His Beast’s Bride

[Amber’s POV]

"You missed one." Jonah points with the hand not holding his gathering basket—the one I gave him an hour ago, still swinging empty from two fingers like a prop he hasn't figured out the purpose of. "Right there. No—there. Gods, Amber, do you actually need glasses, or is this just what happens when your bloodline bottoms out?"

He's ten. He delivers this the way other children deliver knock-knock jokes—with bright-eyed enthusiasm and total confidence in the punchline.

I find the cluster he's pointing at and add the berries to my basket. My fingers are stiff with cold, the skin across my knuckles cracked and dry, and the thorns have opened three small cuts along my palm that I've stopped noticing. "Got it. Anything else, or are you done supervising?"

"I'm not supervising." He kicks at a root, hands shoved into his pockets now that the basket has been demoted to elbow cargo. "I'm waiting. Mother said midday. That was two hours ago, and she's going to take it out on me, even though you're the one picking berries like it's your first day with fingers."

The forest edge catches the last of the afternoon light in long amber bars across the undergrowth. Pine air, cold earth, the faint wet-rot smell of leaves breaking down beneath frost.

I catalog all of it—a technique I have been perfecting since I was old enough to understand that the alternative was cataloging every small, precise way this household reminds me I am borrowed goods.

"Did you see Mira yesterday?" he says, not waiting for an answer, because Jonah has never once in his life waited for an answer. "Full shift. Clean run. No stumbling, no half-forms. Mother actually smiled."