She’s frowning, her full lips tugging down at the corners and her eyes sad when I finish explaining. “Ren, You can’t think of it that way. The point of this was to do some good to counteract the bad. It was never meant to be a punishment. Least of all for yourself.” She steps closer, her body pressing to my arm. “Donating money would help a lot of people.”
“It would,” I say, nodding once before shaking my head. “But it’s not enough and it’s not what we’re going to do.”
“So what do you think we should do?”
I let go of her hand just long enough to gesture around us, to the open field lying quiet and waiting beneath a blanket of snow. “I think we take a page out of Thalassa’s book,” I tell her. “I think we should build another Nightingale sanctuary. On this territory. Right here.”
Her eyes go wide, lips parting on a noiseless gasp. “Ren?—”
“No,” I say gently, before she can finish. “Just listen. Please. This land has profited off the suffering of omegas for too long. Building this—opening our gates to those who need a safe place to heal and rebuild—is how we start to balance the scales. This territory can become a refuge, the same way the manor is in Ashvale.”
I know I’m getting ahead of myself. I can feel it even as I stand here. Still, I’ve already started asking questions, already put feelers out. There’s an architect ready to start sketches next week. Conversations with contractors have already been had, ones where I asked about timelines once we break ground. But none of that is set in stone, and it all stops at Noa. It has to. This isn’t something I can decide alone. Not when what I’m proposing is an extension of her family’s legacy, and that isn’t something I can touch without her blessing.
“If we build a sanctuary here,” she asks, careful in a way that makes my heart drop. “What happens to the manor?”
The fear woven into the question strikes home because I hear what she’s really asking. She thinks I’m going to ask her to choose—the manor or something new here.
“This wouldn’t replace anything,” I tell her immediately. “What you built with your mom in Ashvale will stay exactly as it is. This would be an expansion. A partnership.” I keep talking before she can say anything, needing to get it all out. “Seren plans to go back there once it’s safe enough and run the day-to-day. If we build here too, you’d oversee both. Make sure they’re run the way you believe they should be.”
Walking away completely from what she and Thalassa built in Ashvale was never going to be an option to Noa. And it was never going to be something I’d want for her. I didn’t fight to win her back—to win her love—just to shrink her world or cage her in mine.
“This is your calling, baby, and I want to give back to the omegas, but I also want to give you back everything you set aside when you came here. I was thinking if we build here, that we should add a greenhouse and an attached healer’s room to the plans. We can make sure it’s big enough that you have space to work on online orders for Potion & Petal during those periods we don’t or still can’t go back to Ashvale as much as we’d like.” I quickly add, “And don’y tell Zora, but I think our pack healer would actually appreciate the extra support.”
She falls silent, teeth catching at her bottom lip as her gaze drifts over the clearing. She isn’t looking at the snow anymore, or the open field. She’s looking past it, toward what might stand here instead.
I give her the time she needs.
“You really thought of everything,” she says quietly after a minute of letting her imagination run wild.
Needing her closer, I pull her into my chest and bend to kiss the top of her head. “I tried.”
Her arms slide around my middle and she stays there, breathing me in while the frozen wind whips softly around us. When she finally looks up, her chin resting against the middle of my chest, her eyes are bright with something that makes my pulse skip.
“I knew you’d find a way to tip the scales,” she tells me, smiling now. “It’s perfect, Rennick.”
Relief hits hard, followed by a quiet disbelief I don’t bother hiding. “You think so?”
“I really do.”
Standing here with my mate—the love of my life—held against my chest, the future we’re building laid out before us, I feel the weight of everything we survived to reach this place. I lost her once. Came terrifyingly close to losing her again. And it only confirms what I’ve always known. There was never a fire I wouldn’t have crossed to find my way back to her.
Chapter 52
Noa
The full moon bleaches the snow into a pale blue wash, pulling long shadows from the trees as I run with my head low and my lungs on fire. My paws tear through powder and ice, slipping between trunks, clearing narrow creeks skinned over with brittle frost. Every breath hurts. I don’t slow. I don’t dare.
I’m being hunted.
The sound reaches me seconds later. Heavy. Too close. Paws chewing up ground behind me, closing distance faster than I can keep it. Awareness crawls up my spine, a tightening pressure that locks my muscles and wrings more speed from a body already near its limit.
My wolf doesn’t back down.
She surges forward, all sleek momentum and reckless joy, built for this kind of flight rather than brute force. This is where she shines. The world narrows to movement and the burn in my legs. Trees and snow smear into colorless streaks at the edge of my vision, the chase winding everything inside me tight until I hum with it.
This wasn’t how tonight was supposed to go.
It was meant to be simple. A pack run. The first official one in a long time, I’ve been told. The last scheduled one happened before the rejection and so much fractured and changed since then. But people are healing now. The pack is finding its rhythm again, and that means returning to old traditions like this.
