36. Leo
LEO
The hall fills back up with sound the way it always does. Tristan accuses Evander of hoarding the good rolls. Evander, who hasn’t smiled in recorded history, says something so dry that Dominic actually chokes on his wine.
My mother watches it all from the head of the table like a queen surveying her kingdom of idiots.
“Leopold.” She says my full name the way she’s said it my whole life. Half affection, half warning. “Stop brooding at your dessert. You won the war. Eat the cake.”
“I’m not brooding.”
“You’re brooding.”
“He’s brooding,” Brynn agrees, and steals a bite off my plate.
I look at her. She grins at me with her cheek full and my fork in her hand, and something in my chest goes loose that used to be locked tight.
Three weeks ago I’d have called this weakness. The whole noisy table of it. The way I can’t take my eyes off her. The way the bond hums steady and gold between us now, no longer a wound, just a fact. Just home.
I called it weakness for thirty-six years.
I was an idiot.
After, my father pulls me aside near the great hearth. The new one. Warm gray stone instead of the cold black Eclipse used to wear like armor.
He studies me. His eyes are silver tonight, same as mine go when the wolf’s close.
“You are the High Alpha. Which means just service. You stand between the pack and the dark, and nobody thanks you, and you do it anyway.”
“I know what it means.”
“Do you?” He almost smiles. “I didn’t. Not for years.
I thought it meant control. I thought if I held tight enough, nothing could be taken.
” His gaze drifts to my mother, laughing now at something Tristan said.
“Then I spent twelve years in a box, and the only thing that kept me sane was the thought of her.”
I don’t answer. The thing under my ribs is doing something complicated.
“Vulnerability isn’t the crack in the armor, son.” He claps my shoulder. “It’s the reason the armor’s worth wearing.”
I find Brynn out on the terrace later, away from the noise.
The convergence has long since broken. The sky over the resort is just sky again, ordinary stars in ordinary dark, no moon dragging the world toward ruin.
She’s leaning on the rail with her arms crossed against the cold, blond hair loose down her back, and the mark on my collarbone warms the second I see her.
Completed now. Sealed in the old hall where the first Covenant was sworn.
Mine. Said out loud. Chosen.
“You’re staring,” she says without turning around.
“I’m allowed. There’s a rule.”
“Is there?”
“New one. High Alpha gets to stare at his mate. It’s in the bylaws.”
She laughs, and it does the thing it always does to me. Loosens something. “There are no bylaws, Leo. You tossed most of them yesterday.”
“Then I’ll make new bylaws.” I step in behind her, fold my arms around her, rest my chin on top of her head. “Bylaw one. You stop stealing food off my plate.”
“Never.”
“Bylaw two. You stop walking into spirit realms without me.”
She goes still against me. Just for a second. “That one I’ll consider.”
I tighten my hold. The terror of that, of watching her body kneel empty while her soul went somewhere I couldn’t follow, hasn’t fully left me. I don’t think it ever will. But I’m not going to cage her for it.
I learned that the hard way, in the dark, alone, with the archive drinking me dry because I ran from the one person who’d come for me.
“I’m not going to lock you up,” I tell her. “I just need you to come back. Every time. That’s the whole deal.”
She turns in my arms. Tips her face up. Her blue eyes catch the starlight.
“I’ll always come back,” she says. “You’re my whole future, remember? Big windows. Real kitchen. A dog.”
“A dog.”
“You promised.”
“I did not promise a dog.”
“I’m pretty sure you promised a dog, you were very emotional, there was crying involved.”
“There was no crying.”
“There was a single dignified tear.”
I laugh and kiss her instead of arguing, because I’m not going to win, and because kissing her is the best thing I’ve ever learned to do.
It starts slow. Soft. Her hands slide up my chest and curl into my shirt, and mine find the small of her back and pull her in until there’s no space left between us at all.
The bond pours warm through both of us. No storm behind it now. No magic forcing the wanting. Just her. Just me. Just this.
She makes a small sound against my mouth and I feel it everywhere.
“Inside,” I murmur against her lips. “It’s freezing out here.”
“You run hot.”
“I do.” I press my mouth to the corner of her jaw, down the line of her throat, to the mark on her collarbone that’s twin to mine. She shivers, and not from cold. “But I’d rather have you somewhere with a door.”
“Possessive.”
“Always. It’s in the bylaws.”
We don’t make it far. The first warded alcove off the terrace, and her back’s against the stone, and my hands are in her hair.
She tastes like the wine and the warmth and the impossible, ordinary peace of a night where nothing’s trying to kill us. I take my time. I have time now. For the first time in my life there’s no ritual counting down, no convergence pulling tight, no clock at all.
Just her breath catching when I find the spot below her ear.
Just her fingers tightening in my shirt when I press her into the wall.
Just the mark on my skin flaring gold, in perfect time with hers, the bond singing the two names it waited seven hundred years to say.
“Leo.” My name, breathed into the dark, warm and unfinished the way it was the first night she said it in her sleep.
I lift my head. Look at her. Flushed, mouth swollen, eyes half-shut and shining.
“I love you,” I tell her. Plain. No armor. “I’d choose you with no throne. No bond. No anything. Just you.”
Her eyes go wet at the corners. “Stop. We agreed no crying.”
“I lied. There’s going to be a lot of crying. It’s our whole future.”
She laughs and pulls me back down, and I let the rest of the world fall away.
Later, much later, we lie tangled in the suite with the windows open and the cold night air washing over both of us. Her head’s on my chest. My hand moves slowly through her hair.
I think about the man I was three weeks ago. Cold. Locked. So certain that love was the thing that broke you.
I think about my father in his box. My mother burying an empty casket. Seven hundred years of Van Alstein men taking the bond instead of earning it, and the corruption that came with it, and the way it nearly ate all of us alive.
And then I think about this. Her heartbeat under my palm. The dog we’re apparently getting. The big windows. The ordinary, holy nothing of a quiet night.
“You’re brooding again,” she murmurs, half asleep.
“I’m reflecting.”
“Same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
She tips her head up, kisses the underside of my jaw, settles back down. “What’s it matter, anyway? It’s done. We won. Marguerite’s gone, the bonds are clean, the throne’s asleep.” A yawn. “It’s over.”
I hold her a little tighter.
Because it’s not. Not until we find Triston’s mate.