31. Epilogue
Epilogue
The bonfire turned the clearing to gold.
Someone had dragged benches from the dining hall. Someone else had strung lights between the pines, and the effect was warm and uneven and nothing like the careful precision of a ceremony. This was just pack. Eating. Laughing. Being loud in the dark because they’d earned it.
Sage sat on a bench near the fire with a plate on her knee and Declan beside her. His arm rested along the back of the bench behind her shoulders. Not holding her. Just there. The way he always was now.
She watched wolves move through the firelight.
Nolan arguing with Cade about something that required hand gestures.
Maren leaning against Jace near the food table, her head tipped back while he said something that made her laugh.
Children chasing each other between the adults, shrieking at volumes that should have been illegal.
“You’re staring.” Declan’s voice was low beside her.
“Memorizing.” She leaned into his side. “In case I forget what this feels like.”
“You won’t forget.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I won’t let you.” His lips brushed her temple. Warm. Certain. The hum steadied between them, and for the first time in longer than she could measure, Sage didn’t need to be anywhere else.
The fire crackled. Someone started a song she didn’t know, and voices joined in, rough and off-key and perfect.
Rhys sat at the far edge of the gathering with his bad leg stretched toward the heat. He held a drink he’d stopped tasting an hour ago.
The noise washed over him. Laughter. Music. The kind of easy joy that made him ache for reasons he didn’t examine.
He was happy for them. For Sage and Declan. For the pack that had survived another threat and come out the other side still standing.
He just couldn’t shake the feeling that something had shifted on the wind.
It had started three days ago. A scent on the eastern patrol that didn’t belong to any wolf he knew. Female. Faint. Desperate. Carrying something underneath that his wolf wouldn’t stop circling back to.
He’d reported it. Filed it as a possible rogue moving through. Standard protocol.
But he’d gone back to that stretch of border twice since. Both times, the scent was fainter. Both times, his wolf pulled harder.
Now he sat in the firelight and told himself it was nothing.
His wolf disagreed.
Rhys set down his drink. Stood slowly, the knee protesting the way it always did in the cold.
“Headed out?” Nolan, passing with a plate.
“Just need some air.”
He walked past the firelight, past the laughter, past the warmth of a pack that had given him everything.
The tree line swallowed him whole.
Above the clearing, the moon hung full and bright. The fire burned on. Wolves sang.
And somewhere on the eastern border, the scent of a lone female waited in the cold.