Epilogue - Avaline
The water ran hot enough to peel skin, and I kept my hands under it anyway, because the pain gave me something honest to hold onto in a place built entirely from lies.
Beside me, Lynnea swayed.
I caught it before anyone else could—that small betrayal of the knees, the way her weight tipped toward the rolled steel edge of the trough where a fall would crack her jaw on the metal and mark her as weak, as noticeable, as a problem to be solved with a longer needle.
I shifted my hip into hers, a hard, casual bump, two tired women jostling for the same faucet.
Her body folded against the cabinet instead of the floor.
Breathe, little bird. Keep your feet.
“I can’t,” she whispered under the roar of the water. “The room’s tilting again.”
“That’s the morning dose still deciding whether it owns you.” I worked the lye bar between my fingers, the scoured stink of it climbing into my sinuses. “Palm flat on the tile. Cold. Feel it?”
“...Yeah.”
“That’s real. Hold that.”
I slid my arm behind the small of her back, hidden beneath the sluice of water, and locked her upright. But it wasn’t only Lynnea. Down the whole line of the trough, a dozen women stood scrubbing at nothing, and a dozen women were watching me.
Marisol tracked the set of my shoulders.
The Olinga twins matched their breathing to mine without knowing they did it.
When I was calm, row three was calm, and row three set the tone for the whole washroom, and every dormant in this drowned tile box had learned that lesson somewhere in the animal part of her that the drug couldn’t fully freeze.
They didn’t know what I was. Neither did I, not all of it. But their sleeping wolves knew, and they turned to me the way a compass turns, and I had spent years learning to be worth that turning.
The ache in my sternum pulled taut with the strain of carrying them. A crater the exact shape of a body that had never once lain down beside me, hollowed out and pointing—always, endlessly—toward true.
My body still braced for a mate who never came.
My heart still tried, in the half-second before sleep, to fit itself against a shape made of scorched earth and dry lightning and green sap torn out of a broken branch.
A man with obsidian eyes on a ridge, who had looked at me like I was the first thing he’d ever seen, before the world took him and everything else.
My wolf slept under all of it. Frozen. Their pearl-colored poison packed around her like ice.
Then the air went wrong.
Heat rolled into the washroom ahead of the two who entered it, a thick suffocating swelter that had no fire behind it, and under the bleach came the smell of scorched sugar gone black in the pan—the reek of something sweet burned past all saving.
Where a person should have stood, the Second Saint filled the doorway.
My eyes hit the shape and slid off it and came back wrong, and came back wrong again, like a tongue worrying a broken tooth.
The other women flinched as one. Two of the youngest pressed their hands over their ears, and a thin dark line crept from beneath Friya’s palm and down her wrist—her ear had begun to bleed just from the thing being near.
Behind the Second Saint walked the woman whose hands were stained to the elbow with something blacker than ink, something that drank the fluorescent light instead of reflecting it.
Row three. The words arrived inside my skull, a whisper laid directly against the meat of my brain. Such lovely stillness. This one first.
The Seeress Phaelen crossed the wet tile and stopped in front of me. She lifted a vial in those ruined black fingers, and the tincture inside it caught no light at all.
You set the tone, don’t you? Her stained thumb uncapped it. So you’ll set it now. Drink, and the rest will follow. They always follow you. We’ve been watching how they follow you.
My heart tried to seize and I would not let it, because if I flinched, Friya bled and Lynnea fell and a dozen women found out how thin the ice was that held all of us upright. I gave the Seeress my neutral face, my slow adoring blink.
And down the line, they saw the blink, and a dozen sets of shoulders eased a fraction. The Second Saint’s cinnamon-char heat couldn’t touch what my calm had already settled.
I took the paper cup. I lifted it. I threw it back.
The dose coated my tongue like something scraped off the bottom of a frozen lake—no taste, only absence, a hand laid flat over my chest. The cold crept down my throat and sealed my wolf under a fresh fall of chemical ice, and the ragged edge of my Heat with her.
Good, the whisper crooned. Now the flock.
One by one they came to Phaelen’s black hands.
And one by one, before they drank, their eyes cut to me—Marisol, the twins, Lynnea last and shaking—and I gave each of them the small slow nod that meant swallow it, stay small, live through this hour, and each of them obeyed me.
In a slaughterhouse dressed as a hospital, I was the only mercy they were allowed, and I dispensed it in blinks and breaths so none of us would be noticed enough to die.
I set my empty cup on the steel with hands that did not tremble.
And the drain cover chattered.
It came from beneath—up through the tile, through the soles of my feet, through the rolled steel lip of the trough into the bones of my wrists.
A deep, subsonic ring, so low it was less sound than pressure behind the sternum, a struck bell heard through a mile of stone.
The water in the basin jumped, threw up a ring of trembling peaks, and went flat.
My wolf was frozen. It didn’t matter, because the thing that woke was not the wolf.
It was the bond. The oldest magic in our blood, the silver tether the Moon goddess herself spins in the dark to connect a wolf to her true north. It was the biological anchor the goddess built into our marrow, a truth designed to hold together under impossible pressure.
That ring in the bedrock struck the bond like a mallet on a tuning fork, and the note it gave back was Old-World, ancient, a flavor of magic I had tasted exactly once—on a ridge, in the arms of a boy whose obsidian eyes went wide the moment my scent had hit him.
Every starved cell in me answered it with a single wordless word: ours.
The hook drove into my ribs. My knees tried to buckle. I grabbed the steel and held, the way I held Lynnea, the way I held row three, the way I’d held my own throat shut for years so I wouldn’t scream his name.
He’s alive. The thought came up out of the crater like water finding a crack, and I couldn’t stop it. Somewhere out there, someone I belong to just moved the whole world.
The Saint’s head snapped up.
The whole faceless wrongness of it wrenched toward the far wall, toward the desert and the mountains and the thousand miles of dark beyond them, and for the first time the heat that poured off it stuttered—guttered—like a candle in a draft it hadn’t expected.
The vial dropped out of Phaelen’s black fingers and shattered on the tile.
What—
The whisper cracked, and there was something underneath it I had never once heard in this building. Fear. What was that? Where did that come from? The wards—the wards are singing—
Somewhere above us, deep in the walls of the facility, the Order’s bindings began to scream, a high thin harmonic climbing the tile until the youngest girls whimpered and the black-handed woman spun toward the door, all her lovely composure gone.
Under my thumbs, the steel of the basin whined.
I looked up into the warped tin mirror bolted above the trough, and for half a heartbeat, before I could stop it, my own face looked back at me sharp and clear and gold-eyed and utterly, dangerously present.
Something moved in my chest. Guttural. A ruttle over what is mine, over territory, over a threat not yet arrived but coming.
I dragged the human color back over my eyes.
I straightened Lynnea with a hand at her back.
And the room—a dozen frightened women in a screaming building—waited, because the Seeress was shrieking orders and the Saint was staring at the wall and none of them moved until I shifted my weight and turned toward the line.
Then they filed in behind me. Nice and quiet.
I’m here, I sent it west, into the stone, into the dark, into the impossible. Whoever you are. Whoever you were. I never moved. I kept your seat.
Come and take it.
And I began, very calmly, to plan.
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Thank you so much for reading The Ash Wolf’s Forbidden Mate. If you loved the book and have time to leave a review or even just give it a star rating, I’d really appreciate it. Reviews are one of the best ways to help new books succeed.
I’m so excited for us to reach the culmination of the Hotshot Wolves series, their hidden mates, and all of the impending revolution that will turn the world upside down. Not to mention, dying to see the fire that will erupt when Reed and Avaline meet in Book 6!