He laughs. Short, surprised, genuine. The sound fills the tack room and bounces off the saddles and the bridles, and I think, absurdly, that this is the first time he’s laughed since Cedar Falls.
I turn in his arms. Face him. The late sun is on his face, catching the scar through his eyebrow, the stubble on his jaw. He looks exhausted and injured and more at peace than I’ve ever seen him.
He’s beautiful.
“I love you,” he says.
I look at him. And I smile. Warm, real, unguarded. The first of many more, I hope.
His eyes soften. He doesn’t press me to say it back. I’m not ready yet. But it’s there. Three words making their presence known, just the way the bond did. Unexpectedly. Against all logic and rational thought.
He brushes his lips against mine, gentle and sweet. “We’d better get back to the others. There’s a lot to be done.”
“Yes,” I agree. There’s so much to be done, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
We get dressed. His shoulder needs re-wrapping. I do it, hands steady, touch clinical, nothing romantic about medical gauze. But when I’m done, I press my mouth to the muscle of his shoulder above the bandage. Once. Quick. A gesture that isn’t tenderness so much as declaration:these injuries are mine to tend now.
He catches my hand when I pull back. Holds it. Doesn’t speak.
We walk out of the tack room and into the setting sun. The wolves are loading vehicles, and Brenna is giving orders. Briar is studying a chart, and Merric is standing with his arms folded, watching the operation come together.
Nobody looks at us twice. Or maybe everyone does, and I’ve stopped caring.
The convoy leaves at dawn. We have wolves to move. A territory to reach. A homecoming to deliver.
And a bond, thrumming between us like a second pulse, that says:finally.
Chapter 30
Conner
We leave as the sun comes up. Three trucks, two SUVs, and a van that Nadia commandeered from somewhere I didn’t ask about. The wolves are distributed across the vehicles, some riding, some sleeping, a few of the worst cases lying flat on mattresses in the van. The healers rotate between vehicles. Brenna rides in the lead truck. Merric drives the second.
I’m in the last vehicle with Briar. She hasn’t spoken to me since the safe house, and the silence isn’t the companionable kind. It’s the silence of a woman who hasn’t decided whether to tolerate me or put me in the ground. She drives. I sit in the passenger seat and watch the scenery change.
We stop for fuel outside Waco. I get out to stretch my shoulder. The pain has settled into a dull, grinding ache that the healer’s wrap can’t entirely contain. Dane is at the next pump. He fills his tank without looking at me. When he’s done, he walkspast, near enough that his shoulder would brush mine if I didn’t step back.
“Forrester,” he says. Not a greeting. An identification. The way you’d label a specimen.
“Dane.”
He keeps walking. The interaction is thirty seconds long and tells me everything I need to know about my standing in this group: I’m tolerated because Willow vouched for me. The tolerance has a shelf life, and nobody’s told me when it expires. But for now, I’ll take it.
The mark on Willow’s neck is visible above her collar when I see her at the fuel stop. She’s talking to one of the Ravenclaw healers, organizing something, and the mark catches the light. Fresh, dark, unmistakable to any wolf within fifty feet. A claim. A declaration.
She sees me looking. Doesn’t adjust her collar. Doesn’t hide it. The matching bite on my own throat feels like it throbs in recognition.
Sienna passes me on her way back to the vehicles. She glances at the mark, then at my face, and something flickers in her expression. Not hostility. Reassessment. A female wolf reading a bond mark and recalibrating her understanding of the situation.
It’s a small thing. But it feels like a win.
We drive. Hours of highway, the landscape shifting north. I watch it change and think about the last time I made this drive. South, two days ago, with the ledger on the seat beside me and no pack behind me. The countryside passed in the other direction then. Same rocks. Same trees. Different man.
There’s a stuffed plush toy on the dashboard, wedged against the windshield. Its unblinking black eyes stare back at me. I frown.
“Can you drive with that thing in your line of sight?” I ask Briar. She turns and shoots a look at me that could curdle milk. I raise my hands. “Just asking.”
“Don’t,” she says.