His eyes gleam with understanding. "Tomorrow. Tonight, you rest."
He gathers me against his chest and rises from the altar, carrying me back toward the keep with the same ease he carried me here. The path down the mountainside passes in a blur of moonlight and shadow, my head tucked against his shoulder, my body heavy with satisfied exhaustion. The guards we pass bow their heads, and I feel their wolves brush against my consciousness through the pack bond that now connects us.
Luna.The acknowledgment ripples through my mind from dozens of sources at once.Alpha's mate. One of us.
The weight of it settles around my shoulders like a mantle, heavy with responsibility but also with belonging. I am no longer the human woman who arrived as a political pawn. I am wolf. I am luna. I am exactly where I was always meant to be.
Stellan carries me to our chambers and lays me on the furs where we slept this afternoon. He curls around me, one arm draped possessively across my waist, his body warm against my back. His exhaustion bleeds through the bond, tangled with satisfaction and the deep, abiding love that has become as essential to him as breathing.
"Sleep," he murmurs against my hair. "Tomorrow we deal with the aftermath of the battle and begin the work of absorbing Korren's territory. Tonight, we rest."
My eyes drift closed, but sleep does not come immediately. The wolf stirs beneath my skin, restless despite my exhaustion. She paces. She tests. She wants.
Soon,I tell her, unsure if she can hear me, unsure if this is how it works.Soon, we run.
She settles, but only barely. The hunger remains, coiled tight in my chest, waiting for release.
Stellan's sleeping mind brushes against mine through the bond, warm and possessive and utterly at peace. But I cannot match his stillness. The wolf will not let me.
She has waited a lifetime to be born. One more night feels like an eternity.
I close my eyes and try to rest, but the wolf keeps pacing, and I know that whatever tomorrow brings, I will not be the same woman who greets the dawn.
14
STELLAN
Ifeel her changing.
The wolf stirs beneath her skin, ancient instincts waking in a body that was never designed to contain them but is learning anyway. She dreams of running on four legs, of hunting beneath the moon, of howling her joy into a sky that finally understands her language. Sometimes she whimpers in her sleep, her muscles twitching as the wolf tests the boundaries of her flesh. I pull her closer when that happens, letting my presence anchor her through the transformation neither of us can control.
The conversion takes days.
I've seen wolves turned before, watched humans accept the bite and emerge changed on the other side. But I've never witnessed it from inside a bond, never felt the transformation rippling through someone whose soul is tethered to mine. Every change in her body echoes through our connection. When her senses sharpen, the world brightens around her and I taste the difference. When her temperature spikes with the wolf's growing presence, fever bleeds into me until I burn alongside her. When the pain comes, I absorb what I can and hold her through what I cannot take.
She does not complain. She grits her teeth and rides each wave with the same stubborn determination she brought to everything else since arriving at my keep. Helena trained her well. Iris knows how to endure.
But this is not just endurance. This is becoming something new.
The first few days are the hardest. Her body fights the change even as it accepts the wolf, human biology struggling to accommodate something it was never built to contain. She runs fevers that would kill a normal human, sweating through the sheets while I press cool cloths to her forehead and murmur reassurances she probably cannot hear. She vomits everything she tries to eat until Signe prepares broths thin enough for her altered stomach to accept. She sleeps in fits and starts, waking with wild eyes and a racing heart, reaching for me before she remembers where she is.
I do not leave her side. Torben handles the pack business, the integration of Korren's surviving wolves, the thousand details that follow victory in war. I trust him to manage what I cannot, because nothing matters more than being here when Iris opens her eyes and searches for my face.
Finally, the fever breaks.
She wakes clear-eyed and ravenous, demanding real food with a sharpness that makes me laugh despite the exhaustion weighing on us both. I send for meat and bread and cheese, enough to feed three wolves, and watch her devour it with an appetite that would have horrified her human sensibilities a week ago. The wolf is asserting herself, rewriting Iris's instincts from the inside out. She will never look at a rare steak the same way again.
"I can hear the changing of the guards," she says between bites, her head tilted toward the window. "Three floors down and through stone walls. How do you stand it?"
"You learn to filter. The wolf knows what matters and what doesn't. She'll teach you."
Iris pauses with bread halfway to her mouth, her expression turning inward. "She's getting louder. The voice in my head. It used to be a whisper, but now it's..." She trails off, searching for words. "It's like having a second heartbeat. A second set of instincts layered over my own."
"That's normal. The wolf is part of you now, not a separate entity. You'll integrate eventually, learn to move as one instead of two minds sharing the same body."
"How long does that take?"
"Different for everyone." I reach across the space between us and cup her jaw, tilting her face toward mine. "Some converts find their balance within weeks. Others take months. However long it takes, I'll be here."
