his legs and the two of us continued to roll around on the soft pine needle forest floor, searching for a way to pin each other.
The two of us finally stilled, both of us breathing hard, locked together. Above us, the pines swayed, their tips pointing into a sky far brighter with stars than any I’d seen Earthside. I shifted, trying to see if I could find a new weakness of Rafe to pin him.
“You know Maddie is terrified that you won’t come home with us,” Rafe began, his voice cold.
I didn’t want to lie to her about the future, but I hated the thought that my uncertainty hurt her. I shifted, then managed to explode out of Rafe’s grip, rolling up onto my knees, ready to grapple again.
Rafe didn’t move.
“But it’s the best thing you could do for her and for all of us,” Rafe finished.
That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I pinned him, but he just stared at me without fighting anymore. His dark eyes weren’t flashing with anger like I’d seen so many times; they’d gone cold.
We were done fighting.
Maybe we were just done.
I got to my feet. He rose to his feet, brushing himself off with a few elegant strokes, as if the pine needles—and myself—weren’t worth his time.
“I have to heal us both before we go back so no one knows,” I said.
“I can heal myself,” he promised. The two of us were quiet, the only sound in the forest the faint noise of our ragged breathing as it slowed and returned to normal. The space between trees was bright with magic from our hands as we healed ourselves, and then the magic died and it was just the two of us, out in the deep cold night together.
“We’ll save your family,” Rafe told me.
I cocked my head to one side, feeling relief unfurl in my chest. For a second, the way he’d spoken earlier, I’d thought he was done with me. With us. The brotherhood, the family, that had grown around Maddie were as important to me as my friends from childhood, the people that had formed a family with me in the orphanage when there was no one else to love us.
They were all my family now.
Then he added, “Then we’ll save mine.”
I nodded as if it didn’t matter, although something cold spread through my gut.
Rafe didn’t have to say again that he hoped I wouldn’t try to come home with them, that he didn’t want me. It was written in the disgust he couldn’t hide as he straightened his ripped jacket, noticed the tear, mended it with magic.
Some things can’t be mended quite so easily.
That was all right though. He didn’t owe me anything, and if that meant I didn’t owe him anything, everything I needed to do next became much easier.
Because we’d come here to get a few prisoners and get out again, without being caught or drawing attention to the fact there were Otherworlders moving through the Greyworld on a mission.
But I was in the mood for the kind of thing the Rebels did—big, chaotic, embarrassing for the Establishment.
It was the kind of thing that Silas Zip, Rebel Magician, used to specialize in.
And maybe it was time to go back to my roots.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Maddie
* * *
I was lying on my stomach on one of the transient bunks with Jensen sitting cross-legged beside me, playing with my hair as the two of us talked about the kind of stupid little things lovers talk about when they’re run out of other conversational material, like when they’re in prison and it’s been a bleak day.
We were discussing what we were going to name our kids one day.
“Okay, I’ve got a good one,” Jensen said, and I eyed him skeptically. Jensen and I apparently had very different parameters about what constituted a good baby name.
He spread his hands out, setting the stage. “Blaze. It’s gender neutral—for a boy or a girl.”
“It’s not for a boy or a girl who’s coming out of my uterus,” I said.
We were arguing, of course. That was what Jensen and I did.
And it made me happy.
“What about Axel?” he asked.
“No.”
“For a boy, obviously.”
“Not for anyone!”
“Roc?”
“Are you just testing me?” I demanded. “Because the names keep getting worse.”
“Does that mean Blaze is starting to grow on you?”
Then the door creaked open, and he was out of bed in an instant, standing protectively in front of me.
I didn’t mind that view one bit—broad shoulders, amazing ass—but I still peeked