16. Aslan
SIXTEEN
ASLAN
Whisperwind Charms glows soft through the mist. I push through the door—the wards let me through, which still feels strange—and the bell chimes overhead.
Leire is on the floor behind her workbench, Shadow cradled in her lap. She looks up when I enter, green eyes shadowed but determined. Her hair is pulled back in a messy braid, and there’s a smudge of herbs on her cheek. She looks exhausted. Beautiful.
I thought this would get easier to look at. It hasn’t.
“How was the war council?” Her voice is lighter than her eyes suggest. “Did the alphas puff up their chests and growl at each other?”
“Only a little. Veren made approximately fourteen unhelpful comments, Rhodes threatened to throw him out a window, and Torin had to physically separate them at one point.” I crouch beside her. Shadow’s breathing seems stronger. His fur looks cleaner—she’s been grooming him. “How is he?”
“Anouk came by.” Leire strokes Shadow’s fur with absent tenderness. “She thinks she can break the control magic, but it’ll take time. Days, maybe longer. The spellwork is old. Layered.”
“But she can do it?”
“She thinks so. She’s coming back with supplies.” Leire’s hand stills. “Which means I can help draw out the Preservers while she works. They still think I’m desperate and alone.”
I set the basket on her workbench. “Grandmother Peach sends her regards.”
“Of course, she does.” Leire peeks under the cloth and groans. “Oh no. It’s cobbler. I’m going to eat this entire thing and gain fifteen pounds and it will be her fault.”
“She’d probably consider that a success.”
We sit in silence for a moment. The crystals around us hum their soft songs. Leire’s ridiculous crystal family, bearing witness to whatever this is becoming.
“This ends soon.” I reach for her hand. Her fingers are cold—she’s been sitting on this floor too long, working too hard.
I wrap them in mine, sharing warmth. In my head, I hear Dorothea’s voice, clear as the night I dreamed it—let someone else set a place at that table—and for once it doesn’t hurt.
It just feels like permission. “I need you to know that whatever happens—whatever comes after—I’m not leaving.
Not because of duty. Not because of the Network. Because I choose this. I choose you.”
Her breath catches. I watch her throat work as she swallows.
“That’s a lot of choosing for someone who spent five years avoiding feelings.”
“I’m making up for lost time.”
Her laugh is small but real. “Torin’s been giving you advice again, hasn’t he?”
“Torin. Veren. Grandmother Peach and her terrifying cobbler.” I raise our joined hands to my lips. Press a kiss to her knuckles. Her pulse jumps against my fingers. “Apparently the whole town has opinions about my emotional availability.”
“Small towns.” But her voice is softer. Her free hand rises to my face, fingers tracing the line of my jaw, the white streak at my temple. “I’m not leaving either. In case that wasn’t clear.”
“It wasn’t. I’m bad at reading signals.”
“Liar.” She’s almost smiling now. “You read everything. You just pretend you don’t so you don’t have to deal with it.”
She’s right. She’s always right. It’s infuriating.
I lean in. Stop an inch from her lips. Giving her the choice. Giving us both a moment to breathe before we cross whatever line we’ve been dancing around for weeks.
“This could go badly.” Her whisper brushes my mouth. “We could lose. I could—”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.” The words come out rougher than I intended. More honest. “I know that whatever this is between us, I want it. All of it. For the rest of my life.”
Her eyes are bright. Wet. She blinks rapidly, fighting tears.
“That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me while I’m sitting on a floor covered in cat hair and herb residue.”
“I’ll work on my timing.”
“Don’t.” She closes the distance between us.
The kiss is nothing like I expected.
I expected heat. Urgency. The explosive release of weeks of tension finally snapping.
Instead, it’s soft. Slow. Her lips move against mine with careful intention, learning the shape of me the way she learns her crystals—patient, thorough, attentive to every response.
Her hand slides into my hair, fingers curling against my scalp.
My hand finds the curve of her waist, pulling her closer.
Shadow shifts in her lap—we break apart long enough to move him gently to a nest of blankets on her workbench. The amethyst pulses approvingly. The rose quartz practically glows.
Then her hands are in my shirt, tugging me back, and my mouth finds hers again.
This time it’s different. Hungrier. The weeks of denial building to inevitable conclusion. Her back hits the edge of the workbench. I lift her onto it without thinking, stepping between her thighs, and she gasps against my mouth—a sound that goes straight to my spine.
“Aslan.” My name in her voice. Rough. Wanting.
I trail kisses down her jaw. Her neck. The hollow of her throat where her pulse hammers. She tastes like sage and herbs and something sweeter underneath—something uniquely her. Something I want to spend the rest of my life learning.
Her legs wrap around my hips. Her fingers dig into my shoulders. Every point of contact is electric.
“We should—” She gasps as my teeth graze her collarbone. “We should probably—talk about—”
“Later.” I pull back just enough to meet her eyes. They’re dark. Dazed. Her lips are swollen from my kisses, her hair coming loose from its braid. I want to remember her exactly like this. “First we deal with the Preservers. And after...”
“After?”
“After, we have the rest of our lives to figure out what this is.”
She studies my face. Looking for doubt, maybe. Hesitation. Whatever she finds must satisfy her, because she nods slowly.
“After.” She pulls me down for one more kiss—brief, searing, a promise. “But for the record, I already know what this is.”
“What?”
Her smile is fierce. Certain. “Ours.”
Later, after the sun has set and the mist has turned to velvet darkness outside the windows, we lie tangled on her terrible couch.
Not the way I’ve spent the past week—her upstairs, me down here, twelve feet of air and denial between us.
This is different. Her head on my chest, her body curved against mine, my arm around her shoulders.
Shadow sleeps on the workbench nearby, his breathing easier than before.
The crystals pulse their soft colors in the darkness.
“Tell me about Dorothea.” Her voice is quiet. Careful.
I lock in place. No one asks about Dorothea. Not anymore. The other alphas learned years ago that her name was a door that stayed closed.
But Leire isn’t other people. And maybe it’s time the door opened.
“She was a weather witch.” The words come slowly, rusty from disuse. “Gentle. Optimistic. The opposite of me in every way. She used to tease me about being too serious. Said I needed to learn to laugh at myself.”
“Were you mated?”
“I marked her. We lived as mates for three years.” I stare at the ceiling.
The memories are distant now—still painful, but softer around the edges.
“But she wasn’t... she wasn’t my true mate.
Not the way shifters mean it. We loved each other, built a life, but the pull—it wasn’t like this.
” My hand tightens on her shoulder. “What I feel for you is different. Stronger.”
Leire is silent for a moment. Processing.
“So you can mark someone, live with them as mates, but they’re not necessarily your fated mate?”
“Some shifters never find their true mate. They choose someone they love, mark them, build a life. It’s real love—it counts. It matters.” I close my eyes. “Dorothea and I were happy. But when she died... the grief was devastating, but I survived it. Broken, but whole. If you—” I stop. Can’t say it.
“If I died?”
“I wouldn’t survive it.” The admission costs everything. “You’re it, Leire.”
She props herself up to look at me. Her eyes are wet but steady.
“She sounds like someone worth loving.”
“She was.”
“And you’ve been punishing yourself ever since. Refusing to let anyone else in.”
I don’t have an answer for that. It’s not quite right—not punishment, exactly. More like protection. If I never loved again, I could never lose again.
But that’s not living. That’s just waiting to die.
“Dorothea would have liked you.” The realization settles into place. “She would have loved your sarcasm. Your stubbornness. The way you talk to rocks like they’re people.”
“They are people. Crystal people.” Leire’s mouth curves. “She sounds like someone I would have liked too.”
“You would have been trouble. The two of you ganging up on me.”
“Probably.” She settles back against my chest.
“Do you think they had anything to do with it?” Her voice is quiet. Careful. “The Preservers. Dorothea.”
The question has been sitting in the back of my own mind since Elio’s office. I hadn’t wanted to look at it.
“I don’t know.” The words come slowly. “The timeline could fit. She died in what looked like an accident—a weather working that went wrong. They filed it as an occupational hazard and no one looked twice.” I go quiet.
“Weather workings don’t go wrong the way that one did.
I know that. I knew it then and I buried the question because I couldn’t stand to have another thing that didn’t make sense.
I never questioned it.” A pause that takes longer than it should. “I’m going to look into it.”
“We’re going to look into it.”
Her hand finds mine in the darkness. I don’t say anything else. Neither does she. Some questions are too large for the same night as everything else. But the fact that we’re going to ask them—together—settles something I didn’t know was still unsettled.
“Thank you. For telling me all of it.”
“Thank you for asking.”
We lie in silence. The shop is quiet around us—just the hum of crystals and the soft rhythm of Shadow’s breathing. Outside, Mistvale sleeps beneath its blanket of mist.