Chapter Sixteen #3
I listened without interrupting. The way I listened when something mattered enough to hear completely. Each piece landed and settled, and the picture that emerged was clearer than I wanted it to be.
It was a bloodline ability that had been dormant for sixty years, resurfacing in a newborn pup who had imprinted on a human, and a man who had killed his own cousin because she’d chosen the wrong side.
“Declan believed he was reclaiming something stolen,” Jai said. “Not taking something that wasn’t his. That’s the difference. A man who knows he’s wrong is predictable. A man who believes he’s right is considerably more dangerous.”
The scotch was warm in my hand. I held it without drinking, letting the heat work into my palm while my mind moved through the implications—territory, ability, the advantage a wolf like Grace would represent in the wrong hands.
“Two questions,” I said. “The Morrow line’s known living members. And did Declan indicate outside backing, or was he operating alone?”
Jai didn’t hesitate. “He framed it as a personal grievance. Nothing about outside resources.”
I set my glass down and pulled out my phone. Texted Ashe three words: Morrow line. Full pull.
The response came back in under ten seconds: Running.
I looked at Jai across the firelight. “I believe you.”
He held my gaze. The bruising along his throat had deepened to a mottled purple that the low light turned almost black, and the butterfly closures on his lip pulled slightly when he spoke. “But.”
“But the investigation isn’t doubt. It’s due diligence.
” I kept my voice level. The kind of level that comes from having said this to people who mattered enough that the words needed to land exactly right.
“I need a complete picture before I decide how to move on Declan’s remaining people.
And before I decide what to do about the Morrow line’s claim on Grace. ”
He absorbed this. His thumb traced the edge of his glass, once, a small movement that I recognized as the tell he deployed when he was weighing something against its cost.
Then he nodded once, the kind of nod that settled something between us without requiring the words to do the work.
The fire had burned lower. The logs had collapsed into a bed of embers that threw a deeper, redder light across the timber floor, and the silence that followed was the particular silence of a room where two people had reached the end of one conversation and were standing at the threshold of another.
“I’ve been thinking about Grace’s future,” I said. Quietly. The words came out measured in a way that cost me something. “Not just her safety. Her actual future.”
Jai’s eyes found mine. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just waited, with the particular patience of a man who had learned that the things worth hearing were usually worth waiting for.
“She has no living family that can be trusted with her. Her lineage makes her a target for anyone who knows what she can do.” Each point landed between us with the weight of something I had been carrying since the moment I’d understood what she was.
“And she has imprinted on two people who have both, independently, proven they will bleed for her.”
The fire popped. An ember spiraled up the chimney, brief and bright, and the light caught the gold in Jai’s eyes and held there.
“How would you feel,” I asked, “about making it legal? Both of us. Adopting her together.”
He went quiet. His eyes dropped to his glass. The amber liquid caught the firelight and held it, and I watched his thumb press against the crystal in a small, deliberate movement that said he was counting something.
Then he looked up. Direct. Holding my gaze with the steadiness that had been driving me insane since the day we met.
“You would have to claim me first.” Flat.
Even. No drama, no softening, just the statement delivered with the same matter-of-fact certainty he brought to everything that mattered.
“I’m not signing up for a lifetime commitment to a child without the man asking me to be his partner making that same commitment to me. ”
The room held its breath. The fire murmured in the grate.
The scotch in my glass had gone still, and the weight of what he’d just said—the claim, the bite, the irreversible bond that every wolf in the territory would read on my scent the moment it happened—settled across my shoulders with the heft of something I had been carrying since the first night he’d slept in my bed and I’d lain awake watching the city light move across his skin.
I didn’t hesitate.
“Yes.” Flat. Certain. “As soon as you’re healed.”
He held my gaze for three full seconds. His jaw worked once, the muscle along the hinge tightening around whatever was moving behind those hazel eyes, and then he gave one short nod. Tight. Final.
“That’s acceptable.”
The beat that followed ran long enough to count.
Jai finished his scotch, set the glass down on the armrest with a soft click that the room absorbed, and the fire had burned low enough that the light had gone from amber to something deeper, something that lived in the embers and didn’t reach the ceiling.
The question in the room was no longer whether. It was when.
And underneath it, unspoken, the open threat of what Declan’s information meant for the Morrow line’s surviving members, and whether someone above Declan was still watching to see what I did next.
I would find out. But not tonight.
Tonight belonged to the fire, and the silence, and the man sitting across from me with butterfly closures on his lip and a compression wrap around his ribs and the steadiness in his eyes that had, against considerable evidence, decided to trust me.
I raised my glass. He didn’t have anything left to raise, so he just held my gaze across the dying light, and the thing that passed between us was older than language and twice as certain.