Granite watched the small, round-bellied stranger across the fire and felt something inside his chest shift—like a boulder finally settling into place after centuries of precarious balance.
He had expected many things when he invited the outsider into his private den.
Pity, perhaps.
Calculation.
Greed dressed up as generosity.
Even—though he hated to admit it—some small, shameful hope that the traveler might offer himself as a solution in the most direct way possible.
What he had not expected was this quiet, stubborn fairness.
Alex sat with one hand resting protectively over the swell of his pregnancy, flanked by two apex predators whose five-star marks still shimmered faintly in Granite's memory.
The serpent's coils were loose but watchful; the lion's tail flicked once, twice, then stilled. Both of them radiated the kind of lethal calm that said they would dismantle the mountain itself if anyone so much as looked at their bearer wrong.
And yet Alex spoke of fair exchange.
