Claimed (Bound Mates #2)

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

S everal months later…

We are married in the evening, with the light of the moon bathing us, and the pack all around us. There are guests in the shadows, some seen, some unseen. Mrs. Tibbs got her way, as very friendly people always do. If it were up to her, she’d be catering the outskirts where the uninvited vampires are looming. We’re aware of them. We can smell them, all of us.

My wedding dress is made of black velvet and lace. White would not have been appropriate. Wine red seemed too on the nose after all the bloodshed. So I wear the color of mourning to attend my nuptials.

“You are beautiful.” Dom smiles at me. “I believe your mother would be very proud of you. You have become strong in ways she never was.”

“I’m a college dropout getting married to a much older man who wants to knock me up,” I say, smirking slightly as I voice my deepest self-critique.

“That American sass does nothing to diminish your achievements,” he says. “You have survived mental tortures that would have broken lesser people. You could have—perhaps would have—gone mad. But you did not. I have been inside your head, and I have known your strength. Even now, on the verge of becoming a wife, and inevitably a mother, you are bold.”

I am bold now, but will I be later? What will this marriage be, what will peace be like? I am almost more afraid of that than anything.

Dom leans down and smiles at me. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t be bored. There will always be trouble for a girl like you to get into, no matter how time passes.”

“Stop reading my mind.”

“I can’t help it. You remain transparent to me. Now. Are you ready?”

“You know I’m not.”

He smiles coldly. “You are.”

He offers me his arm and I put my hand into it. I am very nervous all of a sudden. On some level, I don’t think I ever thought this would really happen. Me, married? Me, a wife? No. That’s the sort of thing other people do.

We approach the aisle, music swells from the band, and I am swept up in the moonlit ambiance.

At the altar, Vlad is Alexei’s best man, and Elena is my maid of honor. Their eyes are red, and their skin is pale, and they are changed in personality in some small fractal way, the same way things seem to change when an optometrist flicks between two similar lenses and asks which is better. They seem simply different.

Seeing them all here, I feel a sense of family in a way I never have before. All these disparate, broken, improper parts coming together and rubbing against one another.

This is what it means to belong.

To be shattered in a thousand ways and yet to be accepted anyway. Enemies are becoming friends, when bitterness ends, as Shakespeare once said in his very good movie.

Then my eyes settle on Alexei, and suddenly nothing else, nobody else matters. He is smiling with a genuine joy, an expression I have rarely seen on his face. He is so handsome, so utterly perfectly masculine, and so mine.

I have no idea how I could have doubted this. One look at my mate in his suit and I am absolutely flooded with excitement, anticipation, and the kind of love that transcends all tragedy. I love him with all I am, with every instinct, every thought, every deed.

Dom slides his arm away from me in a gentle motion designed not to break my concentration. I step up to the podium, Alexei takes my hand, and the rest of my life begins…

The End