Chapter 9
The day of the pack run had come.
Rex squared his shoulders, rolling his neck side to side the way he would before facing something that was definitely more complicated than a fight. Fighting was easy; the next few minutes would be... layered, and he had to keep the balance of it all.
He could hear her car—the engine, the sound of her tires on the gravel road, still a quarter mile out. The pack heard it too. He felt it move through them like a current, that collective turning of attention as heads angled toward the road without a single word passing between anyone.
He exhaled and smiled at Annabel, a shifter a few years older than him. She was already beaming at him so hard it looked like it might hurt her.
Alright, then. The pack was going to make it weird.
Which was sweet. His scent had shifted, changed in the deep, soul-level way a wolf couldn’t fake and the others couldn’t miss, and it had taken his pack less than a heartbeat to catch it.
The questions that followed had been exactly what he’d expected: warm and relentless, thoroughly overwhelming, and a little too personal.
But it meant people were happy and wanted to be part of it, so he answered, and talked, and skirted over what they didn’t need to know.
A mate bond was always a reason to celebrate.
This one had an extra charge to it because this mate bond meant an Omega for a pack that hadn’t had one in a long time.
It was also clear no one had a single problem with her being human, but that wasn’t the weight he’d been bracing against. The ones who might have something to say about it were conspicuously, mercifully absent today.
He hadn’t made it an order—showing up today was a choice, not a command—and part of him had relaxed when they’d stayed home.
He checked the bond between himself and the pack the way he’d check a rope for fraying.
Found nothing. No strain, and no fractures.
Maybe they won't be a problem after all. He wasn’t going to bet money on it, but right now, everything held.
Then her car turned into the lot, and he felt it.
A little spike of nerves through the bond, sudden and a little startling, like the crack when you stepped on ice.
Her car stopped just inside the entrance, engine still running, her face barely visible through the windshield.
Taking in all the wolves, all the people, all the attention already swinging toward her like a compass finding north.
He was moving before he’d decided to.
He opened her door. Her scent hit him the way it always did—sweet and warm and clean, with that lavender underneath that was only her—and the ache that lived in him when she was away eased. There. Finally. He offered her his hand. “Moonbeam.”
Her smile for him was the real one, but her eyes darted past him to the crowd. “That’s, um, that’s a lot of people. And wolves.”
“Not the whole pack, but a good portion of it. More will come through the day, though.”
That did not help. It wasn’t fear. More like the edge of overwhelm, only tinted with fear. He felt the question through the bond. Are they okay with me being here?
“They’re happy,” he said, keeping his voice low, just for her. “The pack loved you before, that hasn’t changed.” He let some of the warmth of it pass through to her. “If anything, they’re relieved.”
“Relieved?”
“A mated Alpha is good for the pack’s stability.” He shrugged. “They’d mostly given up on me finding mine.” He glanced back at the crowd, at the eager and barely-contained energy of so many wolves trying to look casual and failing. “My mate—their Omega.”
She looked past him again. He could see her reading the crowd, looking for something specific or, more accurately, the absence of someone.
“None of them are here today," he said quietly. He didn’t know whether that was caution, cowardice, or something worse on their part, and right now, it didn’t matter.
What mattered was the bond between him and his pack sitting smooth and untroubled in his chest, and Zoe’s scent starting, slowly, to ease.
The tightness in the bond shifted; she took a breath. Another. “Okay.”
And then she rose on her tiptoes and pressed a quick, bright kiss to his mouth. It was more like a stamp than a kiss, but...
The pack erupted.
Wildly.
Disorganized and slightly rude, it was the pure, uncontained noise of people who had been waiting for something and finally, finally gotten it. Howls and cheers and sounds that could only be described as triumphant. It rolled over them both like a freaking tsunami.
Zoe smiled right through the blush climbing her cheeks and neck, and it hit him—the two of them in the bond and the pack’s joy folding together into something big, deep, and not completely comfortable yet.
Every thread of connection that made up his pack, the living whole of them, with her at the center of it. Belonging there.
The oldest part of him that didn’t have language, settled and shifted. ‘This. Finally.’
For that, for all of it, he took her face in both hands and kissed her properly. And all was forgotten for a second. It was her, her scent, the constant need to be in her, heart and body and.... Yeah, he got a little carried away.
“Get a room!” someone hollered. Owen, possibly.
He pulled back, and she was still smiling when he took her hand and turned toward the rest of the pack. “Ready to lead them?” he asked.
“I don't know about leading,” she said. “But I'm ready to show them how to help the forest.”
It was exactly the right answer. This woman. His woman.... He was going to drop everything and go find that room if he thought about her for too long.
But—mind over matter.
They walked toward the group together, and he felt the pack... receiving her. It wasn’t a dramatic instant; it was a ripple, moving outward from where they stood, of wolves adjusting and settling around a place she was meant to occupy.
Zoe didn’t feel any of it—couldn’t, the way they could—but it didn’t seem to matter. She was already doing what she was supposed to do.
Bring them together and lead them.
Whatever nerves had been spiking her scent a minute ago burned off entirely within a thought, and were replaced by focus and heart.
She squared her shoulders, reached into her bag, and became the person she always was when something mattered: clear-eyed, professional, with no room for anything that wasn’t the work.
She divided the pack into groups without thinking twice, like she wasn’t standing in the middle of wolves who could each bench-press a truck.
Gently and completely unintimidated, she pressed samples into hands—or paws, for the ones already shifted.
Gave directions without hedging; described the plants with an easy specificity that made even the most restless of them pay attention.
Within an hour, wolves were vanishing into the tree line with collection bags in their mouths, ears up and purpose driven, while Zoe set up what could only be described as a small field office on the tailgate of his truck.
Rex stood back and watched. Nothing else for him to do, actually, which was new.
But the pack was at ease and busy. The bond to them had the mellow texture of acceptance.
And underneath all of it, threaded through everything, he felt her. Content and absorbed and in her element, the nerves entirely gone, replaced by happiness.
He’d known she would step up for them–she’d been there for them, for the town, long before he got in the mix—but he hadn’t anticipated it happening as fast as it did.
His Omega.
He turned the words over carefully, the way he had for days now. Tasted them. And the ache that had always lived in his heart, the grief of something he wasn’t sure would ever arrive, was gone.
There was just her. Sunlight on her hair, her voice carrying back to him in the warm summer air, one wolf crouching patiently in front of her while she showed him something in her open palm.
Just her, the pack, and the forest, all of it finally, breathtakingly whole.