Epilogue
SOREN
The argument happened over breakfast, three days after Ronan officially gave up any pretense of ever leaving, and after Brec had informally moved in to live with us, and it started so quietly I almost missed the moment it turned into something else.
“We need a name for this place,” Ronan said, refilling his coffee. “For the Haven paperwork. They’re not going to list us as ‘the house on the mountain’ forever, and I’d rather it come from you than some committee in Boston deciding it for us.”
Cassian didn’t look up from Asha, who had a fist wrapped around his finger and was working herself up to a serious opinion about breakfast being late. “Call it whatever Haven wants.”
“I already know what I want to call it.”
“Then call it that.”
“The Raines Pack,” Ronan said it plainly, the words already worn smooth, like he’d turned them over a hundred times before he ever brought them to the table.
“We’re not a pack.”
“Led by Alpha Raines.”
“Fuck that—”
“Because that’s what this is, whether you’ve put your name on a piece of paper or not. Two former ORT operatives under your roof. Omegas coming through that door by summer who’ll need somewhere safe to land. That’s a pack, Cassian. It just doesn’t have your name on it, because you won’t let it.”
Cassian’s fork hit the plate hard enough that Asha startled and let out a thin, unhappy sound, and Brec, across the table, reached over without a word and settled her before she could work herself into a real cry.
“Don’t,” Cassian said, low.
“Don’t what? Say it out loud?” Ronan didn’t back down, and I felt every muscle in my body go still, that old instinct to make myself small rearing up out of nowhere even though I knew, I knew, neither of them would ever turn any of this on me.
“You’ve been running from that word since Raff died, and I let you, because you needed to, and I understood.
Three years I let you. But you don’t get to keep doing it now.
Not while I’m living in your west wing and Brec’s drawing up plans for a nursery in the east one, and Soren’s wearing your name, and none of us are going anywhere.
You already are what you won’t say you are.
You refusing it just makes the rest of us have to pretend along with you.
” He rubbed his sternum. “I feel you here, and you’re my alpha. ”
“That’s not—” Cassian was on his feet, chair scraping back hard enough to wake Asha fully this time, and my heart lurched even though none of it was aimed at me. “You don’t get to decide what I am.”
“Somebody has to, because you sure as hell won’t.”
“I couldn’t stop Raff being killed wearing that word!
” It came out of him like something had finally torn loose, loud enough that the whole kitchen went still around it.
Brec was already up, bouncing Asha gently, murmuring something too low to hear.
Cassian stood there breathing hard, both hands braced on the back of his chair.
“I led that team. I made the calls. He trusted every one of them right up until the one that got him killed, and you want me to just pick the title back up like it never cost anybody anything?”
Ronan didn’t flinch, and he didn’t lower his voice either.
“I know what it cost. I lost him too. He was my brother before he was your mate, and I don’t get to forget that any more than you do.
” His jaw tightened. “But you didn’t kill him, Cassian.
Command did. A bad call from people who never once stood in that warehouse, and you’ve spent three years punishing yourself for a decision that was never yours to unmake.
I’m done watching you do it. We all are. ”
The silence that followed had teeth in it. I sat with my hands flat on the table, not sure I was allowed to move, watching Cassian’s shoulders shake with something that had stopped being only anger.
“You already do it for us,” I said, quiet. Cassian turned to look at me, and whatever he saw made the fight go out of him all at once. “Every day. You already are it, Cassian. Nobody’s asking you to become something. We’re asking you to stop pretending you aren’t already our alpha!”
Nobody moved.
Then Cassian let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in his chest for three years, dragged both hands down his face, and when he lowered them, his eyes were wet and he didn’t bother hiding it from any of us.
“Fine.” His voice was rough. “Fine. The Raines Pack.” He looked at Ronan. “Alpha, if you have to.”
Ronan’s whole face changed. I’d never seen him smile like that, not once, not even in the photograph Cassian kept in his office. “Yes, Alpha,” he said, and this time Cassian didn’t snap at him, didn’t correct him, didn’t so much as flinch.
He just nodded, once, like a man setting something down after carrying it a very long way.
Brec, still swaying gently with Asha settling back to sleep against his shoulder, raised his coffee mug like it was champagne. “To the Raines Pack,” he said. “Took you long enough.”
“Shut up, Brec.” Cassian crossed the kitchen and pulled me up out of my chair and into him, and I felt his heart going too fast under my palm, and for a long moment nobody said anything else at all.
That was the morning, but my heat didn’t wait for the celebration to finish.
It hit without warning.
One moment I was fine—tired, a little overheated, already thinking about the whole Alpha thing, and if Cassian had started dinner yet and whether I could talk him into eating in front of the fire instead of at the table—and then it wasn’t fine.
It was very much not fine. I was on the bed with my knees pulled to my chest, and my hands balled up inside my sleeves because the cold wool was the only thing that helped and it wasn’t helping.
I’d miscalculated my cycle, but pregnancy and not shifting for so many years had done a lot of harm, and nothing right now seemed predictable.
The books said three months after birth, but this was more like two.
I now had the immediate problem of my heat climbing faster than I could think through it, and the knowledge that this was going to last three days, and three days shut in with a bonded alpha was more than enough time for my heat to drag him into rut too.
Brec and Ronan were somewhere downstairs, and I needed Cassian. I was mortified. This was new, and scary, and I needed Cassian.
“Cassian!” I yelled, and I heard him on the stairs just as I opened my mouth to call again.
His scent reached me first—woodsmoke and that darker note underneath, the one that had always done something to my cat, to me, long before I’d let myself do anything about it.
The bonding thread went taut and my cat pressed up against my ribs, and I pressed my forehead to my knees and focused very hard on breathing through my mouth.
It didn’t help. It never helped when he was close.
The door opened.
“Cassian.” His name came out wrong. Too thin, nothing like I meant it to sound.
He went still in the doorway. I didn’t have to look up to know it—I could feel the shift in him, the way the air in the room changed. When he spoke, his voice was steady in a way mine wasn’t. “Oh, sweetheart, when did it start?”
“An hour. Maybe—” Another wave hit and my spine arched with it, heat flooding through me in a long shuddering pulse. I gripped my own arms hard through the wool and waited for it to pass. It didn’t fully pass. “I miscalculated. I didn’t think it would come this soon.”
“Soren.” Different tone. Closer.
I looked up. He was two feet from the bed with his amber eyes gone very still and the bonding thread between us so tight I could feel it in my back teeth. My cat lurched toward him, shameless and certain, the way it had always been certain about him even when the rest of me was still catching up.
“You need to tell me what you want,” he said quietly.
I looked at the way he was holding himself like it was costing him something to stand that far away, and I’d been in love with him long enough to know exactly what this moment was.
I reached out and closed my fingers around his wrist.
“I want you. I need… claim me.” The words shook on their way out, brave and terrified at the same time, and some small, guarded part of me flinched at how much I’d just handed him.
“I want this.” My fingers tightened. Wanting something out loud had never once gone well for me, and some old, cornered part of me was still waiting to be told no, or worse, told yes for reasons that had nothing to do with me.
“But I need to know it’s real. Not because I’m burning and you can’t think past it.
Because it’s me. Because you choose to be my alpha, not grudgingly like you did the pack.
But because I’m yours and it’s real.” My voice cracked on the last word, and I let it.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress shifted under his weight, and my body oriented toward him before I could do anything about it, my cat pressing harder against my ribs.
He turned his hand over and laced his fingers through mine and lifted my knuckles to his mouth, and I felt that press of his lips settle something that the heat had been winding tighter for an hour.
“Soren.” My name against my skin. “Of course it’s real, but I need you to be sure.”
“I’m sure.” It came out steadier than I expected, even if it cracked slightly on the second word. I’d been sure for longer than this, longer than today, and I fisted my free hand in the front of his henley and pulled. “Cassian, please.”
He kissed me. Not hard. Just the corner of my mouth first, then my lower lip, careful and unhurried.
I pulled him closer and he gripped my hair, as his tongue slid against mine.
The bonding thread went from taut to something entirely different, something I didn’t have a word for except right, and I stopped thinking in anything but sensation.