Horizon Ridge insuring body parts isn't just for celebrities

she stares at him and it silently confirms what he'd already known: that she was his sister. mallaidh. for a brief time after his talk with lotte he'd went by roarke again but it hadn't felt right. he was roarke and yet ...he wasn't. he shed names like cobras shed skin but since lotte'd appeared to him in that dream she'd opened pandora's box within him and he could no longer act like he didn't remember. wintersbane'd been chosen out of adoration and in the honor of his late mother. it felt right. better than roarke at any rate. roarke was too holy of a name for him, the name of the boy. a boy that he was no longer and would never be again. it doesn't belong to the tundrian. it belongs to the boy that had never gotten to live his life the way it'd been meant to be lived. it did not belong to the war-bred and raptorial tundrian that he's grown into.

yet, roarke is the name she knows him by and thus it is the name that breaches the uneasy silence between them following his tentative hello. he does not know how to communicate that to her without igniting her ire at him. "mallaidh." her name slips from betwixt his lips as a confirmation. that it is him. that he remembers now. that their chance at reconciliation will not be ruined by his suppression of whose son he was this time. but he does not know what else to say: there is much he wants to, and more that he wants to inquire about but bids his tongue still for the moment, watching for further reaction.