Our eyes meet, and the silence between us deepens—not empty, but meaningful. Charged not with tension, but recognition.
When he finally stands, it’s not with his usual abruptness. He moves like the moment has weight he’s reluctant to disturb.
“I’ve got things to tend to,” he says, but before he turns, he pauses.
“Thank you,” he adds, voice quieter, rougher. “For the story.”
I nod, my throat suddenly tight.
“You’re welcome,” I manage.
And as he leaves, I stay where I am, tea cooling in my hands, heart beating louder than before.
Because something’s cracked in him. And not just the walls of defense.
It’s something older, deeper—loneliness, perhaps, beginning to make room for something else.
Something warmer. And I’m not afraid of it.
10
DARIUS
The snow doesn’t fall so much as it drapes, a slow cascade of white that hushes the world like a shroud drawn over the face of the dead. It’s the kind of quiet that wraps around your bones, the kind that settles into the spaces behind your ribs and dares you to breathe too loud. I sit at the far end of the dining room table that’s warped slightly in the middle from age and disuse, fingers steepled beneath my chin as the fire snaps behind me in the hearth, giving the illusion of warmth without ever truly reaching me.
Mary leans against the stone doorframe like she’s been waiting for me to speak since yesterday, arms folded tight across her chest, the lines at the corners of her mouth etched deeper than I remember. Her silence is sharper than any reprimand, but I’ve grown used to that too. Guilt doesn’t speak in shouts—it whispers. In every creak of this godforsaken house. In the sound of her footsteps as she approaches.
“I need to say it,” I mutter, more to the fire than to her. “Out loud.”
Mary doesn’t blink. Doesn’t soften. She just watches me with those sharp, calculating eyes that see too much. “Then say it.”
I drag in a breath, let it scrape its way out. “She’s my mate.”
It hangs in the room like smoke, thick and curling and impossible to ignore. I watch her face for any flicker—disbelief, fear, maybe hope. But Mary is a vault. Her only reaction is the slight stiffening of her jaw.
“You sure?” she asks, voice low and even.
“As sure as I’ve ever been of anything.” And I am. It’s not a maybe, not a passing infatuation or some trick of isolation. The second I caught her scent, something ancient shifted inside me—a lock turning in a door I didn’t know existed.
Mary exhales through her nose. Not a sigh, but something close. “Then we have a problem.”
I nod once. “I know.”
“She’s human, Darius. Fragile. Mortal. And soft in all the ways that break easiest.”
“I haven’t touched her,” I say quickly, before she can accuse me of more. “Not like that. Hell, I’ve barely looked her in the eye since the storm.”
“But you’ve wanted to.” Her words aren’t a question. They’re a sentence.
“Yes.” It costs me something to admit it. The wolf inside me shudders, thrilled to hear truth spoken aloud.
Mary takes a step forward, her boots clicking softly on the stone. “You remember what happened the last time. What you lost. What we all lost. You think Cassian would be proud of this?”
I flinch, just barely. The name cuts deeper than I expected. Cassian, with his rigid sense of duty, his cold logic that never bent even when it should have. “Cassian wouldn’t approve of much, least of all this.”
“He wouldn’t approve,” she agrees, “but he’d understand the cost. The price of letting instinct rule.”
I press my hands flat on the table, feel the tremor in my arms. “I’m not that man anymore. I won’t let it happen again.”
