Epilogue - Remi
Two Years Later
The kitchen smells of coffee and oranges and something warm and masculine that I've stopped being able to separate into its individual parts. It just smells of home now. Of them.
"She landed a double axel," I say. "She's only ten, and she landed it perfectly in the free skate. Textbook rotation, beautiful exit edge. She's the youngest skater to win the state finals by a massive margin."
Knox leans back in his chair, one ankle propped on his knee, peeling an orange with the same unhurried focus he gives everything.
"She's good." He separates a segment, holds it up, and inspects it. "But she's not Remi Silver good."
"She's going to be better than me," I insist.
He pops the segment into his mouth and raises an eyebrow, entirely unbothered, which is exactly what makes me want to throw my mug at him.
Crew reaches across the table and snags a piece of bacon from Steele's plate without looking up from his phone. Steele doesn't even flinch. Two years of living together and there is only a small amount of violence between them, and that is mainly around my heats.
"You have twenty-five kids in your coaching program now, Remi," Crew says, setting his phone face-down. "And you talk about Sophia like she's already booked her spot on the podium."
"Because she has," I say.
Whenever I think of that little girl in the pink jacket, the one who skated toward me like she knew I was waiting for her. She was the first one I saw a future for. And in doing so, she showed me exactly what my future could look like.
I don't miss competing anymore. I thought I would. I was terrified I would. But it turns out that pouring everything I have into raising the next generation fills something in me that chasing medals never quite reached.
I wrap my hands around my mug. The ceramic is warm. The morning is quiet.
“We could always try for one of our own future skaters.” Knox takes a seat at the kitchen island. He's wearing a dark heavy sweater that makes his already broad shoulders look enormous, his gray eyes cutting across the island and he waits for an answer.
“You’re ready?”
“You know I was ready the moment you came into my life, but you needed to find yourself first. And I know you have.” His gray eyes stare straight into mine. Two years, and that look still rewires something in my chest.
"And speaking of the future," Steele says, his voice a low, grounding rumble that shifts the entire temperature of the room. "Your heat is due."
My pulse gives a hard, violent skip.
The coffee is suddenly too hot in my hands. The kitchen is too bright. The air presses close and sweet against my skin.
I can already feel it. The honeyed heaviness simmering in my blood, the slow flush creeping up my throat directly beneath three claiming marks that still feel new every single morning.
My body knows things before my brain does. It has been building toward this moment for weeks, a tide rising against a dam, patient and inevitable and enormous.
Knox watches my throat move as I swallow.
"So are we maintaining precautions during this cycle?" he asks.
The question is careful. There is no pressure. There never has been. That's the thing about Knox that took me the longest to understand.
I look at him. Then at Crew, who has gone very still in his chair, his jaw loose, his eyes fixed on me with an expression he's trying not to have. Then at Steele, who is watching me the way he watches the ice when something extraordinary is about to happen.
They have been patient for two years. More than patient.
They let me establish my coaching career.
Let me heal my knee, let me figure out who I was without suppressants or Olympic pressure or anyone else's expectations shaping the outline of my life.
They waited. All three of them. Without complaint, without pushing, without once making me feel like I owed them something I wasn't ready to give.
I set my mug down.
The click of ceramic against wood sounds impossibly loud.
"No," I say softly.
The absolute, terrifying certainty settles into my bones like something coming home. I knew this was coming. I've been circling it for weeks, pressing my thumb against the edge of the idea to test whether it still frightened me. It does. But fear and readiness have never been mutually exclusive.
"I'm ready," I say. "I want a baby with my pack."
There is no good word for what happens next. The kitchen air just changes. Like a pressure system shifting. Like the moment before a storm when the birds go silent and the light turns gold and every living thing understands that something enormous is about to arrive.
The implicit understanding of what I'm saying lands in all three of them at once. No precautions this time. No barriers between what their biology is screaming at them to do and what my body is already preparing to receive.
That I'm ready.
Knox's eyes darken, the pupils swallowing the gray until there's almost nothing human left in them.
Crew's jaw locks so hard I hear the faint click of his teeth. He exhales very slowly through his nose. “Yes.”
"Sign me up," Steele says, his voice dropping into a gravel-thick rumble that vibrates behind my sternum.
"When?" Crew asks, his voice rougher now, stripped of its usual easy warmth. He stands from the table, and the movement is not hurried but it is absolute. "When does it start?"
I stand too. My chair scrapes back across the tile.
They know what I carry inside me. They know about the feral, primal instinct I spent a decade suppressing, the one that I used to be ashamed of, that I thought made me broken.
They held that darkness too, and they never flinched.
But we found somewhere for it. Somewhere it could breathe.
The Labyrinth.
The place Knox built into the estate's sprawling grounds. The maze where I get to be primal. Where my pack lets me run.
I back toward the glass doors, the autumn light catching the frost on the garden outside, the towering hedges standing dark and silent in the pale morning.
"Anytime soon," I whisper. My blood is already singing, a low, deep vibration that lives beneath my skin, that has been getting louder for days. "Tonight, I want you to catch me."
I hold eye contact with Knox for exactly one moment more.
Then I turn, and I leave them with the sound of their own breathing.
The darkness inside me is the same primal, feral instinct I spent a decade suppressing. But my alphas refuse to allow me to do that, and now it rises through my chest and takes over with a completeness that no longer frightens me.
I slide the glass door open. The cold hits me the moment I step outside.
"Come find me," I tell them. My voice is steadier than I feel. "Find me in the maze."
I don't wait for an answer.
I run.
The night air is clean and carries the smell of woodsmoke from somewhere on the estate. Above me, the moon hangs swollen and low in a cloudless sky, so close it seems to press down against the treetops, casting the shadowy grounds in silver.
I'm already warm.
My heat has been building since dinner, moving through me in slow, rolling waves that make my skin hypersensitive.
The fabric of my leggings feels electric, the cold air feels like fingertips. I breathe through it, the way I used to breathe through pain on the ice. I can. It’s controlled for now.
The gravel crunches beneath my shoes, the sound breaking the peace of the grounds. I push through the maze entrance, the towering hedges swallowing the moonlight the moment I'm inside, leaving me in corridors of blue shadow and fractured silver.
I know this maze.
I know every turn, every dead end, every path that doubles back and tricks you into thinking you're making progress. But knowing doesn't help when they're the ones doing the hunting.
I take a hard left. Then a right. My breath is already coming short. Not from exertion but from my own blood, from the slick warmth spreading through me with every stride, from the omega scent bleeding off my skin into the cold air like a signal flare.
I'm, in the most literal sense, leaving a trail.
Good, something deep in me purrs. Let them find it.
I slow at a junction, listening.
The maze is silent. Then—
Snap.
A twig, one row of hedges to my left. Measured. Not an accident. Moving parallel to me, matching my pace, which means they already know exactly where I am and have chosen not to rush.
A sound escapes me. A half laugh, half something that has no name, and I sprint straight ahead.
"Omega." The growl comes from my right, muffled by the hedge wall, low and deliberate, with an edge of something animal that bypasses my rational brain entirely and lands somewhere deep inside my gut.
It's Knox. But not quite Knox. This version of Knox doesn't bother with control because control is for social contexts, and we are very far from that now.
My claiming marks pulse like a second heartbeat.
I burst into the center clearing.
The moonlight falls full and white on the pale stone fountain, the open circle of gravel, the four paths leading in from the cardinal points of the compass. My chest heaves. I spin, putting my back against the fountain basin, its cold stone pressing against my spine, and I look.
The temperature of the clearing has risen five degrees with their arrival.
Their combined scents crash over me. Dark chocolate, bourbon, citrus, layered and intoxicating and unequivocally mine. My knees try to go soft beneath me. I press harder against the fountain and hold myself upright through stubbornness alone.
Three figures come from three separate paths.
They're wearing masks.
Knox's club has a rule. No one enters without one. Some members bring their own, chosen carefully, worn like armor or sometimes not.
Knox, Crew, and Steele have theirs from the first night they ever took me there. All dark, sculpted things with angular brow lines and hollow eyes, beautiful in the way that alphas wearing wolf masks are beautiful.
I know exactly who is behind each. I've always known. But that was never the point.
The point is what the masks do to them. The way wearing one seems to dissolve the last human constraint they have. Behind the masks, they don't moderate. They don't hold back for my comfort or their own dignity.
Behind the masks, they simply take.
That’s the rule I want.
The first time I saw Knox wear his in the dark of the maze, pupils blown wide through those hollow eyes, I understood that this wasn't about me not knowing who he was. It was about him being free to be exactly who he is.
They move toward me slowly in perfect synchronization, closing in from three angles at once, and there is no competition for position. No jealously. They're a pack. They have always been a pack.
I love that I’m what they're converging on.
Crew reaches me first. His scent changes to something almost sweet as he closes the distance. His hands are on my hips, pulling me off the stone and against his body in a single smooth movement. He's warm everywhere. My hands find his forearms automatically.
"You smell like ours," Crew says, his voice muffled by the mask into something low and unfamiliar and very dangerous. His grip tightens fractionally.
Steele presses against my back.
His chest is a wall of heat, the dark chocolate of his scent wrapping around me as his hands slide up my ribcage. His thumbs press into the undersides of my ribs and my breath stutters out of me.
"Only ours," Steele says against my ear, rough and low and intimate.
Knox stops directly in front of me.
He reaches to his mask, pulls it off and drops to the gravel as he stares at me. His eyes are dark. Every last pretense of civilized restraint has been stripped away, and what remains is something raw.
The other two follow suit, and then I'm looking at my three men.
My alphas. Not the wolves.
Them.
"So, we're having a baby," Knox says. The word falls between us like something heavy placed with great care. But it’s not a question, not quite a demand. It’s what I want. It’s a promise.
"Yes." The word tears out of me. My legs start shaking and I grip Crew's arms to stay upright.
"Good girl," Steele's says before his lips are against the back of my neck, over his mark.
"Please use me." I don't want gentleness tonight. I want to be claimed. I want all three of them. I want what my body has been screaming for since the moment I said I as ready at the kitchen table, and I want to remember this night for the rest of my life as the night everything became more.
Knox steps into my space. His hands frame my face, his thumbs pressing against the marks on my neck and the touch sends electricity down my spine.
"We are going to give you everything," he says, dark and low. The vow of a man who keeps what he promises, and has never promised anything lightly.
I tilt my head back.
Above me, the moon is enormous and cold and completely indifferent, and I'm surrounded by my pack, and the heat in my blood has become a roar.
"Then take me," I breathe. "Now!"
Knox throws me over his shoulder.
The hunt ends.
And we begin.
The End
Thank you for reading.