Home of the Heart

I’m humming before I even realize I’ve started—some tune I don’t have a name for, something that lives in the space between my ribs and comes out when my hands are busy and my heart isn’t hurting for once. Cross-legged on the thin mattress that’s been mine since I was small, I fold my second sweater into the duffel bag like it’s made of glass, like folding it wrong might somehow ruin the only version of leaving I’ve let myself imagine in eighteen years.

You’re humming again, Demarco says, and I can feel the smile in it before I hear the words, if hearing is even the right word for something that arrives warm and low inside my chest instead of my ears.

I like humming, I tell him, tucking a pair of socks into the corner of the bag. You’re the only one who gets to complain about it.

I’m not complaining, Lottie. I could listen to you hum for the rest of my life and die a happy man.

Heat crawls up my neck, and I duck my head even though there’s no one here to see me blush—just me, my narrow room with its water-stained ceiling and the single window that doesn’t quite shut all the way, letting in October air that smells like wet leaves and woodsmoke from somewhere else in the pack, somewhere warmer, somewhere I’ve never quite belonged.

My ears—the ones I can’t hide, the gray, telltale ears that mark me as different even among the different—flick at a sound down the hall, and I go still, my tail curling tight against my hip. But it’s just a door somewhere else in the house. Not my father. Not yet.

You okay? Demarco’s voice sharpens, just slightly, the way it always does when he feels my fear before I’ve even said anything.

I’m okay, I promise, and I mean it, mostly. Just listening.

Keep packing, baby. I’ve got you.

Six months. Six months since my birthday, since the night my father decided that eighteen years old meant a locked door instead of a cake, meant the storage room down the hall instead of a celebration, meant silence pressing in on me so heavy I thought it might actually crush something vital. And in the middle of that silence, in the very worst of it, a voice had found me. Warm. Steady. Utterly unfamiliar and yet immediately, impossibly known, like my soul recognized the shape of him before my mind had caught up.

Hello, little one, he’d said, that very first time, and I’d been so startled I’d nearly bitten through my own tongue trying not to scream.

Six months of him. Six months of falling asleep to the sound of his voice in my head instead of the sound of my own crying. Six months of learning that somewhere in Manhattan there is a man—tall, broad, powerful in ways I still don’t fully understand—who thinks about me first thing when he wakes and last thing before he sleeps, who has never once, not a single time, made me feel small for being who I am.

I fold my only good cardigan and set it on top of the pile, smoothing the wrinkles with careful fingers. It doesn’t look like much. A duffel bag half-full of secondhand clothes, a hairbrush, the little wooden fox Theodore carved for me when we were small, before he learned it was safer not to be kind to me where anyone could see. It doesn’t look like the sum of an entire life. But it’s mine, and soon it will be leaving with me.

You still nervous? Demarco asks, and there’s a teasing warmth threaded through the question, like he already knows the answer and just wants to hear me admit it.

Maybe a little.

Just a little?

Okay. A lot. I press my lips together to keep from laughing out loud, because laughing out loud in this house is its own kind of danger. What if something goes wrong? What if I can’t get out before—

Nothing is going to go wrong. His voice drops, steadies, wraps around the panic before it can fully bloom. You are going to finish packing that bag. You are going to walk out that door tonight before anyone even thinks to look for you. And I am going to be standing right there at the front of that pack house, waiting for you, exactly like I promised. Do you trust me?

I do. I trust him more than I have ever trusted anyone in my entire life, which should probably terrify me more than it does, considering I have never once seen his face, never touched his hand, never heard his real voice outside the private theater of my own mind. And yet.

I trust you, I tell him, and I feel the words land somewhere in him, feel the way his whole presence seems to loosen, just slightly, like he’d needed to hear it as much as I’d needed to say it.

Good girl.

The praise moves through me like warm water, and I duck my head again even though I’m alone, my tail giving one small, helpless wag before I catch it and force it still. He does this—finds these small, devastating ways to be gentle with me, to make me feel treasured instead of tolerated, and I don’t think he even realizes how much it undoes me every single time.

How was your idiot client today? I ask, mostly to give myself something else to feel besides the terrifying, wonderful thing blooming in my chest.

Oh, don’t even start with me. And there it is—the shift in his tone, the way even through the bond I can practically hear him dragging a hand down his face. This man wants to sue his own business partner over a coffee maker. A coffee maker, Lottie. I went to law school for this.

I do laugh then, quiet and quick, clapping a hand over my mouth on instinct even though there’s no one in the room to hear it but me and the boy in my head who apparently cannot survive one workday without narrating his suffering to me in exhaustive detail.

You love complaining to me, I accuse.

I love complaining to you specifically. There’s a difference. Something softer moves under the words, something that makes my chest ache in the good way, the way I’m still getting used to. You’re the only person who laughs at the right parts.

Maybe I just like listening to you be dramatic.

I am never dramatic. I am precise and correct at all times.

Sure, Teddy Bear.

I feel his laugh before I hear anything like it—a low ripple of warmth that spreads through the bond, curling into every corner of me like sunlight finding a window it didn’t know was there. He’s never once complained about the nickname, not since the very first week when I’d blurted it out without thinking, mortified the second it left me, certain a man like him—broad-shouldered and terrifying to strangers, powerful enough to make grown warlocks nervous, if the stories are true—would hate being compared to something soft and stuffed and safe. Instead he’d gone quiet for a long moment, and when he’d spoken again his voice had been thick with something I didn’t have a name for yet.

I like it, he’d said. I like being that for you.

I zip the duffel bag closed, my hands steadier than I expected, and set it beside the door where I’ll be able to grab it quickly once the house finally goes dark and quiet. Outside my window, the last color is draining out of the sky, purple sliding into black, and somewhere beyond the tree line the pack house is already filling with the sounds of preparation for tonight’s ball—laughter that isn’t mine, music that isn’t for me, a celebration I was never meant to be part of.

But none of that matters anymore. Not really. Not when there’s a life waiting for me on the other side of tonight, humming warm and certain at the edges of my mind.

I’ll be there, Demarco says, quieter now, steadier, like a vow. Front of the pack house. The second it’s dark enough to move.

I’ll be there too, I promise back, my heart lifting despite the fear still coiled low in my stomach. I’ll be ready.

I know you will, baby. A pause, warm and full. You’ve been ready your whole life. Tonight, someone’s finally going to notice.

I press my palm flat against my chest, right over the place where I feel him most, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, the ache that lives there doesn’t feel quite so much like grief.

It feels like hope.