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How do I describe the way it felt as my arms went around his neck, when I buried my face in his hair?

He was so easy to overlook, so easy to discount, with the other big personalities in the pack, but this was Hawk.

He held the weight, the strength of a boulder, and that felt so odd as I clung to him.

To be able to throw all my fears at someone, and have it provoke no other reaction than to draw me closer.

Tears pricked at my eyes as he moved to take hold of me, with all of my teeming emotions battering him, and he didn’t move except to hold me closer.

“I love you,” I said. I wanted to say something eloquent, to try and honour how much I appreciated, needed his strength right now, but that’s all that would come out.

He smiled like I had given the most stirring of speeches.

“And for that, I’ll fight the fucking world to keep you safe, Jules. Every time.”

Then he stroked my face and kissed me, and for now, it was all OK.

I’d been in a whole lot of ridiculous situations since I came to Sanctuary, but none more than me trying to sneak into the Volken outskirts under cover of dark.

“Get that luscious arse of yours down,” Slade hissed.

“It’s down as far as it can go,” I shot back. “What do you want me to do? Get down on my hands and knees?”

“Later?” Aaron said, managing to move like some kind of extremely swole gazelle, getting crazy low to the ground for a guy his size. “Definitely, but right now, you need to get down.” He pushed a firm hand on my tailbone, then patted my aforementioned arse when it was satisfactory.

“Get down,” I muttered to myself. “There’s fuck all light down here and hardly any light pollution. They’re not going to see me.”

“Keep saying that,” Brandon whispered, taking my hand.

“What?”

“They’re not going to see me. Say it.”

The guys all paused, their eyes jerking to us when the crystal that now hung inside my shirt from a piece of string lit up. Mouths were pursed, ready to hiss something biting at me when it happened.

I’d felt this before, I realised, this fading.

When you dropped into the background, your absence noted for a moment but soon forgotten as the more interesting personalities took up all the spotlight.

There was the disorientating feeling when your reactions and input, no matter how minimal, had no effect on the outside world, and even when you tried to thrust yourself forward again, nothing happened.

I blinked and glanced around me, feeling the reassuring weight of Brandon’s hand in mine.

“Where’d she go?” Jack hissed. “Where the fuck did she go?”

I smiled when I looked at Brandon, lifting an eyebrow in question.

He nodded in response and then gestured for us to follow Sylvan.

The Volken seer didn’t search for me, instead, he marched straight up to a house on the very edge of the settlement, walking between rows of sprouting crops to get to it.

He didn’t crawl or slink like the others did, just walked up and knocked on the door, something that sent the guys scattering.

The door opened, and an older woman peered back with a familiar face.

“Hello, Mum,” Sylvan said. “I’m back.”

Mum?

I strode up the path between the fields, Brandon beside me. The older woman’s face became clearer now that I was closer, the skin around the intense blue eyes more wrinkled, but the sharp bone structure and long black hair, heavily threaded with silver, was a mirror image of Sylvan’s.

“Why…” Her hand went to her mouth to cover the trembling lips, her eyes burning bright with welling tears. “Son, you shouldn’t have come home.”

“Of course, I should’ve. I brought reinforcements. Julie, Brandon, you can come out now.”

He shot us a dark look over his shoulder as he hugged his mother to him. He stroked her back as we emerged, and it felt for a second like we pushed through some kind of membrane.

“Where the fuck did you get to, and who the hell…?” Aaron said, pulling up beside me, stopping when he saw who Sylvan held.

“That’s how he’s getting us in,” Finn said, hands on his hips. “He’s got an in with the servants.”

“This is my mother, Tsarra,” Sylvan said.

We stood awkwardly in Tsarra’s front room after introducing ourselves, and the men’s hulking frames seemed to make the place look smaller.

“Lovely to meet you,” she said, dropping a quick curtsey.

“You don’t need to do that, Mum,” he said, and I noticed the quick sidelong looks she shot him. She might be his mother, but she acted as if he was her superior.

“Of course not,” she said smoothly. “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?”

“Mum, we don’t need tea.” Sylvan grabbed her hands gently, but the woman still went stock still. “We’ll get the supplies from my room, and then we’re going in. What’s the servant password currently?”

She nodded, not making eye contact. “It’s ‘leaping wolf.’”

“Thanks, Mum.”

He pulled away from the woman, and her hands went to her apron, getting caught in the fabric. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing for us to follow.

If I had ideas about the room Sylvan had grown up in, this wasn’t it.

But then, as I looked at the threadbare curtains and small bed, I remembered he hadn’t stayed here long.

Those memories I’d had of him being trained by the Volken…

He lifted the bed and the floorboards under it, displacing what looked like a dummy box, then dug deeper into the soil to a much larger one.

We weren’t going to be going in packing rifles, but that made sense, seeing as we were passing ourselves off as servants.

He passed out handguns and ammunition, something that was rapidly catalogued by Aaron.

They talked about how best to utilise what we had tomorrow, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it.

Rather, I crawled over to where Jack and Hawk sat up against the wall and nestled down between them.

They stroked my hair as the guys planned until my eyes fell to half-mast. Then Sylvan got to his feet.

“I need to get in touch with some of my contacts, find out what’s happening within the city.”

He didn’t wait for a response, because what could we say? We were on his turf now, and we had to trust someone who’d shown himself to be pretty untrustworthy. So Finn nodded, and when the door closed, everyone settled down to rest and doze as best we could.