Free Web NovelChapter 327: Would Drown Again
Frost was already moving. He picked up a stuffed rabbit and set it on the shelf with the careful precision of someone who understood that arguing was not an option. Luna stood frozen for a moment, then her ears dropped, and she grabbed a towel from the bathroom.
Voss turned to Tommy and extended a hand.
Tommy took it. The wolf pulled him up, steady and easy, and Tommy wobbled on his feet, water still streaming from his clothes.
"You good?" Voss asked.
"Never better, indoor swimming. Five stars. Would drown again."
Voss’s mouth twitched. Just barely. "Go dry off, I’ll handle the cubs."
Tommy nodded and started for the door, leaving wet footprints across the floor that Luna was already scrubbing at with fierce, tearful determination. He paused at the threshold and looked back.
Voss was watching the children work. His expression was unreadable, that flat, controlled mask he wore when something was eating at him from the inside. But Tommy had been around the wolf long enough to see past it. The set of his shoulders. The way his ears tracked every movement the cubs made, cataloguing, assessing.
Proud and furious, he felt both at once.
Tommy stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him. Through the wood, he heard Voss’s voice, low and steady.
"Laps, in the garden. Twenty, if you’re going to be strong, you’re going to train like you’re strong."
A small wail from Luna. The sound of Frost is already moving toward the door.
Tommy leaned against the wall and let out a breath that tasted like toy box water and relief. Somewhere down the hall, he could hear Felicity’s footsteps, quick and light, her ears probably already twitching at the commotion.
He pushed off the wall and went to meet her. Someone was going to need to explain why the hallway was flooding.
She was squinting at the puddle spreading across the floorboards like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
Felicity rounded the corner and stopped, squinting at the puddle spreading across the wood like she couldn’t quite make her brain accept it. The hem of one of Voss’s oversized shirts brushed her thighs, and she carried the smell of fresh bread and the sugar-sweet apricot she’d been snacking on, and Tommy’s whole chest caved in at the sight of her.
"Felicity," Tommy said, and his voice cracked before he’d even finished saying her name. "Felicity, they ganged up on me. The cubs, both of them. It was a coordinated attack, Felicity. They had a plan, they had a whole operation!"
"Tommy." Her voice was soft, "Breathe, tell me what happened?"
"I failed. I failed the babysitting mission, Felicity. I had one job, one job..." His vision blurred, and he blinked hard, and then the tears were coming, and he couldn’t stop them. They mixed with the water already running down his face, and he was pretty sure he was making a sound that wasn’t dignified for a creature his size. "They locked me in, Felicity. They locked me in the toy box, and I couldn’t get out, and I panicked, and the water, the water just..."
He gestured vaguely behind him, at the hallway that was slowly becoming a shallow river.
Felicity’s ears twitched. Her blue eyes tracked over his shoulder, down the hall, and he could see her putting pieces together the way she always did, that quiet, careful way she had of reading a room before anyone spoke.
"Okay. But you’re alright? How did you get out?"
Tommy looked at it and felt his lip push out further. His chest hitched. "Voss saved me before I drowned in toy box soup", he said, and his voice came out small and wet and miserable. "See what they did? I’m sorry."
"Tommy," she said quietly. "Are you sure they locked you in? The bookshelf you pointed at is very heavy."
His mouth opened. Closed. His pale eyes went wide, and the tears stopped for exactly one second while his brain tried to catch up with the question.
"What?"
"The door." Still gentle, never accusing, the curious lilt she gave everything, like she genuinely wanted to understand him. "Are you sure they did it? Because I’ve watched Luna try to work a doorknob, and she can barely reach it on her tiptoes. Are you sure it wasn’t Sarge?"
Tommy blinked. Water dripped from his eyelashes.
"She-Frost helped her. They worked together. It was a team effort, Felicity, they..."
"Frost is seven."
"He’s very coordinated for seven."
Her mouth twitched. She pressed her lips flat, and he watched the war she waged against the smile fighting up her face, and something in his chest split open—not hurt, exactly, but the slow, dawning, terrible suspicion that he might have flooded an entire hallway over a sticky door.
"Voss is currently punishing them," Tommy said. "Twenty laps in the garden. Luna was crying. Frost just went, he just went, Felicity, he didn’t even argue, and that’s somehow worse."
Her smile died. Her gaze cut to the window, toward the garden where two small foxes would already be circling under the wolf’s unblinking watch.
She slipped past him, close enough that the bread-and-apricot sweetness of her trailed after, and was out the door before he’d finished wiping his face.
Voss stood sentinel near the peach tree, arms folded, his cold golden gaze tracking every motion of the two children running circuits around the sleeping hydrangeas and wild, sharp lawn. Luna stumbled, caught herself, and kept going, her tiny fists pumping, her breath hitching in sobs. Frost ran silent and steady, even as his face twisted with the effort.
The grass was cold, but she didn’t feel it. All she felt was the sight of Luna rounding the corner, tail streaming behind her like a pure white flag of surrender, her face already blotched red from crying.
Voss’s gaze snapped to Felicity, and he scooped her into his arms before she even had a chance to make it across the lawn. It was like he teleported next to her.
