the arm of the chair while you spoke, fingers curling once and then forcing themselves loose again.

He understood enough to be quiet. Which, for him, was already a kind of answer.

You looked down at your lap.

"I should have known better," you said softly. "About song. About love. About all of it. But when one has spent so long wanting a thing to be real, one can become terribly willing to recognize it too soon."

Buggy let out a small breath through his nose. Not a laugh. Not mockery. Just sound.

"When I was younger," he said after a moment, and then paused as if slightly appalled to find himself halfway inside a confession, "people laughed."

You looked up. He was not looking at you now. Only at the opposite wall, jaw set, voice gone a fraction flatter than usual.

"At me. Around me. Didn't matter which, most days." He lifted one shoulder. "If they weren't underestimating me, they were waiting for a punchline."

You listened without moving.

"That shit gets old," he said.

There was so much held in the dryness of that line that you almost answered too quickly.

He went on before you could. "People like a show. They like someone loud enough to fill the room and easy enough to laugh at while he's doing it." His mouth twisted. "They like the act."

He looked at you then, very briefly. "Not always the man."

The words settled heavy and bare in the room. No bright costume on them. No joke.

Just truth, given up in fragments because full pieces were too dangerous to hand over cleanly.

You felt your own heart shift at that. Not with romantic thrill. Not first. With recognition.

That was what sat so uneasily between the two of you when you looked longest at one another: two different lives, two different gifts, and the same ugly question beneath them both.

When does attention become real?

Neither of you said that aloud. You did not need to. The room already knew. And still, after that, he could have left.

He had given enough. More than enough by his standards. A crack in the armor. A few honest bones under the noise.

He stayed.

That was the proof. Not his words, though they mattered. Not the way his voice roughened on certain old hurts or the way he could not quite look at you when he admitted the shape of them.

The proof was that the conversation could have ended there.

You had both said too much already. Enough to make distance feel sensible and leaving feel necessary.

He stayed anyway. The light faded. The ship moved beneath you. No one sang. No one performed.

You adjusted the fold of fabric in your lap, and he watched your hands for a second before looking away again. He fiddled idly with the edge of one glove, then removed it and dropped it to the table because apparently his own fingers required occupation too.

At some point you said something small and ordinary about one of the palace hounds you had loved as a child, a great foolish creature named Jasper who had once eaten an entire ribbon garland and then cried until your mother soothed him with song. Buggy snorted and said the dog sounded like one of his men. You laughed very softly. He did not hide his own smile quickly enough.

Then even that faded into quiet. Not strained quiet. Not silence held like punishment.

Companionable.

He sat with you in it. No music at all.

The birds did not gather at the porthole. The rats did not peek from beneath the washstand. Your voice did not reach out and soften the room into something easier. There was only the two of you and the ship and the truth that he had come back with no song to draw him there.

He nearly fell asleep. Not fully. Buggy would deny it to the grave and likely take several others with him for suggesting it. But his posture loosened by degrees the longer the room stayed still. One hand propped against his temple. Head tipped back once against the wall with his eyes closed just a fraction too long between one blink and the next.

You noticed and said nothing.

By the time he startled himself back into sharper awareness, night had thickened fully around the little porthole and the lantern glow made the room feel smaller, softer at the edges.

Buggy sat up straight at once, scowled at the wall as though it had betrayed him, and shoved to his feet.

You looked at him with quiet warmth you knew better than to brighten into anything more obvious.

He saw that too and made a face in self-defense.

"Don't."

"At what?"

"Your face!”

You tilted your head. "I have not done anything."

"That's never stopped you before."

You smiled faintly.

He reached the door, paused there with one hand on the latch, and glanced back at you once more. The room, the quiet, the fact of having stayed this long without performance or song or leverage of any kind, all of it sat between you now in a shape too clear to pretend not to understand.

Then he opened the door and left. Then the room felt fuller after he was gone than it ever had before he entered it.

Because now you knew. No music at all. And he came back.

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[inkmonster21]

Wildflowers in the Wind

Arthur Morgan x Fem!Reader

Series Masterlist

As Arthur’s brutal final confrontation with Micah leaves him bleeding on the mountain, Charles makes the world believe Arthur Morgan died there so the man you love can disappear into the dark and fight for the future he was never supposed to have.

91. A Ghost with a Heartbeat

The mountain was already on fire.

Not with flame. With light.

The sky over the ridge had gone the color of an old bruise, purple and gold and sickly, and the sun sat low and angry behind the jagged teeth of the peaks. Smoke drifted thin through the trees. Somewhere below, the last echo of gunfire was still bouncing off the rock.

Arthur climbed anyway.

His lungs burned. His legs shook. His arm throbbed where Micah's knife had slipped between the ribs of muscle. Blood slicked his shirt, hot at first, then sticky as the air cooled. Every step up the loose shale felt like it might be the one that sent him sliding back down to the bodies below.

He kept moving.

He thought of you, standing on a crooked porch in Saint Denis, lips pressed tight so you would not beg him again. He thought of Grace, hair in braids, tilting her head at him as you walked away from Beaver Hollow.

Come with me. Now.

He thought of how he had said no.

So he climbed.

The path narrowed. The wind picked up, sharp and thin. He could see the valley now, wide and dark, trees like a sea of ink. Somewhere out there, Dutch's dreams were already blowing apart like smoke in a storm.

Micah waited for him at the top.

The man was a smear of white and black against the rock, coat wild, hair loose. He stood near the edge, one boot on a dead man's chest. His gun hung loose in his hand. There was blood on his face that might have been his or someone else's.

"Well, look who made it," Micah drawled. "Cowpoke on the hill."

Arthur straightened as much as his ribs would let him. His hat was long gone, lost somewhere on the climb. The wind tugged at his hair, cold fingers in sweat.

"This ends," he said. His voice came out rough but clear. "Tonight."

Micah laughed. "Ends for who," he asked. "You keep talkin' like you are the hero of this story, Morgan. Man who did Dutch's dirty work for years, now he finds a conscience and wants to lecture me."

Arthur raised his gun.

Micah moved first.

The first shot clipped stone and screamed away into the valley. The second kicked dirt at Arthur's boots. Arthur's return fire ripped the brim off Micah's hat and sent it spinning into the chasm.

They came together like wolves.

Micah slammed into him, shoulder to rib, and Arthur's back hit rock hard enough to make his teeth snap together. The gun went flying. They grappled, boots sliding on scree.

Micah's fist caught his jaw. Light flared white behind Arthur's eyes. He tasted blood and old tobacco. He jammed his thumb into Micah's throat, got a second of choking and surprise, then a knife flashed.

Heat lanced along his side, just under his ribs. The world swam.

Arthur got his hand around Micah's wrist, pushed, teeth bared. Every muscle in his arm felt like rope ready to snap. They staggered together, locked, boots skidding closer to the edge where the ground fell away into nothing.

"You should’ve died in Saint Denis," Micah hissed. "Should’ve sunk with that goddamn ship."

Arthur grunted, twisted, used the last strength he had and threw.

They went down in a tangle. The knife clattered away. Micah hit the ground on his back. Arthur rolled, came up on one knee, grabbed for anything, found a rock.

He did not think. He swung.

Stone met bone with a sound that turned his stomach. Micah gasped, hand flying to his face. Blood ran between his fingers. Arthur raised the rock again.

"Arthur."

Dutch's voice cracked across the ridge like another gunshot.

Arthur froze.

Dutch stood a few yards away. His coat was dusty. His hair was wild. There was blood on his cuffs and his eyes, his damn eyes, were bright and hard and empty.

He had a gun in his hand. It pointed nowhere and everywhere at once.

"Enough," Dutch said.

Micah rolled to his side, coughing, spitting red. "Dutch," he wheezed. "He’s lost his mind. Turned on us. On you."

Arthur got his feet under him, just barely. He dropped the rock. His whole body trembled now, from the fight, from blood loss, from the simple fact of how tired he was of all of it.

"No," Arthur said. "I just finally started usin' it."

Dutch's gaze flicked between them. The barrel of his gun shifted, a tiny, terrible indecision.

"We been together a long time, Arthur," Dutch said. "You and me. We have been through hell together. I believed in you."

"I believed in you," Arthur answered. His voice shook. He did not care. "I followed you into snow and fire and across a damn ocean. I let you put my family in the ground over and over in the name of some paradise that never existed."

"You think I wanted this," Dutch snapped. "You think I wanted Hosea dead. You think I wanted Lenny shot in the street. You think I wanted John locked away. You think I wanted you turnin' my people against me, whisperin' in their ears about houses and little lives."

Arthur's heart lurched. "Hosea died because you would not stop," he said. "Lenny died because you needed another show. John nearly died because you would not let him go. You would have got my woman and Grace killed same as the rest if I had let you."

Dutch's jaw clenched. "You’ve become sentimental," he said quietly. "Weak."

"I became a man," Arthur shot back. "Not just your damn dog."

Micah staggered to his feet, smearing blood across his cheek. "Listen to him," he snarled. "Been poisonin' this camp since he dragged that woman back. You saw it. All he cares about is some brat and a pretty whore with a set of pipes in Saint Denis. He’s the damn traitor."

Arthur took a step toward Dutch. The world tilted. For a second he thought he might fall. He stayed upright by sheer stubbornness.

"Look at me," he said. "Look at him."

Micah swayed, knife back in his hand now, eyes bright with hate. Dutch's gun moved between them, slow.

"Who’s been tellin' you what you wanted to hear," Arthur asked. "Who’s been makin' sure you never had to look at what you turned into."

Something flickered in Dutch's eyes. Doubt, just a flash.

Then it was gone.

"I am tired," Dutch said. "Tired of bein' questioned. Tired of bein' judged by men who would be nothin' without me."

His gun settled. Not quite on either of them. On the space between.

"You boys sort this out," he said.

He turned his back.

Arthur stared, stunned for a heartbeat. "Dutch," he rasped. "Dutch."

Dutch did not look back. He walked away up the ridge, coat swinging, silhouette black against the bruised sky. His boots scraped loose stones. Then he was gone over the rise.

Micah laughed, broken and ugly. "There it is," he said. "He left you, Morgan. You wanted him to pick, and he did."

Arthur felt something inside him give. It was not his ribs this time. It was older.

"You do not get to walk away," he said. "Not after all this."

Micah rushed him.

The second fight was clumsy. They were both hurt now, both slower. They crashed into each other like drunks, knives flashing, fists landing dull and heavy. The edge of the cliff loomed and fell away and loomed again.

Micah's blade punched into his shoulder this time. Arthur shouted, grabbed Micah by the coat and heaved with every last shred of anger he had.

Micah went back, boot finding nothing but air for a sick second. His eyes went wide. For one glorious moment, Arthur thought he had done it, that the man would go tumbling into the dark.

Micah's fingers snagged rock. He hung there, arms shaking, boots scrabbling at the cliff face.

"Arthur," he panted. "Arthur, help me."

Arthur stood over him, chest heaving. Blood ran warm down his side and his arm. His vision pulsed with each heartbeat. He looked down at Micah. At the pale, furious face. At the hand scrabbling for purchase.

He saw you, eyes wet, telling him you could not fall in love with him a fourth time.

He saw Grace, flinching at every gunshot.

He saw Hosea, smiling with that tired patience.

He saw John, riding away with a satchel of money and one last chance.

He holstered his pistol.

"Figure it out yourself," he said.

He turned and stumbled away.

Micah roared something. A promise. A curse. Arthur did not listen. The world had narrowed to the sound of his own breath and the crunch of gravel under his boots. The sky was too bright. The rocks were too sharp.

He made it ten steps.

The ground slid under his foot. Pain flared white-hot from his side. His legs went out from under him.

He hit the rock hard enough that the world went black for a second.

When it came back, the light had changed. The sky at the edge of his vision was more gold now, less purple. The valley had gone soft and far away, like a picture on a wall.

He could not feel his fingers.

He rolled to his back, slowly, because there was not much else he could do, and stared up at the sky.

It was a good sky, he thought distantly. Wide. Open. Not a ceiling of canvas or rot. If this was the last thing he saw, he supposed there were worse choices.

He thought of you.

He thought of the way your mouth had tasted the last time you had kissed him up on the rocks above Beaver Hollow, salt from tears and smoke from the fire.

He thought of Grace's small, stubborn hand in his.

I will come back, he had told her.

He closed his eyes.

There were footsteps.

For a moment he thought it was Micah, come to finish the job. He tried to get his hand around his gun. His body refused.

"Arthur?”

The voice was low. Steady. Not Micah's.

He forced his eyes open.

Charles stood over him.

The man's face was shadowed for a second, haloed by the dying sun. His braids were loose. His shirt was torn and dirty. There was blood on his arm that was not all his. His eyes, though, were clear.

Arthur tried to talk. What came out was a rasp.

"You dead," he managed.

Charles's mouth twitched. "Not yet," he said. "You neither.”

He crouched down, quick and careful, hands already moving to Arthur's side. "You picked a hell of a place to lie down."

Arthur flinched as Charles pressed his palm against the worst of the wounds. "Micah," he ground out. "Dutch."

"I saw them comin' up here," Charles said. "I followed as far as I could without getting shot. Figured there would be something ugly at the top." His jaw tightened. "Looks like I was right."

Arthur huffed, which might have been a laugh if he had more air. "He walked," he said. "Left me and the rat both."

Charles's eyes flicked to the ridge. "I know," he said quietly. "Sadie saw him go past. She is fine. She will get clear."

Arthur tried to push himself up. It felt like his bones had turned to sand. "You need to go," he said. "Pinkertons will be all over this. Dutch will be runnin'. Micah too. You cannot waste time on me."

Charles's hand on his chest was firm. "You are not tellin' me what I can waste," he said. "Save your breath."

He worked fast. Stripped Arthur's ruined shirt enough to see the worst of it, hissed through his teeth, tore strips from his own sleeve and an old scarf to bind the wounds. Tight. Efficient. Each pull made Arthur's vision spark black at the edges.

"You leave me here, they find me," Arthur said when he could speak again. "Dutch will know. Micah will know. Pinkertons will know."

"Good," Charles said. "Let them."

Arthur frowned. "That is not what I meant."

Charles tied off another bandage. Then he sat back on his heels and looked Arthur straight in the eye.

"Do you want to live," he asked.

Arthur blinked. It was such a bare, simple question. No talk of honor. No talk of debts.

He thought of you, again, in the lamplight. He thought of Grace's lopsided drawing of a house with smoke coming out of the chimney.

"Yes," he said. His throat hurt. "Yeah. I do."

"Then you are going to die," Charles said.

Arthur stared. "Come again."

"Out here," Charles clarified. "On this mountain. Tonight." He nodded toward the edge. "As far as they are concerned."

It sank in slow.

"You are talkin' about fak ing my death," Arthur said.

Charles nodded once. "You know this country better than most," he said. "You know how fast a story moves when there is blood on it. Dutch walks away from this. Micah crawls down the other side. They tell themselves you bled out up here and the crows took care of the rest. Pinkertons find a hat, a gun, a patch of red, they write your name in their reports and move on."

Arthur swallowed. His mouth tasted like iron and dust. "And in truth."

"In truth you come with me," Charles said simply. "We get you off this ridge before your blood runs out. We get you lower, where I left my horse. I know trails they do not. Then we disappear."

"To where," Arthur demanded. The effort made his head spin. "I can’t lead a whole posse to Saint Denis."

"You won’t," Charles said. "Not if we’re careful. I’ve been vanishin' my whole life. I can do it one more time. For you."

Arthur stared at him, chest heaving. "You sure about this," he asked. "You do this, you put a mark on yourself. Dutch will hate you more than he already does. Micah will talk. Pinkertons... you tie yourself to me, your life gets shorter."

Charles actually smiled, small and tired. "I do not think my life was ever gonna be long," he said. "Not the way this country is built. But I would like it to mean something."

He reached down. "Can you sit up?”

Arthur grit his teeth. "We about to find out."

It was ugly. He felt like every muscle had just been through a winter's worth of beating. Charles slid an arm under his shoulders, one under his knees, and hauled. Pain burst like fireworks behind his eyes. The ground tilted. For a second the world went gray.

"Stay with me," Charles said, low and steady in his ear. "Breathe."

Arthur did. In. Out. One breath at a time. The sky came back. The rock under him solidified into something he could push against.

He got up onto his knees. Then his feet.

Charles took most of his weight without comment, as patient as a tree. "Hat," he said.

Arthur blinked. "What?”

"Do you care about the hat," Charles asked.

Arthur thought about it. About all the times that hat had been shot, stomped, blown off, and retrieved. About the way you used to put it on Grace's head and laugh because it fell over her eyes.

"No," he said. "Not that much."

Charles nodded. "Good."

He let Arthur sag back against the rock for a second and walked a few steps toward the edge. The wind tugged at his braids. He took Arthur's hat from where it had caught in a crack on the climb up and tossed it out.

It fell, a lazy tumble, into the dark.

Charles came back. Took Arthur's revolver, the one the Pinkertons would recognize, and laid it on a bloody patch of stone where Arthur had fallen. He scuffed the ground with his boot, widening the stain.

"Crows and wolves will take care of the rest," he said. "By the time anyone comes lookin', there will not be enough left to argue with. They will see what they want to see."

Arthur watched him work. "Sadie," he asked. "You said she was clear."

Charles nodded. "She is headin' her own way," he said. "I will find her. I will tell her what we did. If I can get word to John, I will. But as far as Dutch and Micah are concerned, she will think you are dead too."

"You sure she will forgive you for that," Arthur asked.

Charles's eyes softened. "She’ll forgive you," he said. "That’ll be enough."

Charles came back to him then, all business again. "We need to move before that wound decides you’re finished," he said. "Arm over my shoulders."

Arthur hesitated. "If we get caught on the way down," he said. "You leave me."

Charles snorted. "You aren’t in a position to give me orders," he said. "Now move."

They went down the mountain one slow, painful step at a time.

The light faded from gold to gray to blue. Mist crept up the valleys. Somewhere far below, a wolf howled. Arthur leaned on Charles and did his best not to think about how much blood he could feel soaking into the other man's shirt.

Once, he slipped. Charles took the whole of his weight and almost went to his knees. Arthur cursed, grabbed at a sapling to steady them both.

"You still with me," Charles asked.

"Yeah," Arthur panted. "Think so."

"Good," Charles said. "Think about that girl of yours. Think about who you want to be when you see her again. Walk toward that."

So Arthur did.

He thought of you opening the door in Saint Denis with flour on your fingers and tired eyes. He thought of Grace barreling into him like she had when they first got her back from Bronte. He thought of Harper's kitchen, of Robert's childish voices, of a table that did not have a gun hidden under it.

He walked toward that.

By the time they hit the treeline proper, Arthur could barely see. The world had gone soft around the edges. He kept putting one foot in front of the other because Charles kept him upright.

They found the horse where Charles had left it, hidden in a fold of the hill under a tangle of scrub. There was a bundle tied behind the saddle, well wrapped.

Charles eased Arthur down onto a fallen log. "Do not fall off," he said, and rummaged in the bundle. He came back with a flask and a small roll of clean cloth.

"Drink," he ordered.

Arthur took a swallow. It burned all the way down. "What is this," he coughed.

"Strong," Charles said. "Do not ask questions you know the answer to."

He checked the bandages again, tightened one with a quick, apologetic grunt, then began to wrap another layer over Arthur's shoulder. When he finished, his own hands were shaking.

"Can you ride," he asked.

Arthur looked at the horse. At the distance he knew lay between here and anywhere that looked like safety.

"No," he said honestly.

Charles nodded. "Then I will get you started," he said.

He half lifted, half shoved Arthur into the saddle. Arthur bit down on a groan. The world went bright, then dim. He clung to the horn like a drunk.

Charles swung up behind him. His chest was a solid wall of heat at Arthur's back. His hands closed over Arthur's on the reins.

"Sleep if you have to," Charles said quietly. "I have you."

It was the first time in a very long time Arthur had believed something like that.

He let his head sag forward.

The last thing he saw before the trees closed in was the mountain ridge, high and dark against the sky. Somewhere up there, a hat and a gun lay in a circle of blood. Already the crows were circling.

Arthur Morgan died there that night, as far as the world would ever know.

The man you loved rode east in the dark, half conscious, a ghost with a heartbeat, held up by a friend who knew how to disappear.

Somewhere, in a little house in Saint Denis, a girl turned a page in a book about pirates and yawned. Her aunt told her to put the lamp out. Her mother stared at the window, hand pressed flat to the glass like she could feel the wind from the mountains.

Arthur's blood hummed with pain and liquor and the wild, thin taste of something he had never had before in all his years riding for Dutch.

A future.

"Hold on," Charles murmured in his ear, low and steady, as the horse slipped through the trees. "We are nearly at the end."

Arthur closed his eyes and did what he had always done best.

He held on.

[inkmonster21]

Wildflowers in the Wind

Arthur Morgan x Fem!Reader

Series Masterlist

As Dutch leads the gang into one more violent robbery under the promise of salvation, Arthur claims his share not for loyalty or escape, but for John, Abigail, Jack, and the fragile future he still hopes to build with you and Grace.

90. One Last Cut

They came to Dutch on a dirty gray afternoon, with mist hanging low over Beaver Hollow like the world itself was tired.

Arthur watched the way the man stood in front of the fire, coat open, hair longer and wilder than it had been when this all started. There was something fever bright in his eyes. Micah lounged on a rock close by, picking his teeth with a knife. Charles leaned against the cave wall, arms folded, watching everything and saying nothing. John sat at the edge of the light, jaw tight, eyes tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Bill and Javier hovered near Dutch like old habits.

Arthur stayed a little back. Close enough to hear. Far enough to think.

Dutch spread his hands. "We are not done yet," he said. His voice was velvet over iron. "I know it feels like the walls are closing in. Pinkertons, soldiers, savages, every two bit sheriff with a badge and a grudge. I know we have lost people. Good people."

He did not say Hosea's name. He did not say Lenny's. He did not say the names that sat like stones in Arthur's chest.

"But this," Dutch went on, "is still America. And America belongs to men who take what they are owed. There is a train, north of Annesburg. Army payroll. Government money, blood money. They are moving it quiet, out of fear. That fear is our last chance."

Micah's grin flashed sharp. "That is right. Big iron horse full of Yankee dollars. We take it, and we are gone. Across the ocean. Somewhere they never even heard the name Van der Linde."

Javier nodded, eyes hopeful. "A clean slate."

Charles said nothing, but his gaze cut to Arthur, quick and dark.

John shifted. "You are sure about this," he asked. "Last time you said there was a last job, I ended up in Sisika."

Dutch spread his hands wider. "This is different, John. We have learned. We are wiser. We are more desperate, yes. That only makes us sharper."

Arthur watched his mouth move and thought of you in Saint Denis, lamp light soft on your face, your voice breaking as you told him you could not watch him die for another of Dutch's dreams. He thought of Grace at Harper's table, ink on her fingers, not ducking at every sound.

He thought about the army train and the money on it and the fact that for once, he knew exactly what he would do with his share.

Not for a ranch in Tahiti. Not for another year on the run.

For John. For Abigail and Jack. For you and Grace. For some tiny corner of the world where this whole bloody story could finally stop.

Dutch's eyes flicked to him. "Arthur," he said. "You have always been my rock. Tell them. Tell them we can do this."

Arthur took a slow breath. The others were looking at him now. Waiting for the old answer.

Faith. Blind and easy.

"This train will be heavy," he said instead. "Guarded. Dangerous."

Micah snorted. "That never stopped you before, cowpoke."

Arthur ignored him. "We do this, we do it for something real. We do it for people who can still get out. John. Abigail. Jack." His voice roughened. "We do it so some kid does not have to grow up sleepin' in a hole in the ground."

Dutch's smile thinned for just a second at that. Then he clapped his hands. "Exactly," he said. "Our best selves, gentlemen. One last good piece of work. For the future."

Arthur did not know if the words meant anything to Dutch anymore.

He knew they meant something to him.

"Fine," he said. "We do it. But after this, Dutch, I am done. I am not your blunt instrument anymore. I am not your hound. I get John a stake and I go get my family and I get gone. That is what this money is for."

Dutch's eyes flashed, then softened. "Of course, son," he said smoothly. "You have earned your peace. We all have."

Micah's mouth twitched, but he kept his teeth together this time.

Arthur did not believe Dutch. Not really.

He believed himself.

They rode out just before dawn, the mist hugging the hollows, the trees nothing but black ribs against a pale sky.

John rode beside him, collar turned up. Charles hung back a little with Sadie, who had insisted on coming for the ride out even if Dutch told her she would stay with the horses when it came to the train itself.

"You are sure about this," John asked quietly when the others were far enough ahead. "About bein' done."

Arthur kept his eyes on the trail. "Yeah," he said. "This is it for me. I told you, down by the water. Take what you can and go. You get Abigail and Jack and you do not look back this time, you hear."

John huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh. "You sayin' that like I am the one who cannot let go."

Arthur shot him a look. "I got my own bad habits," he said. "But I am finally tryin' to break 'em. Dutch will never stop, John. You know that now."

John's jaw clenched. "I know."

Arthur leaned in a little. "You remember that lady in Saint Denis," he asked. "The one at the church. Sister. Told me it was never too late to be a different man."

"You did not tell me you started listenin' to nuns," John said.

"Maybe I should have done it sooner," Arthur answered. "Point is, this is the last thing I do for Dutch. After that, anything I do is for you. For Abigail and Jack. For..." He swallowed Grace's name back down. Saying it out loud hurt. "For the people who did not ask to end up in this."

John nodded, eyes far away. "You really think we can find somethin' better," he asked. "A place they do not come knockin'."

Arthur thought of Harper's little house with its crooked porch and the way Grace's letter had trembled in his hands last week when he read it. She had told him about school and about pirates and about how Aunt Harper made terrible soup but good pie.

He thought of you, writing at that same table, ink blotted where your hand shook.

"Yeah," he said. "If we are smart and stubborn. I think we can."

They reached the high ridge as the sun finally scraped over the horizon. The track below cut through the trees like a scar, iron rails gleaming dull. Somewhere to the west lay Annesburg, choked in coal smoke. Somewhere up the line, a train full of army money was chugging toward them, ignorant and sure of itself.

Bill and Micah were already clambering down the rocks with sticks of dynamite strapped to their backs. Javier and Charles checked their rifles. Dutch scanned the treeline as if he could see the whole future laid out between the trunks.

Sadie swung down from her horse and walked up to Arthur, adjusting her belt. "Lotta soldiers for a man who says he is tired of fightin'," she said.

"Ain't that the truth," Arthur answered.

She looked at him sideways. "You meant what you said, back at camp."

"About bein' done," he asked.

She nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "I am goin' to find her when this is over. Get her and Grace and let the rest of this burn behind me."

Sadie snorted. "You think it just burns neat and quiet," she said. "You know better than that." Then her face softened. "But you are right to try. I am happy for you, Arthur. You and that girl of yours. Somebody should get something good out of all this."

He glanced at her. "What about you."

Sadie shrugged one shoulder. "I got my own road," she said. "Reckon it has a few more bodies in it before I am done. But I can see the end of it now. That is more than I had when they put my Jacob in the ground."

Charles had drifted closer, quiet and steady. "You will make it," he said. "All three of you."

Arthur met his eyes. Charles did not say your name or Grace's, but it was there.

"Thank you," Arthur said simply.

Micah's shout came drifting up from the rails. "You girls finished braidin' each other's hair," he called. "We got a train to rob."

Sadie flipped him a gesture that was rude in any language. Arthur almost smiled. Almost.

They took their positions along the ridge, horses hitched where they would not spook when the blast came. Dutch wanted the spectacle, as always. Blow the rails, stop the engine, flood the cars with lead before the dust settled.

Arthur lay on his stomach at the lip of the hill, rifle braced, eyes on the bend where the track vanished into the trees. He could hear the faintest tremor under his elbows. Iron and power and all that stolen money humming closer.

Beside him, Charles settled in with his own rifle. "You nervous," Charles asked.

Arthur thought about lying. Then he felt how fast his own heart was beating.

"Yeah," he said. "I have had my fill of trains, to be honest."

Charles huffed. "We were never truly good at robbing them," he said. "Maybe this is the one that makes up for all the others."

"Maybe," Arthur answered. He did not say he hoped it was their last attempt, whether it went right or wrong.

The whistle came first, thin and echoing. Then the smoke curled up through the trees. The locomotive nose appeared, black and arrogant, pulling its silver belly of cars.

"Now," Dutch hissed from where he crouched behind a rock. He raised his hand. "Bill."

Bill lit the fuse with shaking fingers and scrambled back up the embankment, breath ragged. Micah hauled him by the collar. The spark ate along the cord and vanished into the packed dirt under the rails.

There was a heartbeat of quiet.

Then the ground jumped. The blast rolled through Arthur's bones like thunder. Dirt and splinters flew. The front of the engine leapt, metal screaming, wheels leaving the track in a shower of sparks.

The locomotive plowed over the broken rails, nose biting earth, cars piling into each other, iron shrieking and wood cracking. Men screamed. Steam burst out in a white howl.

"Go, go," Dutch roared. "Move."

Arthur slid down the embankment with dirt in his teeth, rifle up. Charles hit the ground beside him, already firing at the shapes scrambling free of the wreck.

Soldiers in blue and dust staggered, weapons half drawn. Arthur put the first one down before the man could raise his rifle. It felt like any other fight, hot and bright, but there was a cold line through Arthur now. No thrill. No rush. Just necessity.

Javier whooped as he ran, bullets kicking up splinters near his boots. Bill bellowed. Micah laughed in that grating way of his, shooting too often, wasting rounds, screaming something about Yankee bastards.

Dutch strode through the chaos like a man in a painting, gun in each hand, coat flared. "This money belongs to the people," he shouted, as if the soldiers cared who he thought the people were.

Arthur put a bullet through a corporal who was dragging himself toward the open door of the payroll car. "I am takin' it for my people," he muttered under his breath. "That will have to do."

They reached the car they wanted, a heavy thing with iron bands on the doors. A pair of soldiers had managed to use it as cover. Charles took one. Arthur knocked the other down and kicked his rifle away.

"Bill," Arthur called. "Get this door open."

Bill stumbled up with a satchel of tools, sweat running down his neck. "On it," he grunted, jamming a bar into the gap and heaving.

Gunfire cracked from the tree line. Arthur's head snapped up. "We got company," he shouted. "More comin' down from the north side."

Charles pivoted, firing toward the trees. "Reinforcements," he called. "They must have had riders nearby."

"Of course they did," Arthur snapped. Nothing ever went as easy as Dutch said it would.

Dutch laughed, wild and delighted. "All the better," he cried. "Show them we will not be cowed."

Arthur gritted his teeth. "You get that door open, Bill," he said. "Micah, you and Javier keep those bastards off us."

Micah fired wildly toward the approaching horses, bullets clipping branches. Javier, as always, made his shots count.

Someone shouted Arthur's name. He looked back to see John, ducked behind the twisted bulk of a passenger car, trading shots with a group of soldiers who had managed to regroup at the rear.

A bullet snapped past Arthur's ear. He swore and fired back. The air stank of steam and hot metal.

The payroll door finally gave with a metallic shriek. Bill almost fell backwards. Arthur seized the handle and yanked it open.

Inside, the car was packed with crates and strongboxes, every one stamped with government marks. It smelled of oil and paper and all the things men thought mattered.

Dutch pushed past him like a child in a candy shop. "Beautiful," he said. "Beautiful."

Arthur grabbed him by the sleeve. "We are not standin' here countin' it," he snapped. "Grab what you can carry and move."

Dutch wrenched his arm free. "I know what I am doing, son."

"Do you," Arthur shot back. "Because we are about to have the whole damn army on our heads."

Charles shouted again. Arthur risked a glance. More riders were tearing down through the brush. They did not have long.

He turned back to the crates, picked one that was heavy and small enough to run with, smashed the lock, and saw neat bundles of bank notes. Enough to start a life or end several. He stuffed his satchel full, hands quick.

"Bill, take two boxes and get them back up the ridge," he ordered. "Javier, cover him. Micah, you fall back in ten seconds or I leave you here."

Micah gave him a look full of white teeth and hatred. "You think you are givin' orders now," he sneered.

Arthur did not have time to argue. He shoved past him and ran toward John.

"John," he shouted, sliding in beside him behind the wreck. "You alright."

John's hat was gone. Blood streaked his cheek, but he was still moving, firing, teeth bared. "Little busy," he grunted.

Arthur leaned over the twisted rail, took two shots, dropped a pair of soldiers who had been trying to flank them. "We got the money," he yelled. "Time to get the hell out."

"Works for me," John answered.

They began to fall back in bursts, covering each other, step by step toward the trees. Bullets tore through the smoke. Shouts echoed off the wreck. Someone screamed about the colors, voice cut off mid word.

Arthur felt something hot graze his arm. He hissed, kept moving. If he stopped to count holes now, he would not get to count anything later.

They hit the tree line and Charles was there, breathing hard, blood on his sleeve. "They have more comin'," he said. "I saw dust on the far ridge."

"Then we go," Arthur said. He glanced back.

Dutch was still by the car, stuffing money into his coat, eyes bright. Micah was beside him, mouth moving, probably whispering poison.

"Dutch," Arthur roared. "We have got it, now go."

Dutch turned, face flushed. For a second, Arthur thought the man would argue. Then some sliver of sense seemed to spark. "Fall back," Dutch shouted. "Pull back."

They broke for the horses, half sliding, half running up the embankment. Arthur's lungs burned. He could hear the engine still hissing behind them, the tick of cooling metal.

By the time they swung into their saddles, the first of the reinforcements were pouring into the wreck site like ants over a spoiled feast.

Arthur dug his heels in. The horse lunged forward. Trees whipped past. Bullets snapped through leaves. Someone cried out behind him. He did not know who.

They rode hard until the noise of the wreck was lost behind the rustle of the forest and the thud of hooves. Only then did Dutch call a halt, chest heaving, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.

They gathered in a small clearing, horses dancing, hands shaking. Bill slid down from his saddle and was sick in the bushes. Javier stared back the way they had come, eyes dark.

Micah threw his head back and laughed. "That is how you do it," he crowed. "That is how the West was won."

Arthur slid down from his own horse slower. His arm throbbed where the bullet had grazed him. His ears still rang. He looked at John, at the smear of blood on his cheek, at the tight set of his mouth.

"You alright," he asked.

"I'm breathin'," John said. "For now."

Dutch dismounted in a flourish, coat flaring, and threw his stolen hat onto a stump. His eyes were shining with the same strange light Arthur had seen back at the camp. "We did it," he said. "We did it. You see. They cannot stop us. They will never stop us."

Arthur looked at him, really looked. The man he had followed for half his life was almost gone. In his place was something hungrier and less certain, feeding itself on danger because it had forgotten how to live without it.

Charles met Arthur's gaze over Dutch's shoulder. There was no triumph there. Only exhaustion.

Sadie had a streak of someone else's blood across her jaw. She wiped it with the back of her hand. "What did we get," she asked. "Was it worth it."

Dutch spread his arms as if he could embrace the entire forest. "Enough," he said. "Enough to set us all up. Tahiti. Australia. A compound in goddamn New York if we want."

Arthur took his satchel off his shoulder, heavy with money that did not belong to any of them. He thumbed open the flap and stared at the neat stacks of notes.

He did the numbers in his head. He had always been good at that, even if he pretended otherwise when Strauss came around.

Enough to buy John and Abigail a piece of land. Enough to put you and Grace somewhere with a roof and a door that locked from the inside and no reason to look over your shoulders at every knock.

Enough to try.

He closed the satchel.

"Dutch," he said. "I am takin' my share now."

Dutch blinked. "What."

"The money we talked about," Arthur said calmly. His heart was still running, but his voice had gone steady. "My share. John's share. I am takin' it."

Micah bristled. "We divide when Dutch says we divide," he snapped.

Arthur looked at him like he was a fly. "You have had your tongue in his ear all year," he said. "You do not get to talk about what is fair."

Dutch's face pinched. "You distrust me, Arthur?"

"I don't trust what you've become, Dutch," Arthur answered. "There's a difference."

Silence settled like ash.

John stepped forward, eyes flicking between them. "Arthur," he began.

Arthur held up a hand. "You want out," he asked quietly.

John hesitated for half a second. Then he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I do."

Arthur nodded back. He walked to his horse, dug another small satchel out of the saddlebag, and shared some of the bundles into it, fingers quick. Enough. Enough that John could buy a future if he was smart and stubborn.

He held the satchel out.

John stared at it like it might bite. "Arthur, I can't."

"You can and you will," Arthur said. "You take Abigail and Jack and you get. You go west or south or wherever the hell feels empty enough. You stay away from Dutch and from me until this is over."

John swallowed. "What about you," he asked. "Your family. Grace?"

Arthur's throat went tight. "I'll come," he said. "I'll find them. I got somethin' to do first."

You.

Harper's crooked porch.

Grace's laugh in a city street.

Break loose clean. Break Dutch's grip without getting everyone killed. It was a fool's hope, but it was the only kind he had left.

John looked like he wanted to argue. Then he seemed to see something in Arthur's face that made him close his mouth. He took the satchel. His hand shook.

"Thank you," he said.

Arthur clapped him on the shoulder. "Do not thank me yet," he muttered. "Just use it right."

Dutch watched all of this with a tight, bright smile that did not reach his eyes. "Are we finished sharin' up the charity," he asked lightly. There was a hard edge under the words. "We have larger concerns."

Arthur met his gaze. "I am finished," he said. "You do what you want with your share, Dutch. Build whatever kingdom you think will finally be enough."

He thought of your words on the rock above Beaver Hollow. Do not make me fall in love with you a fourth time, Arthur.

He would not ask you to.

He was going to bring you a different man this time or not come at all.

"Let's get off this mountain," Charles said quietly. "Pinkertons will be all over that wreck by now. We stand here much longer, we might as well tie ourselves to the tracks."

Dutch tore his gaze away from Arthur as if it hurt. "Fine," he said. "Back to camp. Then we plan."

They mounted up again. The trees closed in around them as they rode. Somewhere far to the south, the air over Saint Denis shimmered with heat and smoke. In a little house with peeling paint, a girl was probably arguing about fractions and pirates. A woman who had already loved the same man three times in three different lives was sitting at a table, trying not to look at the empty chair across from her.

Arthur tightened his fingers on the reins.

One last ride. One last cut.

Then, if he could manage it, a way out of all this. For them. For you.

For his best self, if he could find the shape of him before it was too late.

[inkmonster21]

Hello, my dearest gentle reader. I am here to inform you that a new chapter of Beneath the Marble Stairs is now available!

Chapter 9. A Hand in the Rain

Tagged:

@little-mini-me-world

@merkitty49

[inkmonster21]

Beneath the Marble Stairs

Kyle “Gaz” Garrick x Fem!Reader

Series Masterlist

After an evening of careful courtship with Lord Henry, a rain-soaked return home leaves you shaken by one accidental touch from Kyle, forcing both of you to confront the dangerous spark growing beneath all your restraint.

9. A Hand in the Rain

Rain had threatened all afternoon.

You had watched it gather from the window of the morning room while your mother read aloud the names expected at Lady Ashford's dinner. The sky had begun as a pale, harmless gray, then deepened by degrees until the whole of London seemed to sit beneath a lid of pewter. The air pressed close against the glass. The trees along the square stirred and stilled, stirred and stilled, as if the city itself could not decide whether to hold its breath or sigh.

Lady Henshaw did not believe in weather as an obstacle.

"It shall pass," she said.

Your father glanced toward the window. "It appears rather committed."

"It shall pass," she repeated, because to Lady Henshaw, certainty was often less a belief than a method of command.

By the time you were dressed for the evening, the rain still had not fallen.

That seemed worse somehow. A storm waiting to begin had the same quality as a room waiting for bad news. It made every candle burn too brightly, every sound feel too sharp.

Your gown was ivory tonight, softened with pale gold ribbon at the waist and sleeves. Lady Henshaw approved of it because it made you look "unforced," which you found rather comic considering three women had spent an hour forcing you into it. Your hair had been dressed with pearls threaded carefully through the curls. Your gloves were new. Your slippers were not, though your mother had inspected them with suspicion.

"You will not be walking in the street," she said.

"No, Mama."

"You will remain under cover."

"Yes, Mama."

"You must not arrive damp."

"I shall rebuke the clouds directly should they misbehave."

Lady Bramwell, visiting before the family departed, covered a laugh with her fan.

Your mother gave you a look. "You may be charming at dinner if you have the restraint not to become peculiar."

"I shall endeavor to be charming in the accepted manner."

"You know very well what I mean."

You did, unfortunately.

Lady Ashford's dinner was not a ball, but it mattered nearly as much. Perhaps more. Balls allowed one to vanish into movement and music. Dinners forced conversation. A young lady could be admired from across a ballroom and no one need discover whether she had anything in her head worth hearing. At dinner, the head became harder to disguise.

And Lord Henry Ashford would be there.

That fact sat quietly beneath the entire evening like a second table laid under the first.

His mother had invited yours. Your mother had accepted with satisfaction so complete it hardly required expression. Your sisters had been informed. Lady Bramwell had teased. Lady Carlisle had asked, more gently, whether you liked him.

You had said he was very agreeable.

It had been true. It had also been insufficient.

Lord Henry was agreeable. Handsome. Attentive. A fine dancer. He had called twice since Lady Moreton's ball, each time with the appropriate restraint, each time leaving your mother more pleased and you more unsettled.

You did not dislike him.

That was the trouble. Dislike would have been a door.

Instead, he was a hallway. Long, polished, well lit, leading somewhere everyone else seemed eager for you to go.

Kyle stood in the front hall when you descended.

He had been given the evening's cloak to hold, dark blue velvet lined in pale satin. It was too fine for the weather and not warm enough for the damp, but your mother had chosen it because it suited the gown. Practicality, once again, had been politely dismissed by beauty.

Your father was already speaking with Price about the carriage. Lady Henshaw gave final instructions to Martha concerning your wrap, gloves, and reticule. Soap stood near the side passage with a candle snuffer and the falsely innocent expression of a man who had recently said something he should not have. Ghost, half in shadow as always, watched the hall with his usual impenetrable stillness.

Kyle's eyes lifted when you reached the last step.

Only briefly.

Always briefly now.

There had been a time when you never noticed how carefully he looked away. Perhaps because he had not done it as often. Perhaps because you had not known to feel it.

Tonight, the quickness of it caught you like a pin.

He stepped forward with the cloak. "Miss."

You turned slightly so he might settle it over your shoulders. The velvet was cool at first, then warm where his hands guided it into place.

"You may have to carry me over the puddles when I return," you said, lightly, because the silence between you had begun to feel too aware.

Behind you, Lady Henshaw made a faint sound of disapproval. "Do not be ridiculous."

Kyle's hands stilled for only the smallest beat before he fastened the clasp at your throat.

"If the need arises, miss," he said, voice perfectly calm, "I am certain your father's coachman will manage the steps."

You glanced at him over your shoulder. "How disappointing."

His gaze lifted.

There.

A flicker of humor. Warm, restrained, there and gone.

Then his eyes lowered again. "Yes, miss."

You smiled despite yourself.

Your mother turned sharply. "Come. We must not keep Lady Ashford waiting."

The evening itself passed as evenings did.

Lady Ashford's house was grand without being gaudy, the kind of home that made wealth appear ancestral even when some of it had been recently improved. The dinner table was set with silver that caught every candle and glass so that the whole room seemed to glitter whenever someone moved. Conversation flowed carefully. Not freely. Carefully.

Lord Henry sat near enough to speak to you between courses, but not so near as to seem arranged.

Which, of course, meant it had been arranged very well.

"You are quieter this evening, Miss Henshaw," he said after the fish had been cleared.

You glanced at him. "Am I?"

"Only slightly."

"Then you are very observant."

"I hope not unpleasantly so."

"No," you said, and meant it. "Only dangerously."

He smiled. "Observation is dangerous?"

"It depends upon what one does with what one sees."

His gaze rested on you, thoughtful. "And what do you suppose I see?"

That was a question a bolder woman might have answered playfully. Your mother would have liked you to answer with charm. Your sisters, watching from different parts of the table, would have read the moment like a letter.

You considered him.

Then you said, "A young lady who has been told not to seem too hungry during the soup and is therefore thinking of bread with great longing."

Lord Henry laughed.

Not loudly. Not in a manner meant to draw the table. He laughed because you had surprised him, and the sincerity of it warmed his face.

"Then I have failed entirely," he said. "I had hoped to appear romantic."

"There is little romance in soup."

"I shall recover myself with dessert."

You did like him, a little.

The realization came with a pang of guilt that had no proper place to go.

Because liking Lord Henry did not feel like betrayal, exactly. Betrayal would require a promise made elsewhere, and there was none. No promise. No understanding. No right for any feeling to be injured by your finding a gentleman pleasant.

And yet when Lord Henry smiled at you across candlelight, you thought, absurdly and unwillingly, of Kyle in the front hall fastening your cloak. Of the controlled movement of his hands. Of the flicker in his eyes when you teased him. Of the way he could make you feel understood with one quiet answer and no claim at all.

Lord Henry saw you well enough for a gentleman who had known you a fortnight.

Kyle saw the strain beneath your smile before you had admitted it existed.

That comparison was not fair.

You made it anyway.

After dinner, there was music. Not a formal performance, only a little playing and singing in the drawing room. Lady Ashford encouraged her niece to sit at the pianoforte. The girl had a pleasant voice and a tendency to look at Lord Henry whenever she reached a high note, which made Lady Bramwell glance at you with wicked interest from across the room.

Lord Henry stood beside you near the mantel.

"Do you sing, Miss Henshaw?" he asked.

You lifted your brows. "Does this question lead to my being forced toward the instrument?"

"I should never force a lady toward anything."

A proper answer. A good one.

You smiled faintly. "Then yes, I sing. But not this evening."

"Because you do not wish to be admired too widely?"

"Because the room has already endured soup."

He laughed again, softer this time.

A footman passed with a tray of wine. Lord Henry took a glass for himself, then paused. "May I?"

You accepted one because refusing felt like making a point, and you had no desire to make points in Lady Ashford's drawing room.

"Thank you."

He stood beside you in companionable silence for a moment.

Then he said, lower, "I hope I am not too forward in saying that I have enjoyed your company these past weeks."

Your fingers tightened around the stem of the glass.

There was the hallway again.

Long. Polished. Well lit.

You chose your words carefully. "You are not too forward, my lord."

"That is a relief."

"I have enjoyed yours as well."

It was true.

It was insufficient.

He seemed pleased, but not triumphant. That mattered. He did not pounce upon the admission as if it gave him rights. He only nodded once, as though accepting a small trust and promising not to bruise it.

"You honor me," he said.

You looked down into your glass because meeting his eyes felt too much like allowing the whole room to see a possibility being laid at your feet.

Then the first rain struck the windows.

A quick patter at first. Light enough to be mistaken for wind in the leaves. Then again, harder. A scatter of silver sound against glass.

Lady Ashford looked toward the window and laughed. "Ah. London has remembered herself."

Within minutes, the rain became a proper downpour.

It softened the edges of the evening. Carriages were called earlier than intended, footmen dispatched for cloaks, mothers murmuring about damp hems and ruined feathers. Lady Henshaw, despite having declared the rain would pass, looked personally offended that nature had failed to heed her.

Lord Henry escorted you as far as propriety allowed when your family prepared to leave.

At the threshold of the hall, he bowed over your gloved hand.

"I hope you reach home before the worst of it, Miss Henshaw."

"I suspect we are already in the worst of it."

"Then I hope your house is warm when you arrive."

That was oddly tender.

Simple, but tender.

"It usually is," you said.

His gaze moved over your face with quiet intent. "I am glad."

You did not know what to do with that, so you smiled as you had been taught. Not too warmly. Not too little.

Lady Henshaw called your name.

You withdrew.

By the time you reached the carriage, the rain was falling in sheets.

A footman held an umbrella over your mother first, then your sisters. Your father complained good-naturedly about the state of the street. Lady Bramwell's husband nearly lost a shoe to a puddle and tried to pretend he had not. You gathered your skirts in one hand and ducked beneath the umbrella with Lady Carlisle, laughing as a gust of wind sent rain sideways beneath it anyway.

"Oh, this is useless," you gasped.

Lady Carlisle laughed with you. "Do not let Mama hear."

"She is pretending not to be wet by force of will."

You climbed into the carriage with cold rain speckling your cheeks and the ridiculous urge to laugh still bubbling in your chest.

By the time the door shut and the carriage lurched into motion, your hem was damp, your gloves were marked, and one curl had escaped near your temple.

Lady Henshaw sighed heavily. "This is precisely why we leave on time."

Your father looked out at the rain streaming down the glass. "We did leave on time."

"We did not leave before the rain."

"Ah. My error. Next time I shall instruct the weather to consult your schedule."

Lady Bramwell laughed.

Even your mother's mouth moved, though she quickly corrected it.

The carriage rolled through the wet streets, wheels hissing over stone. Inside, the air was warm with too many bodies and damp silk. Your sisters spoke over one another about the evening. Lady Carlisle thought Lord Henry very kind. Lady Bramwell thought him dangerously suitable. Your mother thought him everything she had said he was, which was to say she had been correct.

You listened and answered when required.

But the rain had loosened something in you.

Perhaps it was the absurdity of the evening ending with everyone damp and half undone after so much effort to remain polished. Perhaps it was Lord Henry's gentle hope that your house would be warm. Perhaps it was the simple relief of leaving a room where every look had weight.

You felt, briefly, almost young again.

When the carriage reached your house, the rain had not softened.

If anything, it came harder, drumming against the roof, running in shining streams along the windows. The lamps outside blurred behind the water. The front steps gleamed black.

The door opened before the driver had fully called down.

Kyle stood beneath the portico with a lantern in one hand.

The sight of him struck you with the strange force of arrival.

Not merely at the house.

At safety.

He handed the lantern to another footman and stepped forward as Price opened the carriage door. Rain blew in at once, cold and bright, making your mother draw back.

"Careful," Price said.

Lady Henshaw emerged first beneath the umbrella, all dignity and displeasure. Your father followed, then Lady Bramwell and her husband, then Lady Carlisle. Each was assisted with proper efficiency, handed from carriage to covered step with as little damage as possible.

Then it was your turn.

You gathered your skirts, already laughing because your slipper had found the edge of a puddle inside the carriage step and there was no hope of preserving perfection now.

Kyle stood at the open door.

Rain had dampened his dark hair at the edges. Water glistened on the shoulders of his coat. He should have looked less composed for it. Instead, the storm seemed only to sharpen him, turning candlelit restraint into something cleaner, darker, more immediate.

He extended his hand.

"Careful, miss. The step is slick."

You placed your gloved fingers in his.

The rain came in a gust just as you moved.

You laughed and ducked your head, one hand clutching your skirts, the other tightening instinctively around his. Your slipper found the wet carriage step, slipped, and for one breathless instant your balance gave way.

Kyle caught you.

Not dramatically. No grand sweep. No improper grasp.

Only his hand firm beneath yours, his other coming just near enough to steady your elbow through the fabric of your cloak.

But you felt it.

The strength in his grip.

The heat of his hand even through gloves.

The sudden nearness of him as you stepped down into the rain.

Your glove slipped slightly against his. The wet kid leather lost its grip, sliding over his palm until your fingers pressed lower, catching at the edge of his wrist where his own glove had shifted.

For one second, you were not properly arranged at all.

You were wet, laughing, flushed from the night, too close to him under the rush of rain and the dim glow of the lanterns.

And Kyle was looking at you.

Not as a footman looked at a lady.

Not as the house looked at its youngest daughter.

His eyes were on your face, then your mouth, then back to your eyes so quickly you might have missed it if every nerve in your body had not suddenly decided to wake at once.

The rain hit the stone around you. Somewhere behind him, your mother was calling for someone to mind the hem of her gown. Soap said something about the umbrella being more decorative than useful. Price gave an order. The horses shifted and snorted.

You heard all of it from very far away.

Kyle's hand remained beneath yours.

Your body seemed to realize before your mind did that he was warm. That he was solid. That his hand was not merely useful but a hand, with strength and shape and restraint in every finger. That his shoulder was near enough for you to see the rain beading on the wool. That his mouth had parted slightly, as if he had forgotten the next breath and then remembered it too late.

You stopped laughing.

Kyle's expression changed at once.

He knew.

Or perhaps he felt the same shift. The same impossible awareness.

His hand loosened carefully, giving you freedom before anyone could notice you had needed it.

"This way, miss," he said.

His voice was low.

Too low.

You nodded, unable to find words that did not belong to some entirely different version of yourself.

He guided you beneath the portico, then released you as soon as the step was safe.

The absence of his hand felt as distinct as the touch had.

You moved into the hall with rain in your hair and your pulse behaving as if you had run the length of the square.

Lady Henshaw turned at once. "Your hem is damp."

You looked down.

It was. The bottom of your gown had caught rain despite every effort. Your gloves were wet. One curl had fully escaped and clung near your cheek.

Your mother sighed. "Martha will have to see to it immediately."

Lady Bramwell looked at you and smiled slowly. "You look as if you enjoyed the storm."

"I enjoyed the absurdity," you said, and hoped your voice sounded normal.

Lady Carlisle took your wrap from your shoulders. "You are chilled."

You were not.

That was the problem.

You were cold from the rain and warm everywhere else.

Kyle entered a moment behind with the last of the carriage things, his coat darker at the shoulders, hair still damp. He did not look at you as he passed the cloak to Martha. Not once. Not even when your mother began giving instructions about drying shoes and sending warm bricks upstairs and ensuring no one caught their death because footmen had failed to predict rain better than the sky itself.

He did not look.

Which meant he was thinking of it too.

The realization sent a strange, helpless flutter through you.

You went upstairs with your sisters, letting them fuss over the wet hem and ruined curl. Martha loosened the damp gloves from your fingers, clucking sympathetically.

"My, miss, these are soaked through."

"Yes," you said faintly.

Lady Bramwell sat on the edge of your bed and watched you too closely while Martha set the gloves aside.

"You were in fine spirits upon the steps."

"The rain was determined to drown us."

"Lord Henry was attentive tonight."

You looked at her through the mirror. "That has nothing to do with rain."

"No," she said. "But it may have something to do with the color in your face."

You turned away. "I was cold."

Lady Bramwell's smile said she did not believe you, but perhaps, mercifully, she thought the color belonged to Lord Henry.

Lady Carlisle, kinder and less inclined to corner prey, only said, "He does seem to admire you."

You stared down at your bare hands.

They looked ordinary.

You could still feel the place where your glove had slipped against Kyle's.

"Lord Henry is very agreeable," you said.

Lady Bramwell laughed softly. "Again with agreeable. You must find a better word before he proposes, or Mama will write it into the marriage settlement."

"Do not be ridiculous."

"About Mama or the proposal?"

You did not answer.

Martha helped you out of the gown. The wet hem was examined and lamented. Your hair was taken down. The pearls were put away. Your sisters stayed a little while longer, talking over the evening, the dinner, Lord Henry, the rain, the dramatic state of the streets.

You listened.

You answered enough to seem present.

But your thoughts kept moving backward.

To the carriage step.

To rain.

To Kyle's hand closing beneath yours.

To the look on his face before discipline returned like a curtain drawn.

When you were alone at last, wrapped in your night rail with the fire burning low, you went to the window and looked down.

The rain still fell.

The front steps gleamed beneath the lamps. A puddle had gathered near the place where your foot had slipped. The carriage had gone around to the mews. The street was nearly empty now, blurred by water and darkness.

Below, the front door opened.

Kyle stepped out briefly beneath the portico with Ghost beside him. Ghost said something you could not hear. Kyle shook his head. Soap appeared behind them long enough to be waved back inside by Price.

For a moment, Kyle remained alone at the top of the steps.

He looked out into the rain.

You should have stepped away from the window.

You did not.

His face was turned from you, but you knew the line of his shoulders. Knew the way he held himself when something had moved beneath the surface and he was determined to show no sign of it.

He lifted his hand once, slowly, as if flexing his fingers.

Then he let it fall.

Your breath caught.

He remembered.

A warmth rose in you so sudden and sharp it frightened you.

Not fondness. You knew fondness. Not gratitude. Not comfort.

This was physical.

Embarrassingly so.

The awareness of his hand. His nearness. The breadth of him in the rain. The way your own body had reacted before thought could intervene.

You stepped back from the window as if caught.

No one had seen you.

No one had seen anything.

And yet your heart pounded as though the whole of London had discovered some secret you had not even known you were keeping.

Downstairs, Kyle returned inside before the rain could soak him further.

Soap was waiting near the side passage with a folded towel in hand and the look of a man trying very hard not to enjoy himself.

"Careful, miss," Soap said in a low imitation of Kyle's voice, far too solemn.

Kyle took the towel from him without expression. "You should find better occupation."

"I have. It is this."

Ghost, leaning against the wall, looked from one to the other. "You nearly dropped her?"

Kyle's jaw tightened. "No."

Soap grinned. "No, indeed. He caught her most heroically."

"I steadied her on a wet step."

"Aye," Soap said. "With all the tragedy of a poet dying young."

Kyle turned away and rubbed rain from his hair with the towel. "You are insufferable."

"I am observant."

"Then observe silence."

Ghost's mouth twitched.

Price entered from the hall. "MacTavish, if you cannot make yourself useful, I shall find something unpleasant enough to reform you."

Soap straightened. "Sir, I was merely congratulating Garrick on his devotion to household safety."

Price's gaze moved to Kyle.

Just once.

It was enough.

Kyle looked down at the towel in his hands.

Price said nothing at all.

That was worse than any reprimand.

The household settled by degrees. Doors locked. Lamps extinguished. Wet cloaks hung to dry. Gloves laid out. Boots cleaned. The rain continued past midnight, softening against the windows after its earlier fury.

Kyle carried the last folded rug to the hall cupboard and paused before closing it.

His hand still remembered yours.

It was absurd. Worse than absurd, it was dangerous. A hand was a hand. He had taken yours before. He had helped you into carriages, over thresholds, down steps, through doorways. Every such contact had been permitted because it was service. Practical. Contained. Devoid of meaning except the meaning he fought not to place upon it.

Tonight had not been different.

Except it had.

Your glove slipping. Your laugh breaking off. The sudden weight of your body trusting him before your mind had time to command it. The rain on your cheeks. The warmth of your fingers against his wrist where the gloves had shifted.

The look in your eyes when you felt it too.

Kyle shut the cupboard too firmly, then forced himself to loosen his hand.

He stood alone in the corridor, rain murmuring against the windows, and pressed his palm flat against the closed wood.

He had no right to remember the shape of your hand.

No right to wonder whether you were thinking of his.

No right to feel, beneath all his better judgment, the first terrible spark of hope.

So he did what he had always done.

He stood straight.

He breathed once.

Then he went back to work.

🌷🕯️💌 🌷🕯️💌 🌷🕯️💌 🌷🕯️💌 🌷🕯️

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Chapter 54. Home

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Chapter 54. Home

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[inkmonster21]

Whispers of Gunpowder and Lace

Captain John Price x Debutante (Bridgerton AU)

Series Masterlist

As you and John navigate the exhausting, beautiful chaos of new parenthood, you discover that home is found not in perfect moments, but in shared sleepless nights, unwavering love, and the tiny family you’ve built together.

54. Home

The first night home with your son was quieter than you expected. Not silent. Never silent.

There were the soft creaks of the house settling around you, the low crackle of the nursery fire, the faint murmur of Anna’s voice somewhere down the hall as she instructed a maid to bring more hot water. There was your husband moving from room to room with the careful concentration of a man trying to prove that every floorboard, every curtain, every candlewick had been properly prepared for the arrival of one very small person.

And there was the baby. Your baby.

He slept in the cradle beside the bed with one tiny fist tucked under his chin, his dark hair soft against the white linen, his little mouth opening and closing in dreams you could not imagine.

You had not slept more than a few minutes at a time since he was born. Neither had John. But John had the advantage of being incapable of sitting still when he was worried.

He had checked the cradle twice before lying down. Then once more after lying down. Then another time after you had closed your eyes, because apparently no amount of reassurance could convince him that the baby had not changed position in the twelve seconds since he had last looked.

“John,” you whispered, watching him rise from the bed again.

He paused with one hand on the cradle rail. “What?”

“You have checked him four times.”

“Five.”

You stared. He looked at the baby. Then back at you.

“He is very small.”

“Yes.”

“He is breathing very quietly.”

“Yes.”

“What if he stops?”

Your heart softened so quickly it hurt. You pushed yourself a little higher against the pillows and held out your hand.

“Come here.”

John crossed the room at once.

He sat carefully beside you, his weight making the mattress dip. His face looked tired in the candlelight. Not badly so. Just changed. Softer around the eyes. A little more vulnerable. He had not shaved that morning, and the shadow along his jaw made him look more like the man you had first met than the polished husband who had stood beside you at dinners and balls.

Only now there was a smudge of milk on his sleeve.

You reached up and touched it. He looked down.

“Is that from him?”

“I think so.”

“You think?”

“I held him after you fed him. He made a noise and then it happened.”

You laughed softly.

John looked faintly offended. “He is very fast.”

“He is a week old.”

“He has excellent timing.”

Your laughter faded into something gentler.

“You are doing well,” you told him.

John’s expression changed immediately. It always did when you praised him. He could accept a compliment from a general, a nod from a superior, even your father’s gruff approval. But when you told him he was good, truly good, something in him seemed to go quiet.

“I do not know what I am doing,” he admitted.

“Neither do I.”

“You seem calmer.”

“I am not calmer.”

“You look calmer.”

“I am very talented at pretending.”

His mouth twitched. Then the baby made a small, unhappy sound from the cradle.

Both of you froze. Another sound followed. A thin little cry that gathered strength by the second.

John was on his feet before you could move.

“I have him.”

“You do not have to do everything.”

“I know.”

But he was already lifting the baby with both hands, careful and steady, drawing him against his chest.

Your son’s cry turned louder.

John stared down at him.

“Well,” he said quietly. “That is a very strong opinion.”

The baby answered with another furious cry.

John looked at you.

“Is he hungry?”

“Possibly.”

“Is he cold?”

“Possibly.”

“Is he uncomfortable?”

“Possibly.”

John blinked.

“That is not helpful.”

You smiled tiredly. “Welcome to parenthood.”

He looked down at the little bundle in his arms. Your son’s face had gone red with outrage, his tiny fists flexing in the blanket.

John began to pace. Not quickly. Not nervously. Slowly, steadily, as though he had spent a lifetime learning exactly how to move through darkness without waking anyone who needed rest.

“It is all right,” he murmured to the baby. “I know. I know, little man.”

You watched him from the bed.

The sight of him with your son still took your breath away. John had always looked large in rooms. Solid. Certain. His shoulders broad enough to block a doorway, his voice low enough to settle a crowd. But with the baby against his chest, he seemed almost gentler than he had ever been.

His massive hand covered nearly all of your son’s back. His thumb moved in slow circles through the blanket.

“It is all right,” he said again. “Your mother is resting. You and I are on watch.”

The baby’s crying did not stop immediately. But it changed. Softened. Became a fretful little complaint instead of a demand.

John kept walking. You watched his silhouette pass the window, then the fire, then the nursery door, the soft rhythm of his steps becoming part of the room. Eventually, your eyelids began to lower.

The next thing you knew, the pale grey light of morning was coming through the curtains. Your side of the bed was empty.

For one terrifying second, your heart lurched. Then you looked toward the window. John sat in the armchair with the baby on his chest. He was asleep.

His head had fallen back against the cushion. One arm curved protectively around the baby, holding him close. The other rested over the blanket, fingers still spread gently across your son’s back. His shirt was wrinkled. His hair was a mess. His bare feet rested crookedly on the rug.

The baby slept too. Warm, peaceful, tucked beneath John’s chin.

You lay still for a long moment. You did not want to wake either of them. The sight was too precious.

Your husband, who had spent years sleeping lightly in unfamiliar rooms, who could wake at the smallest sound, who had trained himself to be ready for danger before danger arrived, had fallen asleep in a chair because his son had needed to be held.

You smiled, though your eyes burned. Very quietly, you reached for the sketchbook on the bedside table.

The pencil scratched softly across the paper. You drew the shape of John’s bowed head. The fall of his hand over the baby’s blanket. The little curve of your son’s cheek against his father’s chest.

It was not perfect. Your hand was still unsteady from exhaustion. But it was enough. It was them. It was home.

The difficult days began after that.

No one had warned you properly about how strange the hours would become. Morning and night lost their edges. The days blurred into a cycle of feeding, sleeping, crying, changing, washing, and trying to remember whether you had eaten something besides half a biscuit at noon.

You had never known a body could be so tired and still so alert. You had never known that you could love someone so much while desperately wishing they would sleep for more than forty minutes at a time.

There were nights when the baby cried until your chest hurt from hearing it.

There were mornings when you stared at your reflection and barely recognized yourself. Your hair unpinned. Your gown rumpled. Dark crescents beneath your eyes. A faint smear of milk on your sleeve and no idea how it had gotten there.

There were moments when you cried for no reason at all. Once, you cried because Anna had brought you toast with butter instead of honey. Another time, you cried because John had tied your robe belt too tightly. The worst was the day you cried because the baby had fallen asleep on you and you did not want to move, but your arm had gone numb.

John found you sitting rigidly in the nursery chair, tears running silently down your face.

“What happened?” he asked, instantly alarmed.

You looked at him helplessly. “My arm is asleep.”

He stared. You sniffed.

“I cannot move because he is sleeping.”

John looked down at the baby, who was indeed asleep against your chest, peaceful and entirely unaware that he had rendered his mother immobile. Then John looked back at you. His mouth twitched.

“Do not laugh,” you warned.

“I am not laughing.”

“You are.”

“I am trying very hard not to.”

You glared at him.

Then he crossed the room, lifted the baby with the gentlest hands, and settled him into the cradle. The baby stirred. John held his breath. The baby sighed and went still. Only then did John turn back to you.

“Better?”

You flexed your arm and winced. “Yes.”

He lowered himself in front of you, hands braced on your knees.

“You should tell me when you need help.”

“I do.”

“You do not.”

“I do sometimes.”

“Not enough.”

You looked down.

The truth was, you had not wanted him to think you could not manage. You had wanted to be good at this immediately. You had wanted to be the woman who knew exactly what to do, who could soothe the baby without fumbling, who never got frightened by the sharpness of his cries or the softness of his breathing.

John seemed to read the thought in your face. He always did.

“You do not have to prove anything to me,” he said softly.

Your throat tightened.

“I know.”

“No, love. I do not think you do.”

He took your hands.

“You have done something extraordinary. You brought our son into this world. You feed him. You comfort him. You know the difference between his hungry cry and his tired cry before I have even figured out he is crying at all.” His thumb brushed your knuckles. “You do not have to do every part of it alone.”

You blinked hard.

“I do not want you to think I am failing.”

John’s face changed. He looked almost hurt. “You could never fail me.”

The words were so simple. So sure. You started crying again.

John sighed softly, not because he was tired of your tears, but because he knew there was no sensible way through them except to stay. He rose and pulled you gently into his chest.

The baby slept in the cradle. The fire crackled. John held you with one hand in your hair and the other pressed between your shoulder blades.

“You are a good mother,” he whispered. “You are the best mother for him because you are his.”

You buried your face in his shirt. “I am tired.”

“I know.”

“So tired.”

“I know.”

“I think I could sleep for a week.”

“Then sleep.”

“And what will you do?”

“Everything else.”

You pulled back enough to look at him. “John.”

“I mean it.”

“You cannot do everything.”

“I can try.”

“You will make yourself sick.”

“I am already married to a woman who believes she must carry the whole world. It seems fair that I take a turn.”

Despite yourself, you smiled.

He kissed your forehead. “Go lie down. I will bring him when he needs you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

And he did. John learned quickly. Not perfectly. Not without mistakes. But he learned.

He learned how to warm bottles and how to test the temperature against his wrist. He learned which blanket your son liked best. He learned how to hold him with one hand while making tea with the other. He learned that rocking too quickly made the baby angry, that singing helped sometimes, and that the baby had no respect for the idea that his father might need sleep.

At night, when the crying grew too sharp and your body was too tired to rise immediately, John would sit up first.

“I have him,” he would whisper.

Sometimes you would protest. “You need rest too.”

“So do you.”

“But I need to feed him.”

“And you will.” He would tuck a curl behind your ear. “But I can walk him first.”

Then he would lift the baby and take him into the hall. You heard him sometimes through the door. The soft creak of the floorboards. The low murmur of his voice. Not words you could always make out. Sometimes just sounds. A quiet hum. A slow, rough sort of melody that barely counted as singing.

One night, you woke and found the bed empty. The baby had been crying for nearly an hour before that. You remembered feeding him. Remembered John taking him afterward, insisting you close your eyes for a few minutes.

You slipped out of bed and followed the faint glow of a lamp down the hallway. John stood by the nursery window with your son against his shoulder. The curtains were open. Moonlight stretched across the garden. Your husband’s back was to you. He swayed slowly, side to side, one hand cradling the baby’s head.

“You’re all right,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”

The baby fussed softly. John kissed his hair.

“I know it’s a lot, little man. It’s a lot for me too.”

You paused in the doorway. He did not know you were there.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “The worlds loud. The house creaks. You miss your mum when she is not holding you.” He gave the smallest smile. “I miss her too, sometimes. But she’s right there. She’s always right there.”

Your son gave a sleepy little sound.

John’s voice softened even more. “You have got us,” he told him. “That is the thing to remember. You have got us.”

Your heart ached. You leaned against the doorframe and watched them. Then the floorboard beneath your foot creaked.

John turned. For a moment, he looked apologetic. “I did not mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

“You should be sleeping.”

“You should too.”

He looked down at the baby.

“He was fussing.”

“So you came here?”

“He likes the window.”

“You have decided that?”

“He stops crying when I bring him here.”

You smiled. John looked tired. Not the tiredness of a long day. The deep kind. The kind that settled in the bones. But he looked happy too. Not easily happy. Not carefree. Something quieter. Something rooted.

You crossed the room and slid your arms around both of them. John leaned into you. The baby slept between you, warm and heavy with milk and dreams. For a while, you stood like that beneath the moonlight. No words. Just the three of you.

The first visitors arrived when your son was nearly two weeks old.

Your father came first.

He arrived at the house with the solemnity of a man prepared to inspect a battlefield, carrying a bundle under one arm and wearing an expression that made Anna whisper to you, “He is more nervous than he was at your wedding.”

Your father had barely crossed the threshold before he demanded to know where the baby was.

“He is sleeping,” you told him.

Your father lowered his voice immediately.

“Sleeping?”

“Yes.”

He nodded gravely, as though you had just revealed the location of a fragile treaty.

“Then I shall be quiet.”

He lasted perhaps six minutes.

The baby woke. Your father was in the nursery before anyone could stop him. You found him standing beside the cradle, hands clasped behind his back, staring down at his grandson.

The baby blinked sleepily up at him. Your father’s face changed. All the pride and bluster seemed to fall away.

He leaned down, very slowly, and offered one finger. Your son’s tiny hand curled around it. Your father went completely still.

“Oh,” he whispered.

You looked at John. John was standing near the door with his arms crossed, trying very hard not to smile too broadly.

Your father cleared his throat.

“Strong grip,” he said.

“Like his father,” John said.

Your father nodded. “Like his mother too.”

Then, before anyone could say more, he turned to you.

“Does he have enough blankets?”

“Yes.”

“Is the cradle safe?”

“Yes.”

“Are the windows properly latched?”

“Yes.”

“Does he sleep through the night?”

“No.”

Your father looked appalled.

“No?”

“No.”

John coughed into his hand.

Your father frowned at the baby as though this was a personal failing.

“Well,” he said firmly. “We shall work on that.”

Your son yawned. Your father softened again.

“Not today,” he whispered. “Today, you may rest.”

Mr. Price arrived the following afternoon and somehow managed to be even worse.

He came carrying a fishing basket, a bundle of soft cloth, and a wooden toy so large that Anna had to ask whether he intended the baby to ride it.

“It is a boat,” Mr. Price said proudly.

“It is half the size of the nursery,” John replied.

“It is aspirational.”

The baby was awake when he arrived. Mr. Price took one look at him and immediately burst into tears. Not quietly. Not subtly.

He stood in the middle of the nursery, one hand over his mouth, the other gripping the edge of the cradle, and wept.

John stared.

“Father.”

“I know,” Mr. Price said thickly. “I know. I am being ridiculous.”

“You are.”

“He is so small.”

“Yes.”

“He looks like you.”

John glanced down at the baby. Then at you.

“He looks like both of us.”

Mr. Price wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and peered closer.

“Definitely his mother’s nose.”

“You said he looked like me,” John replied.

“He has your scowl.”

“He is two weeks old.”

“Exactly. Started early.”

Your father, who had been visiting again because apparently grandfatherhood had made him allergic to remaining in his own home, appeared in the doorway.

“He does not scowl,” he said.

Mr. Price looked offended. “He absolutely scowls.”

“He is sleeping.”

“He is sleeping with intensity.”

You and John exchanged a look.

Your son yawned. Both grandfathers leaned closer.

“Oh,” your father whispered.

“Oh,” Mr. Price echoed.

The baby made a tiny, squeaking noise. Your father looked delighted. Mr. Price looked ready to commission a full orchestra.

The 141 arrived at the end of the third week.

You had been warned in advance.

John had received a note from Gaz, written in his usual neat hand, informing him that Soap had been threatened with bodily harm if he brought anything loud, sharp, explosive, sticky, or inappropriate for an infant.

Soap had written beneath it:

No promises.

Ghost had added one line at the bottom.

We will keep him contained.

No one believed that.

They arrived in a clatter of boots, coats, laughter, and nervous energy. Gaz was the first through the door, carrying a wrapped parcel and looking almost suspiciously polite.

“Congratulations,” he said, his smile warm. “He is beautiful.”

You smiled. “Thank you.”

Soap pushed past him immediately.

“Where is the wee menace?”

“Soap,” John warned.

“What? I am being affectionate.”

“You are being loud.”

“I am whispering.”

“You are not.”

Soap lowered his voice by perhaps one degree.

“Where is he?”

Ghost entered last.

He did not say anything at first. He only removed his gloves, set them carefully on the hall table, and looked toward the nursery door.

John watched him.

“You can hold him,” John said.

Ghost looked at him.

“I know.”

“You do not have to.”

“I know.”

“You look like you are approaching a bomb.”

Ghost stared at him.

“It is smaller than a bomb.”

Soap snorted. Gaz covered his mouth to hide a smile. Ghost glanced at all of them with the exhausted air of a man who had somehow survived war only to be assigned to this.

When they entered the nursery, the baby was awake.

Your son lay in John’s arms, wrapped in a soft cream blanket. His eyes were open, dark and curious, his little mouth making thoughtful shapes.

Soap stopped dead.

“Oh,” he said.

His voice had gone quiet. Really quiet.

You looked at John. John looked just as surprised.

Soap came closer slowly, hands tucked awkwardly behind his back.

“He is tiny.”

“Yes,” you said.

“I knew he would be tiny. Babies are tiny. But he is actually tiny.”

“That is generally how babies work,” Gaz said.

Soap ignored him.

“Can I hold him?”

John looked at you. You nodded.

Soap sat in the rocking chair with such exaggerated care that everyone in the room had to bite back laughter. John lowered the baby into his arms.

Soap froze. His entire body went still. Your son blinked up at him. Soap’s eyes immediately filled.

“Oh, no,” Gaz said under his breath.

Soap sniffed.

“He has got his mother’s face.”

John gave him a look.

“And his father’s grumpy brow,” Soap added quickly.

The baby made a small sound.

Soap looked terrified.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he has found your voice unpleasant,” Ghost said.

Soap turned to glare at him. The baby startled slightly. Soap immediately looked horrified.

“Sorry, wee man. Sorry.”

Your son settled again.

Soap’s face softened.

“I would kill anyone who hurt him,” he whispered.

John looked at him. Soap met his eyes. The joke had gone. For once, he sounded entirely serious.

John’s expression changed.

“Aye,” he said quietly. “I know.”

Gaz held the baby next.

He was calmer about it, though you noticed the way he adjusted the blanket twice, then once more, before settling your son securely against his arm.

“He has a good grip,” Gaz observed when the baby wrapped his fingers around one of Gaz’s.

“Everyone keeps saying that,” you said.

“It is a useful skill.”

John looked amused. “For what?”

Gaz looked down at the baby.

“Life.”

Ghost held him last.

He did not ask. He simply took the baby when John offered him. For a moment, the room seemed to hold its breath.

Ghost looked down at your son. Your son looked back. Then, very slowly, his little hand reached up and caught on the edge of Ghost’s sleeve.

Ghost went completely motionless.

Soap noticed first.

“Oh, he likes you.”

Ghost did not look up.

“He has poor judgment.”

Your baby made a contented noise.

Ghost’s thumb moved once over the blanket.

“He is safe,” Ghost said quietly.

It was not a question. It was a statement.

John nodded.

“He is.”

The visit became loud after that.

Soap presented his gift, a tiny stuffed lion wearing a little blue ribbon around its neck.

“It is not loud,” he said defensively. “It does not explode. It is suitable.”

“It has a knife sewn into its mane?” Gaz asked.

Soap looked offended. “It is decorative.”

John took the lion.

“It is going in a drawer until he is older.”

Soap sighed. “Fine.”

Gaz gave you a book of maps, the pages filled with soft illustrations of rivers, mountains, and towns.

“For when he is old enough to ask where things are,” he said.

You touched the cover.

“It is beautiful.”

Ghost had brought a small wool blanket. Dark, warm, plain, and obviously chosen with more thought than he would ever admit.

“It will last,” he said.

You looked at him.

“Thank you.”

He nodded once.

The baby yawned. Ghost looked down at him. Then, so quietly you almost missed it, he said, “Sleep well, little one.”

By the time they left, the nursery was full of gifts, laughter, and the kind of warmth that stayed long after the door closed.

That night, the house was quiet again. Not silent. Never silent.

Your son had finally fallen asleep after a long evening of fussing. John had carried him upstairs, refusing to let you make the climb again after you had spent most of the afternoon entertaining visitors.

Now you sat in the nursery chair with a blanket over your knees, your head tipped back against the soft cushion. John stood beside the cradle. He had just checked the baby. Again.

You watched him.

“Five times tonight,” you said.

He looked at you.

“Six.”

“You are impossible.”

“I know.”

He came to sit beside you on the floor, his back against the side of the chair. For a few moments, neither of you spoke.

The fire burned low. The baby breathed softly in the cradle. John rested his head against your knee. You slid your fingers into his hair.

“I did not know it would be like this,” you whispered.

John looked up at you.

“Hard?”

“Yes.”

He nodded.

“It is hard.”

“Everything takes longer.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot remember the last time I drank tea while it was still hot.”

“Neither can I.”

“I miss sleeping.”

“So do I.”

“I miss being able to leave a room without wondering if he is breathing.”

John was quiet for a moment.

“Me too.”

You looked down at him. He smiled faintly. Then he reached for your hand and pressed it to his mouth.

“But,” he said softly, “I have never been happier.”

Your throat tightened. John looked toward the cradle.

“I did not know a person could feel so tired and so full at the same time,” he continued. “I did not know I could be frightened every hour of the day and still think this is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

You swallowed.

“I feel that too.”

He shifted closer, resting his cheek against your knee.

“We are learning.”

“Slowly.”

“Painfully.”

“Very painfully.”

He smiled. Then his expression softened.

“But together.”

You looked at the cradle. At the tiny shape beneath the blanket. At the room that had once been a study, then a dream, then a carefully prepared future.

Now it held your son.

Your son, who had cried through the night and refused to sleep unless held and already seemed capable of commanding every heart in the house.

You reached down and touched John’s face.

“This is hard,” you whispered.

“Yes.”

“But this is home.”

John looked at you. His eyes shone in the firelight. Then he rose, leaned down, and kissed you softly.

Not the desperate kiss of newlyweds. Not the breathless kiss of stolen moments. This was slower. Tired. Tender. A kiss between two people who had survived another long day and knew there would be another one waiting in the morning.

When he pulled back, he pressed his forehead to yours.

“Home,” he agreed.

From the cradle came the smallest little sigh. Both of you turned. Your son slept on.

John smiled. You smiled too.

And in the quiet glow of the nursery, with the fire low and the house settled around you, you understood something you had not known before.

Love did not always arrive in grand moments. Sometimes it came at three in the morning with a crying baby and cold tea. Sometimes it came in a husband pacing the hall with your child against his chest. Sometimes it came in exhaustion, in milk-stained sleeves, in unfinished meals, in hands reaching for each other without looking.

Sometimes it was difficult. Sometimes it was loud. Sometimes it made you ache. But it was yours. And it was home.

🌹✨🕯️🌙✨🌹✨🕯️🌙✨🌹✨🕯️🌙✨

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[inkmonster21]

Hear ye, hear ye: a fresh chapter has been laid before the court. Sir Simon and his princess await.

Chapter 3. The King’s Hound

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