"We're yours now," Jett adds, his quiet voice carrying weight. "As you're ours. And we protect what's ours."
"While not allowing the world to stop us," Kai finishes. "From whatever we want to become. Together."
Together.
The word breaks something open in my chest.
Something I've kept locked away for ten years.
Something that feels dangerously like hope.
The tears fall.
Finally.
Silently.
Tracking down my cheeks, dripping onto my ruined costume, physical evidence of emotions I've spent years pretending I didn't have.
I nod.
Can't speak.
Can't find words.
Just nod.
Sage's arm wraps around me.
Blaze's hand finds my knee.
Jett's fingers brush against my shoulder.
And Kai?—
Kai reaches across the space between us and gently wipes a tear from my cheek.
"We came back for you," he says quietly. "We'll always come back for you."
Always.
Come back.
For me.
The sobs come then.
Quiet.
Shaking.
The release of a decade of grief and loneliness and the desperate, crushing fear that I would never be enough for anyone.
They hold me through it.
All of them.
In a car speeding toward a future I never dared to imagine, surrounded by Alphas who chose me—crazy and violent and broken as I am—I let myself fall apart.
