Epilogue
Josie
Six months ago, I invented a fake pack to survive a family reunion.
Best mistake I ever made.
I'm thinking about it because I'm bundled on the porch swing Logan built, wide enough for four, hung on chains he set himself, angled at the exact spot where you can watch the snow come down over the pines — with a quilt over my knees, one hand spread over the curve of my belly, and the whole warm house glowing gold behind me through the frosted glass.
Woodsmoke and clove from Finn's jacket over the back of the couch.
Juniper, sharp and green, from wherever Hudson's dropped his boots this time.
Maple and cedar soaked so deep into this house that Logan doesn't so much wear it as the walls do.
And under all of it, threaded through every room, my own.
Brown sugar and oat, laced now with all three of theirs. Pack-scent. Ours.
The house was Logan's before it was ours.
He was building it the whole time he was falling for me, board by careful board, and when I found out — months later, once he'd stop going pink every time I looked at him — he admitted he'd been building it for a someday he wouldn't let himself name.
A someday with a full porch and more than one coffee cup in the sink and a person to come home to.
Turns out the someday was this. Finn and Hudson finished it out with him in a matter of weeks once we were bonded, the three of them working dawn to dark like men possessed, and I moved my terrible throw pillows in before the paint was fully dry.
Logan didn't change a single thing about how I arranged them. Alphas don't touch the nest.
I lift a hand to my throat without meaning to, the way I do a dozen times a day.
Three marks. Finn's where my neck meets my shoulder, the first, blunt and sure.
Hudson's on the far side, placed with a growl I still think about.
Logan's at the last unclaimed spot between them, the one that completed the bond and broke the heat and made me theirs for good.
I feel all three of them pulse warm under my fingers, and down the bonds, faint and steady, three separate hums of the same thing. Home. Home. Home.
The baby shifts, and I spread my palm wider over the swell.
We did the math, after. Four suppressant pills left in the bottle and a heat that came anyway, three days in a nest with three alphas and not one thought in my head practical enough to be called a plan. I was pregnant before the second morning, probably. We just didn't know it for weeks.
I told them at the kitchen table over a Tuesday dinner, because I have never in my life known how to make a moment small.
Finn went still. Completely still, fork halfway up, and then he set it down with the careful precision of a man who has just been handed something breakable and is recalculating his entire life around not dropping it. “Okay,” he said. Then, quieter, wrecked, “Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
Hudson laughed. Of course he did — laughed until it cracked in the middle and turned into something else, and then he was on his knees by my chair with his forehead against my stomach and his shoulders shaking, and for once in his life the funny one didn't have a single joke.
And Logan — Logan, who still measures twice and speaks once, who says goodnight like a shopkeeper — Logan crossed the kitchen without a word, gathered me up out of the chair like I weighed nothing, and started to purr.
Deep, helpless, endless. The sound an alpha only makes when everything in him has gone right at once.
He didn't say anything for a long time. He didn't have to. I could feel exactly what it was through the bond, so bright it stung my eyes.
“Say something,” I finally told him, laughing, crying, both.
He pressed his mouth to my temple. “I built enough rooms,” he said.
He had. Room after room, for years. Building them was the only way that man knew how to say I hope.
School lets out for the holidays on Friday, which is a mercy, because I have reached the point in this pregnancy where sitting in a tiny preschool chair is a genuine engineering problem.
My Huckleberry Hollow four-year-olds have spent the whole autumn patting my belly with enormous seriousness and informing me, daily, that I am getting rounder. They are not wrong.
Dottie's had a pool running at the diner since October on whether it's a boy or a girl. Cara's threatening to write the whole thing into a book, which — fair. She called it, months ago. When did it stop being fake, Jos?
I never did answer her. But I know now. It stopped being fake in a craft closet, and at a fence line at two o'clock, and under a wall of rope five years and a whole life ago. It was never fake for any of them. I was just the last to find out.
From inside, I hear Finn say something low, and Hudson bark a laugh, and the particular clatter of Logan setting a fourth place at a table that used to be set for one.
I heave myself up off the swing — three attempts, one hand braced on the chain, absolutely no grace whatsoever — and stand for a second in the blue winter dark with snow catching in my lashes and the windows behind me spilling gold across the porch boards, my whole ridiculous, real, chosen family loud and warm on the other side of the wall.
“Josie?” Finn calls. “Food's up. Get in here before Hudson eats yours.”
“I would never,” Hudson says, with his mouth clearly full.
“He absolutely would,” Logan says.
My phone buzzes against the swing. Lily. I answer it with the particular thrill of a woman who knows a good phone call when she feels one coming.
“Okay,” she says, no hello, breathless. “So. Ethan just texted me from behind the bar and you are going to want to sit down.”
“I'm already sitting. I'm the size of a truck, I sit constantly. Go.”
“Scarlett Blake.” Lily says it like a headline.
“Our Scarlett. Not-my-problem Scarlett. The sheriff came in tonight on his fourth noise complaint this month — the taproom, Josie, which does not make noise — and sat at the bar for two hours nursing one soda water and watching her like she hung the moon. And when he left, the search-and-rescue one showed up. Same night. Different flimsy reason. And do you know what Ethan says she did?”
“Tell me she pretended not to notice.”
“She pretended not to notice. While her own brewer stood ten feet away wiping the same clean glass for twenty minutes because he couldn't stop looking at her either.” Lily is delighted. “Three of them, Jos. Circling. And she's out there telling the whole town they're not her problem.”
I laugh, and it rolls out of me and down all three bonds and I feel my alphas catch it from inside the house. Because I remember. A June night a lifetime ago, in over my head, the whole town watching me swim, and Scarlett Blake sliding me a free beer and saying nobody drowns quiet here.
“Well,” I say, and I cannot keep the grin out of it. “It's a small town. Nobody drowns quiet here.”
“That's what I said.” Lily's grinning too, I can hear it. “Go eat. Tell the boys I said hi. Kiss the baby.”
I hang up and sit for one more second in the cold and the dark and the snow, buzzing with the delicious knowledge that Scarlett Blake — who watched me go under and called it to my face — is about to be so, so gloriously in over her head.
Good. It's her turn.
I press my palm flat against the swell one more time, and I feel it — three bonds, three men, one impossible lucky life — and I go in to them.
I built a fake pack to get out of one bad weekend.
I walked away with everything.