29. Milo #2
“You watched a thread between us before I was born. You strengthened it while I grew up. You picked the professor, you picked the lottery ball, you arranged the whole thing and then you sat back and enjoyed the show.” Her voice is steadier than it has any right to be.
“You gave him a name and a month and a plan. And you gave me nothing. No warning. No choice. I found out I’d been drafted into a divine marriage from the man you sent to marry me. ”
Well, the goddess says, and there’s something new in it now. Attention. Somebody’s angry.
“I spent tonight wondering whether a single thing I felt was my own,” Lynn says. “You reached into my life and rearranged it and never once asked. So no. I’m not going to thank you. I think you owe me one, actually.”
The silence that follows is the longest of my life. I have stopped breathing entirely.
And then the goddess laughs.
Not the cold, amused thing from before. A real one, delighted, enormous, old enough to have echoed in caves before there were words for caves.
Oh, she says, I chose WELL. Do you know how many humans, handed a wolf king and a crown and eternity, faint?
Weep with gratitude? Fall to their knees?
A pause, warm and wicked. You demand an apology from a goddess on your wedding-adjacent evening.
Pup, take notes. This one’s going to be a problem for everyone, and I mean that as the highest compliment I have.
“That’s not a yes,” Lynn says. “To the apology.”
No, the goddess agrees. It isn’t. I don’t apologize for the shape of a soul, and yours was always going to end up here, whether I nudged or not.
But I’ll tell you the thing I think you actually came here to hear, and then you can decide what it’s worth.
She goes gentle, and gentle from her is a stranger thing than thunder.
I made the thread, little one. I didn’t make you walk it.
I’ve named more partners than you have years to count, and plenty of them looked at the gift I gave them and turned around and went home.
You got on a bus. That part I couldn’t have arranged if I’d tried for a century. That part was yours.
It lands somewhere under her ribs and stays there; through the bond, I feel the echo of it.
“…Okay,” Lynn says. “That was almost worth the raffle.”
High praise, the goddess says drily. I’ll have it carved somewhere.
Take care of my favorite human, pup. The goddess’s attention shifts back to me. She’s going to change everything. Your pack, your people, your world. In ways you can’t imagine yet.
“I know.”
And you, Her voice softens, just slightly. Take care of yourself, too. Your father would be proud of the king you’ve become. The man you’ve become.
My throat tightens.
That’s all I wanted to say. For now. The presence begins to fade. There’s an older rite, of course. For making things more permanent. But that’s a conversation for another moon.
“An older rite?”
Ask your mother about it sometime. She’s been hoping.
And then she’s gone.
Lynn stares at me.
“What older rite?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Your goddess is cryptic as hell.”
“I know.” I pull her into my arms. “I know.”
We stand together on the balcony, watching the moon rise over the compound. Below us, the pack is settling in for the night, fires lit, families gathered, life continuing in all its messy, beautiful complexity.
“So,” Lynn says. “What happens now?”
“Now?” I press a kiss to the top of her head. “Now you meet the territorial leaders. Learn pack history. Figure out how to run a kingdom.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
“And you’ll help me?”
“Every step of the way.” I tighten my arms around her. “For a very, very long time.”
She looks up at me, and through the bond, I feel it, her love, warm and certain, wrapping around my heart like a homecoming.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too.” I smile against her hair. “My queen. My mate. My other half.”
“That’s very dramatic.”
“I’m a king. Drama comes with the crown.”
She laughs, bright and real, and the sound echoes across the compound.
Behind us, on the little table where Isla left him, Mr. Darcy is glaring at his empty food bowl with the specific outrage of a creature who believes the entire world has personally failed him.
I’ve learned my lesson about the hamster.
I have the scars, small and humiliating and real.
But Lynn’s still wrapped in my arms and I don’t want to let go of her to find Isla, so I reach over one-handed, pinch a pellet from the tin, and set it in the bowl, already bracing for the bite.
Weeks of this, the playing dead and the biting and the strategic defecation, from a two-ounce rodent who has despised me on sight since the first night I climbed through his person’s window.
He looks at the pellet.
Then at me.
And then he takes it from my fingers, gently, for once, sits back on his haunches, and eats. No teeth, no shriek, no theatrics of any kind. He just eats, watching me the whole time with those beady black eyes, and when he’s finished he doesn’t turn his back on me.
I go very still.
“Lynn.”
“Mm?”
“Your hamster just took food from me without trying to draw blood.”
She turns in my arms to look. Mr. Darcy, caught in the act of not hating me, immediately flops onto his back and plays dead, legs in the air, as if to say this changes nothing and he’ll deny it under oath.
But it happened. We both saw it.
“Huh,” Lynn says softly, and there’s a wobble in it. “He took it clean. He’s never once let anyone he’s decided against off that easy.” She swipes at her eyes. “The dying is just for show now. He already forgave you the second before.”
Not long ago I was a gray-souled thing going through the motions, a boy in a dead man’s chair who’d stopped expecting to feel anything again.
Even Mr. Darcy came around. That has to mean something.
My pack. My mate. My family.
My future, finally beginning.
I intend to make it a good one.