Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
The south cove was absolute chaos, and she loved every second of it.
Tourists packed the beach from the festival's edge down to the waterline—a ridiculous patchwork of wetsuits and long underwear and, in the case of four people who had clearly lost a bet, head-to-toe penguin costumes.
The wind off the sound was raw and relentless.
The crowd shrieked and jostled and dared each other in the way of people who had committed to something terrible and were now gloriously stuck with it.
Festival banners snapped overhead. A cider vendor near the path was doing extraordinary business. A man in a Viking helmet near the path's edge was explaining the health benefits of cold immersion to a woman who looked like she regretted everything about this trip.
Ryker's arm was around her waist and she was wearing his jacket. At this point she might never give it back.
She'd grabbed it off the chair that morning without thinking, and he'd looked at it on her shoulders, then at her face and said nothing at all, which was somehow exactly right.
His claiming mark pulsed warm at her throat.
Every wolf who'd passed them this morning had clocked it immediately—a flicker of eyes, a shift in posture, some small recalibration.
Pack language doing what pack language did.
Shaw had lifted his chin at Ryker in acknowledgment without breaking stride.
Faith had stopped dead in the middle of the path, looked at the mark, then at Ryker, and said finally with the energy of a woman who had been extremely patient for a very long time.
Damien had simply nodded. Which, from an Alpha like him, was basically a standing ovation.
"How are we doing on the barrier rope?" she asked, mostly because she needed to do that wasn't just touching the mark again.
Ryker checked without moving his arm. "Fen's got it. Stop working."
"I'm not working."
"You have your clipboard face on."
"I don't have a clipboard face."
He turned his head just enough to look at her, and the corner of his mouth lifted. In her mind she felt the warm press of his amusement, easy and unhurried, like a fire that had finally found the right place to burn.
She stopped working and settled in to enjoy the festivities.
The countdown started somewhere near the water, by someone with a megaphone.
The crowd picked it up and the noise swelled into something physical, pressing against her sternum while the number dropped.
Ten. Nine. Eight. She felt Ryker's hand tighten at her hip.
Seven. Six. Five. The crowd was one now, breathing together, every ridiculous costumed tourist and grinning pack wolf and windburned local counting down toward the same collective act of joyful insanity that somehow, every year, convinced hundreds of reasonable people to charge into the ice cold sound.
Three. Two. One.
The screaming that followed was genuinely impressive.
The first group hit the water and the sound they made was pure, unfiltered, shrieking human delight.
Or maybe pain, because while everyone knew how cold the water was, it was easy to forget normal humans couldn’t survive for long in that level of freezing water.
Everyone else started running, a tide of people pouring past the barrier rope and into the water. Ryker pulled her forward. She'd insisted on going in weeks ago when the planning started. She was running this festival and she wasn't doing it from the sidelines.
So they jumped together.
The cold was immediate and merciless.
She gasped, lost her footing on a rock, and then his arm was there, hauling her upright while the water foamed around them and she made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scream.
"It's fine," he said through his teeth which meant he also found it genuinely terrible and was too proud to admit it. "Totally fine."
"Liar." She shoved forward anyway, pulling him with her, as she shrieked along with everyone else on the beach.
It was glorious.
By this point it seemed like the whole island was in the water or cheering from the shore.
The clouds had broken just enough to let the winter sun through, thin and bright over the sound, as if the island itself had decided to show up for the occasion.
She was laughing so hard she could barely breathe.
Ryker caught her when she lost her footing on the slick bottom again and she grabbed his arm and they went under together, a brief, cold, chaotic plunge, and came up gasping and grinning, hair plastered flat, his eyes bright and alive in a way she was still getting used to seeing on him.
That was when she saw it.
Far out, near the rocks at the cove's edge, something surfaced briefly, a shadow, or a shape, gone before anyone else could have caught it. But Willow felt the brush of it at the edges of her magic. Not threatening. Watchful. Keeping a promise.
She was smiling before she knew she was.
"What?" Ryker asked.
"Nothing." She looked up at him, water streaming down both their faces, the crowd roaring around them. "Just—we did it. Look at it. We actually did it."
He glanced out at the beach, packed and alive, vendors selling out, pack wolves laughing alongside tourists, the festival running exactly as it was supposed to.
Mara had told her that morning they'd broken every attendance record the island had.
Months of planning and two weeks of crises and one siren negotiation that had almost killed her, and Frost Fest had paid for itself twice over.
His expression softened into something she was still learning to read, but this was the one that meant he was feeling something he didn't yet have words for.
"You did it," he said. "I just finally got out of your way."
She kissed him as he lifted her into his arms and started for the shore.
Salt water and cold air and the crowd screaming around them, both of them soaked and freezing and laughing into each other's mouths, and she thought this, exactly this, this ridiculous frozen wolf man on this ridiculous frozen beach, was worth every single hard thing that had brought her here.
The witches' cabin smelled like sage and woodsmoke when she pushed through the door an hour later, still damp at the edges, a heavy wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
Ryker had gone to help with breakdown at the vendor tents while she got changed.
She'd kissed him again at the path and watched him walk away with a grin she could still feel through the bond.
Her coven arrived back at the cabin the same time she did, all of them still damp, Hazel wringing out the end of her braid on the porch.
They filed into the kitchen and put the kettle on and nobody said anything until the mugs were in hand, and then Neve looked at her with the particular expression of a woman who had been waiting all morning to have this conversation properly.
Sage looked at the claiming mark first. Then at Willow's face. Something in her expression softened just slightly, and she said nothing, and the nothing said everything.
Hazel broke first—she always did. "Is it what you wanted?"
"Yes." Willow's hand went to her throat. "It's exactly what I wanted."
Neve set down her mug with a deliberate click.
Of all of them, Neve was the one Willow had watched most carefully when Ryker's name came up these last weeks. She’d been the most guarded about the influence he seemed to have over the pack when it came to them.
"Good," she said. "Then it was worth it. "
That was what broke Willow open.
She'd been holding it together all morning, through the Plunge and the cold and Ryker's arm around her and the pack's quiet acknowledgment of the mark on her throat. She'd been fine. She was going to stay fine. But Neve’s words with her flat voice and her raised chin…
Willow's throat closed.
"I need to talk about last night," she managed quietly. "About what you did."
They were all watching her, and they already knew. But that didn’t take away from her need to tell them.
"You felt my magic fail." She looked at each of them.
Sage, with her hands wrapped around her mug too tight.
Esme, who hadn't looked away since Willow walked in.
Hazel, watching with wide and unguarded eyes.
Neve, whose jaw was set the way it got when she was feeling more than she planned to show.
"You were sitting in this kitchen with your tea, staying up for me, and you felt me fail, and you gave me your power.
You helped me restore my bond to a man who told everyone on this island we couldn't be trusted.
" Her voice cracked on the last word and she let it.
" You gave him your magic as much as me and you didn't have to do that. He hadn’t earned that from you. "
No one said anything at first and she worried what their silence meant.
Then Neve said, "No. He hadn't."
"Then why?"
"We didn't do it for him." Neve met her eyes steadily. "I want to be clear about that. We did not do it for him."
"I know. And because of that it means even more. I don’t know what I did to earn this much from you all, but I love you for it. It means everything to me. And whether you realize it or not, it means everything to him as well. He wants your forgiveness too."
Neve snort laughed. "He's going to spend a long time earning it."
She nodded, completely understanding. "He will. I know it."
Neve held her gaze another beat, then nodded once. And that was it. Verdict delivered. Case open, not closed. But settled enough that they could all move on.