I squeeze her hand, silently telling her I don’t blame her and pleading with her to keep talking.
“Whenever I thought about this place, it was like looking through dirty glass. Shapeless shadows and sounds, but nothing solid. I could never hold on to the details…not even your name. When I came back and saw you, I knew you instantly, but before that, I told myself maybe the haze was a blessing. Because remember this place, this home I thought I’d been banished from, it broke something in me. It hurt to think I’d been cast out for being latent.”
My throat works around a protest, but she cuts me off with a small shake of her head.
“I know now that you were right,” she concedes, but it physically pains her to do so. “That day in the clearing, when you told me my own mother was the reason I couldn’t shift…you were right. She caged my wolf.”
Guilt claws at me, sharp and relentless. I used that information as a weapon the day I rejected her. I wanted her to hate me, thought it’d make it easier on her. But she never has. Even after everything I’ve done, she’s only ever looked at me with understanding twisted with sadness. Never disgust or hatred. That mercy—her capacity for forgiveness—hurts worse than anger or punishment ever could.
She’s quiet for a long moment before she finally continues. “But I also know when my mom caged my wolf away, chaining that piece of me down, she also stopped me from accessing my charmer gifts.”
Charmer gifts.
The phrase has something in my brain hesitating. It shouldn’t. Not when Thalassa Alderwood was her mother—one of the most powerful charmers on record—but somehow, I’d never connected that her daughter might also hold the same kind of magic.
“Are you a weaver like Thalassa?” The question slips out before I can stop it, my thumb still tracing the pale line of the scar on her palm.
She hesitates, shoulders lifting slightly. “I don’t think so?”
My brow furrows, waiting her out.
“Zora thinks I’m an oracle,” she says, almost like she’s testing how the title feels on her tongue. “I’ve been able to hear things…fragments of people’s thoughts, little flashes here and there. So far, it’s only happened during moments of heightened emotion.”
That gives me pause. I’ve heard of oracles. Foresight. Visions. Those I understand, but hearing minds? That’s rare, bordering on almost unheard of. But then again, I shouldn’t expectanything less from the Alderwood bloodline since power seems to be their Goddess-given birthright.
“Have you always been able to do that?”
“No. The first time it happened was when I came back…when I saw you again.”
My pulse stumbles.
That day. On my house’s back deck. Her reaching out when my control had started to slip. I hadn’t understood the chaos then, the way my wolf had surged forward, desperate to claim what he couldn’t yet name. But I do now. He’d known her instantly. Recognized what I had been too blind—or too damn stubborn—to see.
“I touched you and I heard you in my head. You kept saying…” She stops, bites her lip. “You were repeatingitover and over.”
Mate. Mate. Mate. Mate. Mate.
Like we’ve switched roles, the word tumbles from me before I can stop it. “Mate.”
Her eyes flicker to the side, sunlight catching on tears she won’t let fall. There’s relief on her face, but familiar pain, too. It’s a perfect mirror of my own.
“Yes,” she breathes. “It’s all I could hear or focus on. And I didn’t understand what it meant, so when I repeated it back to you, I—” Her laugh is humorless and fragile. “I didn’t mean to claim you. It just happened. And then everything went to hell in a fucking handbasket from there.”
Noa’s sad smile guts me.
Her version of that day brings the truth into sharp focus—how one accident, one spoken word, had set off the chain of everything that followed. Her declaring me as hers in front of Talis and Cathal. The perfect shitstorm that gave the McNamaras the tools to back me into a corner. And Carly—fuck,Carly—had been the last piece that had solidified my misguided decision.
Self-hatred and remorse chew through me with their sharp unrelenting fangs.
I lift her hand to my mouth and press a kiss to the mark there. She trembles, breath catching, and I feel it resonate through me.
“That never should have happened,” I manage, my throat tight with regret.
She gives a pitiful, wet laugh, blinking fast to keep more tears at bay. “No,” she agrees on an exhale. “I doubt that’s what my mom had in mind when she put all this in motion.”
“Thalassa told me she always mean for you to find your way back to me,” I tell her, holding her wrist and tucking her palm against the curve of my jaw. “Said she left safeguards in place to make sure of it.”
Noa’s reaction is small, but I catch it, the way her shoulders tense and her breath hitches. “I figured as much,” she admits slowly. “She told me once that you were going to be my‘key’.”
