Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Anne
Kain takes me to a restaurant on the east side of the human district that I have never been to. It’s small and warm and tucked between a bookshop and a florist, the kind of place that has candles on the tables and a handwritten menu and no reason to be in a hurry.
He holds the door open. I walk in ahead of him, and he puts his hand on the small of my back as we follow the host to our table. The touch is so easy, so unselfconscious, that I have to look away and compose myself before I sit down.
This is what it is supposed to feel like. I forgot.
We order. He gets whatever he gets, which I barely register because I’m watching his face while he talks to the waiter—the way he smiles when he thanks the man, the way his eyes come back to me immediately after, as if he’s checking that I’m still here.
I’ve noticed that this is something he does without thinking about it.
Through the bond, I can feel his contentment. It’s like a quiet room with all the windows open. No edge to it. No shadow.
“You’re staring,” he says once the waiter is gone.
“I’m allowed to stare. You’re my mate.”
The word sits in the air between us, and we both feel it—the newness of saying it plainly, out loud, as a simple fact rather than a complicated issue.
He reaches across the table and turns my hand over, his thumb tracing the bent, gold ring on my finger. “How long have you been wearing this?”
“Since the morning you gave it to me.” I look down at it. “I haven’t taken it off.”
He is quiet for a moment, his thumb still moving along the band. “I want to get you a proper one. Before the ceremony.”
“This is proper,” I say.
“Anne.”
“I mean it. I don’t want a different one.” I turn my hand over and lace my fingers through his. “This is the one you kept for ten years. I don’t want anything else.”
He looks at me for a long time. His expression does the thing it does when he has been disarmed and is trying not to show how completely.
“All right,” he says finally. “This one.”
We talk through dinner the way we have started to talk—easily, about everything and nothing, filling in the years between us piece by piece.
He tells me things I didn’t know, such as that he spent his first year in captivity counting the days by scratching marks into the underside of a cot frame.
That he taught himself to sleep lightly, to wake at the smallest sound, and that this is a habit he is now slowly and deliberately trying to undo.
That the thing he missed most, in the years when he couldn’t remember details clearly, was the smell of the woods at the edge of Moonvale in autumn.
I tell him things, too. That I’ve always kept a particular blend of coffee in my apartment because we used to drink it together as teenagers, and I couldn’t make myself stop buying it.
That I had a nightmare about losing him so frequently in the first years that I learned to recognize it mid-dream and pull myself out.
That Sienna once told me the healthiest thing I could do was let go, and I smiled and nodded and went home and talked to his photograph for twenty minutes.
He listens to all of it. He doesn’t flinch from any of it.
“We wasted so much time,” I say. Not bitterly, just as a fact.
“No,” he says. “We survived. That’s different.”
I look at him through the candlelight. “The ceremony is next week,” I say.
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
He squeezes my hand. “I’ve been ready for ten years.”
After dinner, we drive past the edge of the pack settlement to the tree line, where the woods begin in earnest—old growth, dense, the kind of forest that goes quiet when you walk into it, in the particular way of a place that has been undisturbed for a very long time.
The moon is up and nearly full, flooding the clearing at the tree line with silver light.
Kain parks, and we sit in the car for a moment, looking at the forest.
“When did you last run?” he asks.
“Before you came back,” I reply honestly. “A long time before that, actually.”
He looks at me, lines creasing his forehead.
“It was too much,” I say simply. “My wolf remembered you. The grief was worse in my wolf form, without the human part of me managing it. So, I stopped shifting.”
He is quiet for a moment. I feel his reaction move through the bond—it’s not pity, nothing as simple as that. It’s more like sorrow on my behalf, and underneath it, there’s a fierce and uncomplicated gladness because that particular reason no longer applies.
“Come on, then,” he says softly.
We shift at the tree line.
The change moves through me in a wave, and when I come down onto four legs, the entire forest opens up—sound layered on sound, a hundred scents where there was one, the ground solid and detailed beneath my paws in a way that human feet never quite feel.
The night air is cold and clean and smells of pine resin, wet earth, and the deep-forest aroma that has no human name.
My wolf stretches.
Not in a hurry. Not checking for threats. Just the long, deliberate extension of a body that has been folded up for too long. Her spine arches, her chest drops low, and her legs reach out behind her in an enormous, luxurious stretch that seems to come from somewhere deep and essential.
Yes, I shifted for the fight. She remembers. But that was about survival—four legs and teeth and desperation, nothing joyful about it. This is different. This is the first time in years I have shifted just to run.
She knows this. The relief of it is physical, through her whole body and the sweep of her tail and the lifting of her muzzle into the night air.
She is not grieving anything. She is not bracing for pain.
She is simply here, in the forest, on a cool night, with the moon up and her mate three feet away, and she is entirely happy.
I forgot what it feels like.
Kain shifts beside me. His wolf is the same black that I remember—enormous and scarred now in ways the younger version wasn’t, the marks of everything he survived written into this form, too—but carrying himself with the ease of an animal that has come home.
He turns to look at me, and his eyes are bright in the moonlight.
He bumps his head against mine.
It is such a simple thing. The kind of contact that needs no translation—just warmth and presence and I’m here and so are you. My wolf leans into it immediately, her head pressing back against his, and I feel a release in her chest that I didn’t know she needed.
Kain takes off into the trees, and I follow without thinking.
We run the way we used to when we were young and the forest was ours and the future belonged to us: full out, no holding back, the trees blurring past, the ground flying under our paws, and the cold night air rushing over us.
He is faster than me and always was, but he doesn’t leave me behind.
He runs just fast enough that I have to work for it, just far enough ahead that catching up is possible, glancing back over his shoulder with those bright eyes every few seconds to make sure I’m there.
I am there. I am absolutely, completely there.
We bank through a stand of birch trees and come to a stop in a smaller clearing, moonlit and still.
My shoulder hits his flank, and we go sideways together into the long grass, a tangle of paws and tails.
The sound that comes out of me is not a howl or a growl but much more embarrassing: a kind of playful yip, the sound of an animal that is simply and thoroughly delighted.
Kain rolls upright and shakes himself, looking at me with an expression that manages to convey, even in wolf form, that he finds me entirely endearing.
I shake myself, too. Very dignified.
He drops to his elbows, the classic invitation to play, and I accept it immediately.
We chase each other through the clearing like we are not grown adults who work office jobs and have been through actual warfare in the last month, and I do not care even slightly.
My wolf does not care, either. She is running, and her mate is running beside her, and the moon is up, and it is enough. It is so much more than enough.
At some point, we end up lying in the grass side by side, breathing hard, flanks touching.
He is warm against me, and his breaths slow and even out alongside mine.
Through the bond, I can feel his contentment matching my own—the same as I felt over dinner, except larger out here, the forest and the moonlight and the run having made room for more of it.
My wolf puts her head on his shoulder, and he lets her.
We shift back at the tree line, human again in the moonlight, and dress in the clothes we left folded on the hood of the car.
Kain’s hair is a mess, and I reach up to fix it without thinking.
He lets me do that, too, standing patiently with his hands in his pockets while I try to arrange it properly with my fingers.
“It’s not going to lie flat,” I inform him.
“I know.”
“You have impossible hair.”
“I’ve been told.”
I give up with a giggle. He catches my hand as I lower it and presses his lips to my knuckles —to the bent ring, specifically, a deliberate gesture—looking at me over the top of my hand.
“Good?” he asks.
I think about the restaurant and the candlelight and his thumb tracing the band around my finger.
I think about the way he ran just fast enough ahead of me through the trees.
I think about my wolf’s head on his shoulder in the moonlit grass, and the grief I carried for ten years simply not being there anymore.
“Really good,” I say.
He gives me a smile. The real one, the one that reaches his eyes and transforms his whole face, the one that looks like the boy I fell in love with and also like the man he became. And also like something new that belongs only to me now.
I go up on my toes and kiss him.
He kisses me back, his free hand coming up to my face, unhurried, the forest quiet around us and the moon overhead and the ceremony a week away and all the time in the world stretching out ahead of us.