Page 86 of Curvy Arranged Mate

The table went quiet. Elianna babbled into the silence, oblivious, smacking her bread against the edge of the table.

Caitlynn shrugged. “Not often. She asks about you.”

Chris’s knee pressed harder against hers.

“I… I’ll get there,” she promised. “Maybe I’ll have lunch with her. Tomorrow.”

Kahn passed the potatoes. Viktor poured the wine. Damian told a story about the eastern patrol that morning, about Reyes chasing a fox through the underbrush and coming back with a torn jacket and an expression that could have curdled milk. Olivia corrected three details. Damian said his version was better.

Sloane ate. She listened to the noise of it, the overlapping voices, the scrape of cutlery, Elianna’s babbling, Damian’s laugh cracking through the conversation. Her shoulders were down. She registered that with the same distant surprise she’d felt when she first noticed it weeks ago: the absence of the brace, the dropped guard, the strange lightness of sitting in a room full of people and not calculating the nearest exit.

Caitlynn caught her eye across the table.

Neither of them smiled. It wasn’t that kind of exchange. Caitlynn’s green eyes held hers, steady, and the look between them carried the weight of everything they’d been.

Caitlynn lifted her glass. A fraction. An inch. The smallest possible acknowledgment.

Sloane lifted hers back.

Elianna threw her bread on the floor. Kahn picked it up. Caitlynn looked away to take it from him, her hand brushing his, the gesture so automatic that neither of them registered it, and the moment passed, and Damian was talking again, and Viktor was shaking his head, and Olivia was laughing.

Under the table, Chris’s hand found hers.

His fingers laced through hers, warm, steady, and the pressure was gentle, an offer she could refuse. She looked at his hand on hers. At his fingers, blunt, scarred at the knuckles, wrapped around her smaller ones.

She could have pulled away. Three months ago, she would have. Three months ago, she would have extracted her hand and reached for her wine glass and filed the contact under things that happened accidentally and never needed to be discussed. She would have sealed the crack before it widened, because cracks were how people got inside, and people inside meant people who could hurt you.

She tightened her grip.

Chris turned to her. His eyebrows lifted, a question.

“Eat your dinner,” she said softly, her cheeks warming.

He smiled before turning back to his food.

The roast was good. The wine was better. Damian challenged Viktor to arm-wrestle across the table, and Olivia moved the candles with the resignation of a woman who’d seen this before. Kahn watched them with an expression that could have been amusement or could have been a man silently calculating the cost of replacing the furniture.

Sloane watched all of it. The mess and the noise and the elbows on the table and the baby throwing bread on the floor for the third time. The people who had let her in.

The wound was still there. She could feel it if she pressed, the way you could feel a scar beneath skin that had healed over. It would always be there. Her father’s hands, her aunt’s silence, the years of handling everything alone because alone was the only safe option.

But the wound was not in charge anymore.

She was sitting at a table that was too small, holding the hand of a man who had stood in her hallway and waited for her to open the door. Across from a woman she had once tried to destroy, who had lifted a glass to her anyway. Surrounded by people who had watched her at her worst and stayed.

She could ask for help now. She was learning that. The asking still scraped against old machinery, still cost her more than it should have. But she could do it. She’d asked Olivia to train with her. She’d asked Caitlynn about the wards. She’d asked Chris to come with her to see Lyssa, and he had, and he would again, and the asking hadn’t killed her.

Damian won the arm-wrestle. Viktor said he’d let him. Olivia said Viktor was a gracious loser. Kahn opened a second bottle.

Chris’s thumb moved across her knuckles. A slow stroke.

She leaned into him. Her shoulder against his arm. A small thing, the kind of thing other people did without thinking. She had to think about it. She thought about it, and she did it anyway, and the sky didn’t fall, and nobody looked at her like she’d shown them a loaded weapon.

His arm came around the back of her chair.

She let it stay.

*****

THE END