Chapter 18 #2
“I think she thought it’d be simple,” I add as we come to a familiar bend in the road.
I know every curve, every tree by heart, that mark the way to the healer’s cabin.
“That once I found Rennick again all the pieces she left behind would fall into place—that I’d easily fall into my place being back here.
” The huffed laugh that escapes my sore throat touches the air and becomes a curl of smoke.
“For all her foresight and immaculate planning, even the mighty Thalassa couldn’t have seen all… this…coming.”
Rhosyn’s fawn curls whip across her face as the wind picks up. She pushes them back, frowning at me. “But you are back, right? For good?”
The question has my insides stuttering and I hesitate.
She narrows her eyes in my direction. “You and Nick seem to be working things out. I mean, I smelled him on—”
“Stop!” I blurt, cutting her off before she can finish the sentence. Mortification hits me so hard I nearly trip over my own boots. My face floods with heat, and I swear even the frost on the ground melts in sympathy.
“What?” she says, wide-eyed and far too innocent to be remotely convincing. “You want me to pretend I didn’t scent him all over you? Or that Siggy didn’t see him walking out of your bedroom the other morning?”
“Rhosyn,” I warn, but it only makes her grin wider.
The ground might as well swallow me whole. My wolf, of course, has no shame about any of it. She’s practically glowing inside me, smug as sin, still stretching and purring over what happened between us and the Alpha the day before last.
That morning had been a haze of overwhelming sensation.
The warm press of his body against mine, the quiet safety of it, I’d soaked it in like it was mine to keep.
For a stolen stretch of time, I’d felt whole again, sated in ways that had been left aching and needy for too long.
But when he kissed me goodbye and left for morning patrol, the warmth went with him. So did the sense of peace.
The cold came creeping back in and accompanying it was remorse. Not for him, but for me. For the promise I’d made to myself and promptly broke.
I’d told myself I wouldn’t cross that line until his engagement was officially dead. Until there was nothing tying him to Talis McNamara. But I let him touch me, let him leave proof of it on my skin, while he still technically belonged to someone else—if only on paper.
You don’t owe her a fucking thing, my wolf snarls, her fury curling low and possessive in my chest.
She’s right. I know she’s right. But that doesn’t stop the guilt. It doesn’t silence the piece of me that holds fast to the knowledge that I deserve more than to exist in the shadow of a promise he gave to someone else.
A promise brought on by necessity or not.
And yet, two days later—two days of replaying every moment, of feeling the ghost of his mouth on mine, his body moving with mine until we both came apart—I find the remorse that held me so tightly at first has gentled its grip.
What remains in its place is something steady, something verging on right.
I think I might actually be okay with what we did.
Or maybe it’s just me finally surrendering and giving up my fight against it.
“We still have a lot to figure out,” I say quietly, the words tasting heavier than I mean them to. “I have a lot to figure out. My head’s kind of a mess.”
Rhosyn loops her arm over my shoulders, pulling me close enough that her warmth steadies me.
“Anyone’s head would be after what you’ve been put through,” she tells me gently.
“But don’t forget to give yourself some grace, all right?
You and Rennick…it’s complicated, sure, but what you two are, your bond, it’s also the most natural thing in the world.
Even if it’s a little cracked right now.
” Her thumb traces slow circles over my arm.
“You’re allowed to still want it, Noa. Wanting him, wanting to forgive him—none of that makes you weak.
It means you’re still brave enough to try.
Forgiveness takes a kind of strength most people never find. ”
My throat aches as I breathe out shakily.
The way my eyes also start to sting catches me off guard.
I push through it. “I never stopped wanting him.” My quiet admission nearly gets lost in the wind.
“I just didn’t know if I could trust him when he said he wanted me back. Not after everything that’s happened.”
Rhosyn nods, the look in her eyes seeped in understanding. “Yeah. No one can blame you for feeling that way.” She hesitates. “But what about now? Do you trust him?”
The question hangs between us, fragile in the cold.
I think about Rennick—about all the ways he’s not only shown up for me but shown me that he can.
That he wants to. Not just through declarations or promises, but in the small things.
The quiet moments that shouldn’t matter but somehow do.
The morning coffees. The fleeting touches in crowded rooms where no one else exists for him but me.
And the one that nearly undoes me, the fact he’s been sleeping on the floor outside my bedroom as my silent guardian.
The answer I have for Rhosyn isn’t simple, but neither is what exists between him and me. Like I told her, we still have a lot to figure out.
“I want to.”
Rhosyn exhales, a puff of white mist curling from her lips.
“Well,” she says, relief threading through her voice.
“It’s a start. I’ll take it.” Her arm squeezes around my shoulders before she lets go, rubbing her hands together for warmth.
“I already warned Nick that if you decide to dump his stubborn Alpha ass for good that you get custody of me in the breakup. We’ll have to work out a visitation schedule for poor Canaan, though, which might get tricky.
Oh well, one weekend a month to myself might be good for me.
I can finally catch up on all the terrible reality TV I pretend to hate. ”
She knows about the rejected mate syndrome, but I don’t think Rhosyn comprehends how deep its claws are in me.
She doesn’t understand that if I don’t accept Rennick, this won’t end in heartbreak—it’ll end in another pyre.
There won’t be custody battles or visits.
Just ash and the memory of me carried off by wind.
And the last thing I want is to end like that.
I don’t want to die. I’m not ready to become a memory people cling to because there’s nothing left of me to hold.
But even I can admit this refusal to speak—this fear I’m gripping so tightly—is tipping into something resembling recklessness.
Still, I keep holding out, at the detriment of myself, by keeping the truth of this sickness tucked away from Rennick.
And I will until I know without question or doubt that I can trust him with both my heart and my life.
Still, I indulge Rhosyn, matching her smile when she turns it on me.
“As if Canaan would let you leave him behind, even for just a weekend,” I retort with a huffing laugh. “He’d find you before sundown.”
There’s a beauty in what they have that people tend to overlook.
Everyone’s always chasing their fated mate, their perfect scent match.
But Rhosyn and Canaan are proof that love doesn’t need the Goddess’s stamp of approval to be real.
They found each other on their own and held fast. There’s something deeply peaceful in that—in waking up every day and still choosing the same person, not because fate said you have to, but because your heart does.
“And I could never let you leave with me, Rhosyn. This territory would burn itself down if you weren’t here, and Rennick and Canaan would be standing around, thumbs in their asses, wondering where the water bucket is.”
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating just a little since Ren and Canaan are both more than capable adults, and she knows this as well as I do, but it’s fun to pick on the boys. Someone needs to keep them humble.
“Well, we don’t have to tell them it’s an empty threat.
It won’t make them squirm if they know we’re bluffing,” she teases, her brows doing that wicked little dance before her face softens.
Her gaze drifts over the frost-touched pines and the granite mountain peaks looming over the treetops.
“I really would hate to leave this place. I didn’t even want to come at first, but Cane swore I’d love it here.
He was right—don’t tell him I said that, though, it’ll go straight to his fat head.
But it’s scary how a place that felt foreign not that long ago somehow became home. ”
It’s even scarier to come back to a place you thought had cast you out and find it only takes a handful of days to start feeling like you belong again.