Wren never expected her life to change the moment she set foot in the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College. But everything shifted when she met Liam Mairi. Loving him was effortless, bright, and full of promise. Losing him was shattering.
His dea...
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I was in love with Wren Blackwell.
The realization came to me on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning, which seemed like a particularly inconsiderate way for something capable of rearranging my entire fucking life to announce itself. There was no dramatic near-death experience attached to it, no dragon fire scorching the sky, no blade pressed against anyone's throat and certainly no argument loud enough to make half of Fourth Wing stop what they were doing and listen. I wasn't even with Wren when it happened. I was sitting at breakfast with Bodhi and Garrick, half listening to an argument about whether the rain rolling in from the west would cancel afternoon flight maneuvers, when I happened to look across the dining hall and saw my girlfriend laughing.
My girlfriend.
That was still new enough that every time I thought the words, something warm settled low in my chest.
Wren sat wedged between Sawyer and Ridoc at one of the long tables, her dark hair pulled away from her face in a loose braid that was already surrendering strands around her temples. Violet and Rhiannon sat across from them, and whatever Ridoc had just said had apparently been ridiculous enough that Wren had abandoned whatever she'd been eating to laugh properly, her head tipping toward Sawyer as she covered her mouth with one hand. Sawyer was laughing too, although judging by the color creeping up his neck, I had a suspicion he might have been the subject rather than a participant. Wren reached over when she finally caught her breath and squeezed his arm, saying something I couldn't hear from this distance, and whatever it was made the embarrassment disappear from Sawyer's face almost immediately.
That was the thing about Wren that people missed if they only watched her fight.
She paid attention.
Not in the way commanders did, cataloguing weaknesses or waiting for mistakes, though she was frighteningly good at that too when somebody put her on a sparring mat. Wren listened to people as though whatever they were telling her deserved somewhere to land. She remembered the smallest details and brought them back weeks later without seeming to realize she'd done anything unusual. She knew when Ridoc's jokes were actually jokes and when he was using them to avoid saying something real. She noticed when Violet was getting overwhelmed before Violet said a word. She could get Sawyer talking when he'd otherwise retreat into himself, and I'd watched her spend nearly twenty minutes after Combat helping a first-year from another squad correct his footing because she'd noticed Emetterio's explanation hadn't made sense to him.
Then someone hurt one of those people, and the same woman who remembered how everyone took their coffee could make a man regret having a functioning mouth.
I loved both versions of her.
The thought arrived so naturally that it took several seconds for me to understand what had happened.
My attention stayed on Wren while the noise of the dining hall seemed to pull farther away, and there was no panic waiting behind the realization, no frantic attempt to argue myself out of it. If anything, the strangest part was how obvious it suddenly felt, as though the truth had been sitting patiently inside me for weeks while I took the long way around to noticing it.
