Fallen Ward (Deepwoods Saga Book 3) by Honor Raconteur

springs it on him.”
    “Like he did me?”
    “Exactly.” Siobhan was torn between celebrating Rune’s growth and finding a hard surface to bang her head against. Instead, she flopped back in her chair, letting her legs and arms sprawl out like a rag doll’s. “Well, the upside to this is we won’t have to worry about Denney’s safety anymore.”
    “Truly. I pity the fool that crosses her. Rune doesn’t know how to pull his punches.”
    That was only half the problem. When Rune decided that something was precious to him, he protected it with his life. She’d seen what happened when anything threatened the guild as a whole, and Rune’s reaction had been over the top. He’d improved, some, since Hyun Woo had taken him on as a student. But that didn’t mean he was fully in control of his darker instincts yet. “So…Rune hasn’t confessed to her yet?”
    “No. I think he told me because he felt like I would understand.”
    What? Siobhan canted her head, looking at him sideways. “Why would you understand?”
    Wolf didn’t answer. He just looked at her, and the heat in those clear blue eyes made her blood run like quicksilver. She felt unable to move under the weight of his gaze. In that moment, she felt like he was telling her something, but she was too scared to hear him properly. Or maybe it was something else that stopped her from understanding him.
    “Siobhan.”
    She startled so badly that she nearly fell out of her chair. Beirly’s voice was like a thunderclap in the taut silence. She looked away, uncomfortable, and cleared her throat before she could find her voice enough to answer. “Yes?”
    “Our turn. Hyun Woo needs to talk to us and Tran.”
    Right. They were still discussing things in the other room. “I’m coming.” Standing on shaky legs, she resolutely didn’t look at Wolf. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she did, all she knew was that she didn’t know how to respond to him right now. “We’ll talk later.”
    “Yes,” Wolf promised in a soft voice. “We will.”

It was all easier said than done, of course. It would take them the next week and a half to make the preparations. Since Siobhan was an experienced stone gatherer who more or less had time on her hands, she was drafted as one of the ‘voluntold’ who got to help Grae and Rune build the new pathway. As a consequence, her knees and back ached from being hunched over. But it might have been a blessing in disguise. Gathering stones kept the hands busy, but allowed the mind to roam free.
    Siobhan desperately needed some time to think.
    That moment with Wolf had been seared into her mind. She couldn’t shake away the image. She wasn’t sure she wanted to, either.
    For ten years, ten incredible years, Wolf had made it clear on a daily basis that he loved her. His love was fierce, sometimes overwhelming, and was usually displayed through a variety of broken bones. The one thing that Siobhan had never doubted, since she’d brought him back from Reske, was that he stayed because he loved her and couldn’t imagine not being with her. But until that moment, she’d assumed it was the love of a brother, a friend, and while incredibly deep, it wasn’t anything more than that. That look in his eyes, however, had opened a door in her mind and now she couldn’t see anything else but the possibility that perhaps she’d been wrong to assume she knew how Wolf felt about her.
    Now that the option was there in front of her, she didn’t know how to respond to it.
    For three days, she gathered stones and stewed, lost in thought. On the fourth day, she went with everyone else in the morning out of sheer habit, sank onto the ground near the sandy beach, and went about gathering without any real focus on her part. She was so lost in thought, in fact, that Grae managed to sit next to her without her noticing. When she turned to stand, she nearly bumped heads with him, and had to jerk back to avoid doing so.
    “Grae!”
    “I