Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
COLBY
Colby couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t felt threatened. He knew that if he let himself relax, even for a second, the trap would snap shut around him.
But nothing snapped. No hand grabbed for him, and no one laughed at his gullibility. There was just warmth, and Tristan’s fingers, threaded through his.
It felt impossible. A mistake, maybe. Like if he looked too closely at the moment, it would vanish. He shifted his hand slightly, half expecting Tristan to pull away, but he didn’t.
Colby turned his head. He couldn’t see Tristan’s face in the dark, but he could feel him. His soft breaths, and his heartbeat, a little faster than usual but steady. He didn’t pull away. So Colby didn’t, either.
He didn’t know how long they lay like that, whether it was a few minutes or a lifetime. But the longer Tristan stayed close, the easier it became to believe this was real.
“So,” Tristan said, his voice soft but full of something that made Colby feel lighter just hearing it, “I know we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, what Matt’s going to decide. But I just wanted to say, if it turns out you have to leave—”
Colby tensed.
“I could come with you.” Tristan shifted slightly. “I mean, I don’t know where we’d go or how it would work. But if Matt decides you can’t stay, you don’t have to be alone. That’s all I meant.”
Colby stared up into the darkness. His heart had started pounding like it was trying to outrun Tristan’s wild words. “You’d leave your pack?”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t know,” Tristan said. “I always thought there wasn’t anything more important than pack. That nothing could be. But now—” His voice faltered. “You matter. I don’t know how to explain it. You just… do.”
Colby’s fingers curled tighter in his.
“I’m not asking anything of you, I swear,” Tristan said. “I just wanted you to know.”
Colby didn’t answer. Couldn’t. He was too busy trying to breathe through the lump in his throat.
After a moment, Tristan said, quieter, “What would you do, if you could do anything? Like, if there weren’t any limits. If you could just choose.”
The question hit something painful inside him. “I don’t know,” he said, voice low. “I always thought I’d stay in the Army. That was the plan, and then I got discharged. Nothing else ever looked right. Nothing I’d want to do.”
“Nothing?” Tristan asked gently.
“I like fixing stuff,” Colby admitted. “Engines. Bikes, mostly. I had this beat-up BSA back before Nico—” He stopped, damning himself for letting that name slip out.
Tristan didn’t speak, but he didn’t pull away, either.
Colby took a deep breath. He wasn’t there anymore. He had to hold on to that. “I rebuilt it from the frame up. Took me forever. But when it finally ran…” He shook his head. “Best feeling in the world.”
“Sounds like you already know what you’d want,” Tristan said.
“It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“It matters to me.”
God. That voice. That steady, unshakable voice that just meant what it said. He still couldn’t quite see Tristan’s face in the dark, but he could feel the truth of him.
“You don’t know what Urban will decide,” he said.
“Matt’s not going to kill you,” Tristan said simply.
“If he hasn’t done it by now, it means he has doubts.
He’s a good man. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect his pack, but he wouldn’t choose to hurt anyone else.
He’d only do it if he was forced to.” Tristan’s voice quivered slightly with the strength of his emotion.
“And if he makes you leave, I could come with you. If you want me to.”
Colby opened his mouth to answer. He didn’t know what he was going to say, but what came out was, “Why?”
Tristan was silent for an instant. Then, he took a deep breath and said simply, “You’re my mate.”
The words dropped into the darkness, where they seemed to rebound around the silent barn until Colby’s head was filled with them.
“I’m what?” he asked faintly.
Tristan let out a breath, almost a laugh. “I wasn’t going to say anything yet. It felt unfair, with you locked up and everything so uncertain, but then I thought about it, and it seemed more unfair not to tell you when I already knew. I felt it earlier tonight. We’re mates.”
He said it like it was something precious, not a threat or a leash, and Colby didn’t know what to do with that. He’d dreamed of meeting his mate. Before Nico, when he still believed in things. But Nico had taken even that and twisted it.
“No one else would want you,” he used to say. “But if you’re good enough, maybe I’ll claim you.”
Colby had known, deep down, that wasn’t how it worked. Fate didn’t barter. Mates weren’t earned or deserved. They just were. Or they weren’t. But the lie was repeated so often, and fear and loneliness had gnawed at him so long, that it had started to feel like a promise.
So now, hearing that word in Tristan’s voice—soft and sure, with no conditions wrapped around it—Colby didn’t know how to trust it.
He swallowed, mouth dry. The words rang in his head, louder now. He tried to say something, because Tristan was waiting, but what came out was a question he hadn’t known was there.
“What does that mean to you?”
He heard the rawness in his voice and hated it. But Tristan didn’t flinch.
“It means I’m with you,” Tristan said softly. “That you matter to me, before anything else. Well—apart from morality, I suppose. And maybe Jason’s cupcakes because, well, you know.”
He hesitated, long enough for Colby to feel the weight behind what came next. “But if what you really want is for me to back off, I will. You don’t owe me anything. I just wanted you to know.”
Colby’s breath caught. He didn’t say anything, but he turned the words over in his head, wondering if they were true.
Some part of him knew they were. Because even with his wolf still curled up tight and silent inside him, something deep in his bones had already recognized Tristan.
Being Tristan’s mate didn’t feel like a trap, but it didn’t feel safe either. It felt like standing on the edge of something both terrifying and wonderful.
TRISTAN
He’d told himself not to expect anything. But still, when Colby didn’t immediately confirm that he, too, knew they were mates, uncertainty crept in.
Colby hadn’t been thinking of the future—hadn’t been sure he had a future—so maybe it wasn’t surprising he didn’t feel it too. But even knowing that, for the first time Tristan doubted himself. It wasn’t as if he had a manual for what it felt like to meet your mate. What if he’d been wrong?
And had he actually talked about Jason’s cupcakes in the same breath as fate and devotion? He wanted to bury his head in the blankets and never come back out.
“I don’t—”
“Tristan—”
They both spoke at the same time and fell silent, waiting for the other to continue.
“Please,” Tristan said, when it became clear Colby was letting him speak. “I want to know what you were going to say.”
Colby’s fingers tightened briefly around his. “I feel right when you’re with me.”
That sentence felt like it changed the world.
“I’m glad,” Tristan said softly.
And then he stopped breathing, because Colby shifted closer, until their shoulders touched.
It was an amazing feeling to know Colby trusted him that much. He didn’t dare move, scarcely dared breathe.
“I don’t know what my life’s meant to look like anymore,” Colby murmured. “But what about you? What do you want yours to be?”
Before yesterday, Tristan would have had no problem answering that. He’d had everything mapped out. He wanted to become an engineer and design things. It was what he’d dreamed about since he was a tiny pup. But if he had to leave the pack…
He didn’t know what that meant for finishing college.
For anything. Grief welled up at the thought of losing his pack—everyone he loved—and he sniffed it back, hard.
That was a worst-case scenario. It wouldn’t come to that.
Surely, if he told Matt they were mates, Matt would look at Colby differently.
After all, he’d let Riley stay, despite everything he’d done.
“Tristan?”
Colby’s voice was soft, questioning.
Tristan breathed out slowly. Right. Colby could probably hear every stutter in his pulse. He made himself relax, one breath at a time. Tomorrow’s problem. Tonight was for Colby.
So he wove the story of his imagined life as a successful engineer, told him how satisfying it was when the numbers worked, the thrill of solving something no one else could crack.
Colby lay there and listened. He didn’t just let Tristan talk—he wanted to hear it. He asked thoughtful questions. And not once did he seem faintly amused, the way Bryce sometimes was, or politely indulgent, like Matt. He was actually interested.
After a while, Colby shifted slightly and said, quiet but steady, “When you fix something, when it finally runs again, it’s like the world makes sense, just for a second.”
Tristan turned his head toward him in the dark. “Yeah,” he said, warmth curling through him. “Exactly like that.”
It struck him then that rebuilding a motorbike from scratch wasn’t so different from what he wanted to do. Putting things together and making them work.
Of course they were similar. They were mates.
He batted that thought away before it got too sticky. Christian and Dave were mates, and there weren’t two more different people in the entire world. But this was how it worked for him and Colby.
As he talked, Colby’s warmth soaked through his skin, and his breath slowed to match Tristan’s. They lay together in the dark, and Tristan felt a kind of peace he hadn’t known he’d been missing.
He couldn’t wait to tell them all. To tell Bryce.
He’d found his mate.