15 Finn #3
The cloth’s markings shifted under Nadia’s hand—patterns crawling and reforming, dark grids sliding toward a shape—and a faint sigil surfaced glowing on her palm where it pressed the fabric.
She held it. Her face did the composed clinical mask that told the whole pack she’d found something, and Sloane’s terror spiked again.
I pressed my thumb harder into the Oath marks—
Then Nadia exhaled and lifted the cloth, and her mouth did something that on anyone else would have been a smile.
“Viable,” she said. “Strong, actually. Resonance runs clean—no corruption, no suppressant scarring on the line itself. Whatever you poisoned yourself with it kept off the pup.” She sat back on her heels and looked at Sloane, direct, and dropped the clinical register a single degree.
“You did a hard thing to your own biology for a long time and the kid’s fine anyway. Take the win.”
Sloane’s breath came out ragged. The terror finally broke and ran off her all at once, and what was left underneath was so raw I had to look away from her face and let her have it privately, down the bond, where I held it with her.
Nadia was already packing the cloth away. She snuffed the bundle against a saucer, dropped it in a pocket, and stood, and she gave me a look on the way up—dry, knowing, edged.
“She’s stable,” Nadia said to me, and there was something almost amused in the flatness of it.
“Biologically. You have my professional clearance to stop looming over her like a monument.” She snapped the case shut.
“Blood next week. I’ll bring Kaia so you don’t put me through a wall.
” Then, to Sloane, warmer than she’d said anything yet: “Welcome in. Drink water. Growing a royal wolf is metabolically expensive and nobody in this pack drinks enough water.”
She walked off toward Reed’s table without waiting for a reply.
Kaia squeezed Sloane’s shoulder. “Told you. Rude. Also right.” She grinned. “Go. Both of you. You’ve earned about a decade of quiet.”
I stood and drew Sloane up with me, and this time nothing stepped into the gap.
I got her a goodnight to Reed—a nod, received with a nod, the whole conversation—and I turned her toward the corridor.
The noise of the mess hall started to fall away behind us, plates and Tommy’s voice and Del calling somebody back for a third bowl, and then the door swung shut on it and it was just the two of us and the low hum of the ductwork and the concrete cooling under our boots.
The corridor was dim. Emergency lighting, mostly, spaced far apart. Sloane’s shoulder brushed mine as we walked, and the bond ran quiet and full between us.
My wolf was finally lying down inside me, one long muscle at a time.
“You held me together back there,” she said. Her voice was low, worn soft at the edges. “Twice tonight. The link, and then Nadia.”
“That’s the job.”
“Is it?” She glanced up at me. The gold caught the emergency light and threw it back.
“Being the person who holds other people together? You’ve been doing it this whole time.
In the ravine. In the tower. With the pack link.
You held the whole room’s grief and then you held mine on top of it, and I never once saw you set any of it down. ”
I stopped walking.
“I have spent a lifetime looking for you,” I said. “And then I found you and I had to walk away. You asked me to walk away and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do. But I always knew there was a shape I was supposed to protect, a scent I’d catch on a ridge, a mate.”
Her breath had gone shallow. She’d stopped too, a foot from me in the dark hall.
“You’re not sleeping anymore,” I said. “You’re awake.
The suppressants are gone. There’s no distance I have to keep.
There’s no version of getting close to you that ends with you dying.
” I reached out and set my hand against the side of her face, and the wolf came all the way up into it, into the warmth of her skin under my palm. “I’m done keeping my distance.”
“Finn.”
“My door’s the next one.” I was already turning her toward it, my hand sliding from her face to the back of her neck. “You should know that once it closes I’m not going to be interested in being the person who holds the room together. I’m going to be interested in you.”
I opened the door. The room beyond was dark and cool and smelled like nothing, like the swept-clean nothing of a space I’d never once let become mine.
I didn’t push her forward. I would never—but she stepped through it, and the hum of the pack and the war and the whole exhausting world dropped away as the door clicked shut behind us.
Then I backed her against it.
Her spine met the wood. My hands found the wall on either side of her head, and I brought myself down close enough to feel the heat coming off her, close enough that the clove-and-violet scent of her flooded the small dark room and drowned out the careful years I’d spent starving for exactly this.
“River stone,” she whispered, her gold eyes fixed on mine, her hands coming up to close in the front of my shirt.
“You smell like river stone and moss and the wind that comes down off a mountain right before the weather turns. Do you know that? I’ve had it in my head for days and I couldn’t say it to anyone. ”
“Say it to me,” I said, and closed the last of the distance.