I left. That’s all it remembers.
“Don’t start,” I say quietly.
It answers with a low, unhappy growl.
Out beyond the window, snow keeps falling. The world looks peaceful.
Nothing about tonight is.
Her scent is still hanging on in my head—honeysuckle, cocoa, the sharp, brittle edge of fear she tried to hide when she was out there calling the cat. It threads through my thoughts until everything else smells wrong.
My hands grip the sill.
I told myself for five years that if fate ever put her back in front of me, I’d do better. That I’d be stronger. That I could stand there and look at her like she was any other girl from this town and not the one my beast claimed the first time she smiled at me.
Then I saw her in the snow—all grown up, and as stubborn as ever—and the first thing in my head was not “keep her safe” or “stay away.”
It was one word, deep and honest:
Mine.
I hate that it’s still there.
I hate that it still feels true.
I step back from the window. The fire cracks softly behind me. A log sags, spits sparks, shifts its weight.
“She’s here,” I say into the empty room. Hearing it out loud doesn’t make it any easier to believe. “After all this time.”
The bear’s answer is simple, a deep thrum in my chest.
She never stopped being here—in me.
I sink down onto the couch, elbows on my knees, hands loosely clasped. My body is tired from the shift, from the run, from fighting myself in about six different directions.
Regret sits heavy in my gut. It always has, but tonight it’s got a new edge to it. Hope, maybe.
It would be easy to say I’ll win her back.
Easy to imagine walking up to that cabin tomorrow, looking her in the eye, and telling her everything I should’ve said years ago.
It’s harder to admit the truth.
She’s human.
I’m not, not in the ways that matter.
She doesn’t know what I am.
She doesn’t know why I left.
All she knows is that I broke something between us, clean in two.
I scrub my hands over my face.
“I don’t get to want this,” I tell the room.
My beast doesn’t care. Its fur prickles my skin.
