Chapter 15 #2
Isdisa was already awake. Not distressed or anxious, just restless in a way that felt familiar.
The feeling moved through me steadily, like energy seeking a place to go.
For the past year, she had tested every boundary the compound offered, every fence line, every patrol route, every limit she could find.
This morning felt different. Not because she wanted to leave, but because she wanted movement.
Beside me, Ty's breathing shifted.
His eyes opened.
For a second, neither of us spoke. We didn't need to. The bond was still new enough to surprise me and familiar enough to understand.
His mouth curved slightly. We got up, dressed, and went to the eastern tree line.
We shifted and we ran.
I understood running, and I understood freedom. What I hadn't understood was what it felt like to run beside someone who was built to move with you.
Kai was massive, with a deep river-blue hue.
Like Ty, he was calm and strong, like water that has already decided its course and doesn't rush.
He neither surged ahead nor fell behind but kept pace with me, sensing my intentions before I acted, moving alongside me like a tributary merging into a main current.
Isdisa responded to him the way ice responds to the right temperature.
Not melting. Releasing. Opening — all the way, nothing held at the edges, the specific quality of ice that has stopped calculating whether it can afford to move and simply moves.
We let them run.
At some point, deep in the eastern forest, where the trees opened into a small clearing with afternoon light filtering through at an angle, they stopped.
And what happened between them in that clearing was theirs.
Ancient. Instinctive. The completion of something that had been building since the bond first registered them to each other — two wolves, fully sealed, finally given the time, space, and freedom to be exactly who they were.
Ty and I stood at the edge of that clearing afterward, back in our own skin. Neither of us spoke.
Some things don't need language. Some things sit better in the body than in words
We headed to the waterfall without planning to.
The eastern path curved toward it the way it always had, and our feet knew the route before we made a decision about it.
The falls spilled over dark stone into the same crystal-clear pool below. Sunlight filtered through the canopy overhead, catching the mist and turning it silver.
Ty sat on the flat rock at the edge and pulled me onto his lap. I snuggled close without thinking what it would cost me.
I looked up at him and smiled.
“What’s that for, Angel?” he asked.
“I love your lips.” I giggled. Actually giggled.
He smiled and kissed me slowly and gently.
“They are all yours.”
“Mine,” I said, bringing those lips back to me.
The thing that had been tight in my chest since I was sixteen — the specific bracing I had carried so long it had begun to feel structural, as if removing it might take something essential with it — was gone.
Not loosened. Not eased.
Gone.
I sat with that for a moment, feeling the shape of the absence, the unfamiliar lightness of a chest no longer braced for the next thing.
Ty was looking at the falls.
"Hey,"
He turned.
"Thank you," I said. "For all of it. The whole year. Everything."
He held my gaze. Then he reached down and tucked a loose curl behind my ear.
"You were always worth it," he said. Simply. No performance behind it. Just the truth, spoken directly, as he said what mattered.
Isdisa was resting peacefully inside my chest, fully satisfied. For the first time, we were both right where we wanted to be.
***
DAY THREE
The last day of the heat had a different quality from the first two.
Not less intense, but more settled, as if we had gone through something together and neither wanted to return to the ordinary world. We stayed in the quarters most of the day without explicitly deciding; neither of us wanted to be anywhere else.
We cooked together.
That was the thing I hadn’t expected.
Ty moved around the stove with focused determination, as if he were still committed to proving that his eggs could improve with enough effort and emotional support.
I stood beside him in one of his shirts, my hair loose down my back, as he explained seasoning ratios as if they were sacred knowledge.
And somewhere in the middle of that ordinary moment, I realized how soft I had become around him.
Not weak.
Never weak.
Just… open.
The version of me standing barefoot in that kitchen, with flour on my shirt and no armor in sight, would have terrified the woman I used to be. I had spent years surviving by staying sharp enough not to let my guard down around anyone.
Ty saw it immediately, of course.
I looked up from the counter and caught him watching me with that quiet expression he wore whenever he felt deeply.
“What?” I asked.
That small smile touched his mouth instantly.
“Nothing.”
“Ty.”
“You’re beautiful like this,” he said. “I need you to know I see this version of you, too.”
Something tightened unexpectedly in my chest.
“The soft version,” I said quietly.
“Your version,” he corrected. “All of them.”
I stayed still while he looked at me.