Chapter 30 - Caitlynn
The dress was Olivia’s idea, not hers.
It was not a gown—Caitlynn had drawn the line at anything that required assistance getting into or out of, which eliminated most of what Olivia had initially proposed.
They’d compromised on something simple: cream linen, long-sleeved, loose enough to accommodate the belly she was no longer able to pretend wasn’t visible.
It was the nicest thing she’d ever worn. She hated how much she liked it.
“Stop fidgeting,” Olivia said, adjusting the back.
“I’m not fidgeting.”
“You’ve touched your hair four times in the last minute.”
“My hair is doing something.”
“Your hair is doing what it always does. You just care today.” Olivia stepped back and looked at her with an expression that hovered between satisfaction and the softness she deployed when she thought Caitlynn wasn’t strong enough to handle what she was actually feeling. “You look beautiful.”
“I look pregnant.”
“Both. At the same time. It’s allowed.”
The clearing was at the heart of the territory, past the training yard and through a stand of old-growth pines that opened onto a circle of grass ringed by birch trees.
Caitlynn had walked through it a dozen times over the past months—during training with Kahn, during the long, restless evenings when she couldn’t sleep and the boundary pressed in from all sides. She’d never seen it like this.
The pack had strung lanterns between the birches, warm amber light that swayed in the late afternoon breeze.
The grass had been cleared, and someone had laid a path of flat stones from the tree line to the center, where Gideon stood with his hands clasped in front of him and an expression that suggested he had agreed to this under duress and wanted everyone to know it.
Everyone was there.
That was the part that caught in her chest. Not everyone as in the official attendees, the required witnesses, the political necessities.
Everyone. The kitchen staff, still bandaged from the battle.
The patrol wolves, some of them on crutches, one in a wheelchair that Viktor was pushing with his good arm while his bad one hung in its sling.
The children, scrubbed and fidgeting. Elena, standing at the front with her arms crossed and her chin lifted, daring anyone to suggest she didn’t belong there.
They’d come for her. All of them. The pack that had whispered behind her back and served her cold meals and turned away when she walked into rooms. They were standing in the late afternoon light with lanterns swaying above them, and they’d come because they wanted to be here.
She was not going to cry. She didn’t cry.
Chris was waiting at the edge of the clearing. He’d put on a shirt with actual buttons, which was his version of formal wear and which she intended to mock him for at the earliest opportunity. He held out his arm when she reached him.
“You clean up well,” she said, pointedly avoiding his gaze.
“You’re deflecting.”
“I’m complimenting your shirt.”
“You’re terrified, and you’re hiding it behind commentary on my wardrobe.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. “I know you.”
She didn’t argue. He did know her. He’d known her since she was fifteen and angry at the world and too proud to admit she needed someone to walk beside her, and here he was, twenty years later, walking beside her anyway.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
They walked the stone path together. She kept her eyes forward because if she looked at the faces on either side, she was going to lose the fight with her tear ducts, and she had not survived seven foster homes and a kidnapping and a magical barrier that nearly killed her only to cry in front of two hundred wolves because someone had hung lanterns in the trees.
Kahn was standing at the center.
He’d done something about his hair, which meant Olivia had gotten to him, too.
Dark suit. No tie—he’d apparently drawn his own lines.
The scar along his jaw caught the lantern light.
His eyes found hers the moment she cleared the tree line, and the bond between them flared—warm, steady, certain.
Not the wild pull of the early days, not the desperate thread she’d clung to in the medical wing.
Something settled. Something that knew where it was and intended to stay.
He looked at her like she was the only person in the clearing.
She stopped in front of him. Chris released her arm with a squeeze she felt in her ribs and stepped back. The clearing was quiet.
Gideon spoke first.
His voice carried the way it always did—deep, rough, built for authority rather than sentiment.
He recited the opening words of the Aldric Pacts, the old language that predated the pack structure, from a time when wolves and witches had stood together in clearings like this one and chosen each other because the magic between them was too great to ignore.
He did it well. She’d give him that. He didn’t stumble, didn’t sneer, didn’t add any editorial commentary about humans or bloodline purity or the general decline of standards. He said the words like he meant them, or at least like he’d decided that meaning them was the lesser evil.
When he paused, she caught his eye.
“For the record,” she said, quiet enough that only he and Kahn could hear, “I spent three months thinking you were the one feeding information to the rogues.”
Gideon’s eyes narrowed. Something moved behind his eyes—not offense, exactly. Recognition. “For the record,” he said, just as quiet, “I thought it was you.”
They looked at each other. She understood, in the way she understood most things about Gideon, that this was as close to common ground as they would ever get.
Two people who had suspected each other of the worst and been wrong about it.
They would never be friends. They would never share a meal without some variety of tension crackling between them like static.
But he was here. Officiating at her wedding. Saying the old words. And she had burned herself hollow defending his pack, and he knew it, and the knowledge sat between them like a handshake neither of them would ever actually extend.
Grudging respect. She’d take it.
Gideon continued. He reached the vows.
The Aldric words were simpler than she’d expected. Not the ornate, ritualized language of the first ceremony—no invocations of bloodline or duty or the binding weight of law. These were plain. Direct. Two people standing across from each other and saying what they meant.
Kahn went first. His voice was steady and low, and he said the words while looking at her, not at Gideon, not at the assembled pack, at her, and she felt each one land in the bond like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples spreading outward into territory she hadn’t known she had.
Then it was her turn.
She’d never been good at this. The saying of things.
The opening of doors she’d spent years learning to lock.
But she’d walked through fire for this man and his pack and their daughter, and if she could do that, she could stand in a clearing and say words that meant I choose you, I chose you, I’m choosing you now.
So she did.
The bond shifted when the vows were complete.
She felt it—a deepening, like a root system pushing further into soil, finding water, anchoring.
Not just to Kahn. To the territory. To the wards, the land, the pack that stood in a circle around them.
The magic recognized what was happening and responded: a warmth that started in her chest and spread outward, golden at the edges, settling into the ground beneath her feet and the air around them like the clearing itself was holding its breath and then releasing it.
Kahn’s eyes shifted. Blue to amber and back. His wolf, pushing forward, settling.
Sloane found her afterward.
She appeared at Caitlynn’s elbow while the pack was still milling, still celebrating, with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had waited for exactly the right moment and didn’t intend to waste it.
“I hate being indebted to people,” Sloane said. No preamble. Her voice was cool and precise and exactly as sharp as it had been the first time she’d called Caitlynn a fraud in the maze courtyard. “I want you to know that.”
“Noted.”
“You saved my life. You saved all of our lives. And I owe you for that, which I find deeply irritating.” She paused. “You’re Luna. I accept that. I don’t like it. But I accept it, and I will defend you with everything I have.” Her eyes were hard and clear. “Not because I want to. Because I owe it.”
“That might be the most aggressive pledge of loyalty I’ve ever received.”
“You’re welcome.”
Sloane turned and walked away. Her blonde hair caught the lantern light. She didn’t look back. Caitlynn watched her go and felt something that wasn’t quite respect but lived in the same neighborhood.
Chris caught her eye from across the clearing. Their eyes met, and she remembered that time—so long ago, when she had seen him as the closest thing to a family. It was only fitting that he be part of the final family she had.
Then the first howl rose.
It came from somewhere at the edge of the clearing—a single voice, long and low, the note held until it resonated in the bones.
A second joined it. A third. The sound built and layered and spread, wolf after wolf adding their voice, the chorus rising into the darkening sky until the clearing vibrated with it, until the trees swayed and the lanterns flickered and the sound was everywhere, was everything, was a hundred voices saying the same thing in the only language that didn’t require translation.
Welcome. You’re ours. You belong.
Caitlynn stood in the center of it with Kahn’s hand in hers and Elianna turning somersaults beneath her ribs and the sound of a pack—her pack—singing her home.
For the first time in her life, she believed it.