Epilogue
Maddie
Sunlight pressed around the edges of the heavy velvet curtains like it had money and breeding and every expectation of being let in.
I lay there in a bed too fine for the likes of me, staring up at a carved ceiling I still hadn’t gotten used to, and knew before my boots ever touched the floor that something in me had shifted hard in the night.
The room was quiet in that rich-people way.
Not dead quiet. The kind that came from thick walls, old money, and enough space between souls that nobody had to hear each other snore unless they wanted to.
Somewhere beyond my door I heard the faint roll of footsteps on polished floorboards.
Farther off, a door opened and closed with careful weight.
The estate had its own rhythm. Controlled. Elegant. A little intimidating.
I pushed up on my elbows and looked around the guest room I’d been sleeping in for the past three days.
Everything in it felt deliberate. Dark wood.
Pale bedding soft enough to make a person suspicious.
A rug under my bare feet that probably cost more than my truck back home.
Fresh flowers on a side table, because apparently in this house flowers just materialized and stayed alive out of respect.
I’d spent the first night afraid I might stain something by looking at it too long.
By the second, I’d stopped feeling like an intruder every second I breathed.
This morning felt different.
Not easier exactly. Heavier, maybe. Clearer.
I sat on the edge of the bed and shoved both hands through my hair, pushing the chestnut mess back off my face. “Well,” I muttered to nobody, “hell.”
Because the truth had gotten up before I had.
I didn’t want to go back to Texas.
I said it in my own head just to see if it felt ugly there. If it made me disloyal. If my wolf would buck up against it on principle. Instead, it settled deeper. Solid. Mean as a stake in the ground.
I didn’t want to go back.
Not because I didn’t love my family. I did.
Lord, I did. Bronc had been more father than brother half my life.
Pearl had mothered damn near everybody in Iron Valor, but I’d always known her love for me had that extra thread in it because I was hers for real.
The pack had fed me, protected me, laughed with me, put up with my mouth.
Dairyville was the only home I’d ever known.
But recently it felt like it wasn't really mine.
That thought stung enough that I nearly got up and paced.
Instead, I stayed there, elbows on my knees, and stared down at my hands.
Back home, I was Bronc Baucaum’s little sister.
That was the first thing people knew, the main thing they remembered, and for most of the male wolves around me it was the last thing they needed to know.
They’d flirt with out-of-town girls. They’d sniff around any unattached female who wasn’t connected to our Alpha by blood.
But me? Men either got real respectful real fast or acted like I was made of barbed wire and consequences.
Couldn’t entirely blame them. Bronc had never said it plain, but nobody wanted to be the poor bastard caught looking too long at his baby sister. Not unless he was suicidal or stupid, and I wasn’t in the market for either.
So I’d spent years laughing it off. Working at Pearl’s.
Helping at the shop. Learning engines and schedules and customer service and all the million little things that kept a place running.
Getting my degree online, because Goddess forbid I leave the pack and venture out on my own.
And sure, I went on dates here and there with men from outside the pack or men dumb enough to think they could handle the complications.
Nothing ever stuck. Never had a chance to.
And meanwhile, everybody else kept finding their mates among Iron Valor's most eligible wolves.
Aspen, got that sweet giant who looked at her like she was a prayer answered.
Harper, back where she belonged with Arsenal after all that pain.
Brie, wild and polished and messy-hearted, still somehow got her shot at fated love.
Even Parker, after her betrayal, wound up with that dangerous bastard she had always secretly adored.
I was happy for them. I mean that. But happiness for other people and loneliness in your own skin could sit side by side just fine. I knew because I’d been carrying both around for a while now.
I leaned back and scrubbed a hand over my mouth.
Maybe it would’ve been different if I’d felt rooted there in some other way.
Maybe if the pack had ever seen me as something besides Bronc’s sister, Pearl’s girl, the pretty little grease monkey who cussed too much and could run a restaurant and tune a bike.
Maybe if every room I walked into didn’t come with history attached like a name tag I never got to peel off.
Philadelphia had done something to me in three damn days.
Maybe it was the wedding. Maybe it was seeing a place like Obsidian turned inside out by love and power and all those impossible people standing witness.
Maybe it was the Kozlovs themselves, strange and beautiful and dangerous as sin, making room at their table like it were the easiest thing in the world.
Maybe it was just being somewhere nobody knew me from birth.
Whatever it was, I had woken up with a feeling in my chest I hadn’t had in a long time.
Possibility.
It scared the shit out of me.
I stood, padded to the window, and dragged one of the curtains back.
Time ran different here. Mornings were actually late afternoons, and that late afternoon sun spilled across the room.
The estate grounds rolled out below in disciplined green, old trees and stone paths, and distant ironwork.
Beyond that, the city sat in layers, harder and stranger than home.
Philadelphia wasn’t soft. It wasn’t open sky and dust and familiar roads.
It was brick and power and history with its teeth still in.
I liked it.
That was maybe the worst part.
I got dressed quick, because if I sat there too long I might talk myself back into obedience. Jeans, fitted black top, boots. Armor enough. I braided part of my hair back from my face with clumsy fingers, then gave up on making it perfect. I looked like me. Good enough.
The hallway outside smelled faintly of lemon polish and old wood.
The guest wing had a hush to it, but not an empty one.
More like the house was awake and simply didn’t need to announce itself.
I moved through carved archways and past portraits that looked expensive and judgmental and probably older than the state of Texas.
The place ought to have felt cold with all that grandeur, but it didn’t.
It felt watched, maybe. Guarded. Lived in by people who valued privacy more than coziness.
By the time I found the kitchen, my stomach was tight enough I couldn’t tell if I was hungry or about to confess to murder.
The kitchen itself was big enough to fit half of Pearl’s diner in it.
Dark cabinetry, stone counters, a long central island, copper pans hanging where they looked too pretty to use.
Outside light pooled over one section of the island where Lucia sat with a stack of documents, a tablet, and a cup of coffee.
She looked up the second I stepped in.
Lucia always looked up like she already knew who was approaching and had just been generous enough to let them finish the walk.
“Maddie,” she said.
I hovered there like an idiot for a second. “Hey.”
Her dark eyes moved over my face in one sharp sweep. She wore black, of course. Simple this morning, fitted and elegant and practical all at once. Her curls were pulled back. Not a hair out of place.
“You used to our time zone yet?” she asked.
“Gettin’ there, but couldn’t sleep past my own thoughts.”
One corner of her mouth moved. “That is usually inconvenient.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She gestured to the coffee pot. “Pour yourself some before you say whatever you came in here to say.”
That stopped me cold.
I let out a short breath. “Was I that obvious?”
“Painfully.”
Well, no point dancing around it then.
I grabbed a mug mostly to give my hands something to do. Poured coffee. Added too much cream because I was stalling, and we both knew it. Finally, I set the spoon down and turned toward her, leaning one hip against the counter.
“I want to stay,” I blurted.
Lucia’s brows lifted a fraction. Not much. But for her, it might as well have been a gasp.
“In Philadelphia,” I said, because now that I’d started, everything was trying to rush out at once. “Not forever necessarily, I mean maybe forever, I don’t know, but not just for the wedding trip. I don’t want to go back to Texas right now.”
She sat back in her chair and folded one hand over the other atop the papers. “All right.”
That was it. No immediate shutdown. No, why would you say something so ridiculous? Just all right, in that calm, deadly competent voice of hers.
It opened the gate wider.
“I know it sounds sudden.”
“It sounds important,” she said.
I looked down into my coffee, then back up. “I’m tired, Lucia.”
“Of what?”
A humorless laugh slipped out of me. “That’s the thing.
It’s not one big dramatic thing. It’s a hundred little ones.
” I set the mug down untouched. “Back home, I’m always somebody’s something.
Bronc’s sister. Pearl’s daughter. The pack’s little sister.
The one who helps at the diner, helps at the shop, fills in wherever.
And I love them, I do, but…” I spread my hands helplessly.
“I don’t know who I am when none of that’s attached. ”
Lucia said nothing. She had a gift for silence that made a person keep talking without feeling pushed.
So I did.