12 Sloane #3
Finn’s mouth twitched, a slow, dangerous heat sparking in his eyes as he stepped closer. “We’re a matched set.”
“A highly sweaty, highly warded set.”
“The best kind.” He reached out, his hand sliding behind my neck, pulling me forward until my chest met his. “Come here.”
And I did, and he wrapped me up, and he asked for nothing.
That was the thing that undid me. His arms just came around me, and he didn’t tilt my chin up, didn’t reach for the hem of my shirt. He just held on, one big hand spread warm between my shoulder blades and the other cradling the back of my skull, and he lowered his cheek to the top of my head.
I’d been the strong shoulder my whole life.
I’d held broken dormant wolves in worse rooms than this and let them fall apart against me and told them it was over, they were safe, they’d made it.
I was the one who stayed steady so somebody else could come undone.
Nobody had ever once held me like the coming-undone was allowed.
I came undone.
It came up out of me in an ugly heaving wave, my face crushed into his sternum, a sound tearing out of my throat that I didn’t recognize as mine.
The mornings I’d swallowed poison in jaundiced bathrooms and painted a smile on for the Order.
Every dormant woman I’d stood beside and smiled at while the Wardens took her to harvest, every scream I’d catalogued instead of stopping, every time I’d played the loyal enforcer while something sacred got carved up in the next room and I did nothing, I did nothing.
I stood there and did nothing so the mission could go on.
The alias now burned. The role I’d never have again. The home I’d been sure I’d forfeited the second I gave the Oath away, and finding instead Maren’s hands held out palms up.
And the pup.
The impossible lit-lamp—mine now.
Ours. Real.
I cried like something breaking. My whole body shook with it, years of it, and Finn held on through every second and didn’t shush me and didn’t tell me it was okay and didn’t try to fix a single piece of it.
He pressed his mouth to the crown of my head every so often, and once, into my hair, so low I felt it more than heard it, he said, “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got you.”
That was all. That was everything.
When it finally wrung itself out of me I was empty in the good way, scoured clean.
He lowered us down onto the narrow cot and arranged us so my head was on his chest and his arm was locked around me.
The boiler ticked warm through the wall, and neither of us reached for anything more.
We could have. The Heat was gone and the door was shut and there was, for once, all the time in the world—and it would have been the first time we’d ever touched each other with nothing driving it but wanting to, and I understood it was a thing we’d get to have, soon, whenever we chose it.
But tonight the choosing was this: to be held by someone who asked for nothing, until my breathing evened out against his heart and the fear finally, finally set itself down.
I fell asleep to the count of his breaths and the tick of the tank and the far muffled hum of the house keeping itself.
I woke to daylight bleeding around the painted window and Finn still under me, awake, one hand moving slow up and down my spine like he’d been doing it for hours and would happily do it for years.
“Morning, Ash Wolf,” I whispered, shifting my cheek against his chest.
“Morning.” He kissed the top of my head, his chest vibrating with a low rumble. “You’re drooling on me, by the way.”
“That is fated mate saliva. It’s a blessing. You should be honored.”
He let out a real laugh, deep and rich, his arms tightening around me. “I am deeply honored. Now it’s time to get up.”
“Not a chance.” I snuggled closer, breathing him in.
Finally, I sat up. Stretched. Noticed someone had left a mug of coffee on the shelf, and a folded stack of clean clothes in our sizes, because of course they had.
And I saw the doorframe.
Someone had come while we slept and knelt at the low threshold and drawn, in careful white chalk on the old painted wood, a sigil. I’d know it in the dark, in smoke, at the end of the world. A circle, and a hand inside the circle, palm up. Nothing to fear. Warded and kept. This one is ours.
The same mark. The exact same one, in the same steady careful hand, that she’d drawn over my bunk the first week I came to her as an eight-year-old who wouldn’t sleep because she was sure the dark would take her.
I knelt down in front of the doorframe in the gray morning light and put two fingers against the chalk, not smudging it, just touching, the way you touch something to be sure it’s real.
Finn’s voice came quiet from the cot behind me. “What does it mean?”
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t yet. My eyes had gone hot and full all over again, but the good way this time, the clean way, the way you cry when the thing you were most afraid you’d lost turns out to have been keeping your place the whole time.
“It means we’re home,” I said.