Page 77 of Ethan
I took the card carefully, smoothing my hand over the cover. In shaky letters, it said:Thank you, Ethan.
Something in my chest loosened, the knot of guilt and doubt I’d been carrying since that day.
“I’ll treasure this,” I said, my voice rougher than I meant.
Across the room, Maurice caught my eye. He raised his glass in a quiet toast, his expression lighter than I’d ever seen it. I lifted mine in return.
I turned back to Micah, forcing a smile. “Hey, don’t you have a job to do?”
His eyes widened. “Oh! Yeah!”
Cathy chuckled and gave him a gentle nudge. “Go on, then.”
Micah nodded furiously, then bolted out the door and into the hall.
“Mind if I join you?” Devon’s voice came from behind me. Cathy excused herself quietly, giving me one last grateful squeeze on the arm before she drifted away.
I grabbed a beer from the cooler behind me and held it out to Devon.
“It’s eleven in the morning.”
“Everyone else is already drinking,” I said, gesturing at the enforcers cackling over some joke in the corner. “If you want to survive an enforcer party, you need to be in the same state of mind.”
Devon smirked but took the bottle anyway, twisting off the cap. “Fair point.”
He watched me for a long moment before saying, “Listen, about what happened…”
I groaned, running a hand through my hair. “I know, I know. I broke protocol. I shouldn’t have gone out there?—”
“No.” Devon shook his head firmly, cutting me off. “That’s not what I was going to say.”
I blinked at him, caught off guard.
He took a sip of beer, then fixed me with a steady look. “If it had been me? I probably would’ve done the same thing. You made the hard call, and you kept people alive. That’s what matters.”
His words sank in slowly. I’d braced myself for another lecture, but instead there was understanding. Respect, even.
“I…” I faltered, the weight in my chest shifting. “I thought maybe I’d just made everything worse.”
Devon shook his head again. “You acted like a head healer, Ethan. And sometimes being a head healer means carrying the blame, even when you made the right choice. Protocol exists for a reason, but it doesn’t define you. Your judgment does.”
I let out a slow breath, almost a laugh. “Funny. Cooper made it sound like I’d set the whole forest on fire.”
Devon’s mouth curved in a wry smile. “Cooper’s job is to keep order. Yours is different. A healer doesn’t answer to rules the same way. Our responsibility is to life itself. If someone needs help, we go. That’s the code, whether the lead alpha likes it or not.”
That gave me pause. Devon tipped his bottle toward me. “You’ll need to learn how to stand your ground when it comes to Cooper. He won’t always agree with your choices. But when lives are on the line? You don’t wait for permission. You act.”
For the first time, I thought I understood what it meant to truly carry this role. Not just patch wounds, not just follow orders. But to lead, in my own way. To know when to bend rules for the sake of what mattered most.
And I think I was finally ready for that.
Devon tipped his bottle back, then said, almost offhandedly, “You know Cooper hates looking at spreadsheets, right?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
His lips curved into a sly grin. “If he gives me too much grief about something, I just bring up the quarterly budget. Start talking numbers, supplies, costs. Within five minutes he’s begging me to take the whole thing off his hands.”
I stared. “So you’re telling me your grand strategy for standing your ground is… weaponizing spreadsheets?”
