He presses a kiss to the top of my head. “Figured you needed to hear it anyway, pretty girl.”
“I’ve already decided,” Shade declares.
I blink, lifting my head off Viper’s shoulder. “You have?”
He doesn’t glance up from his tablet, fingers still moving across the screen in calm, efficient taps.
“Mmhmm. Ran the probability models,” Shade says casually. “Factored in emotional compatibility, physical bonding chemistry, shared trauma responses, and the statistical outcomes of Blaze murdering us all in our sleep.”
Blaze groans and throws his head back. “Oh, comeon. We all know I like to watch the light drain from my victims' eyes. Can’t do that if they’re sleeping.”
I swallow thickly.
“I’mkidding!”
Silence.
“Okay, fair. I’m not kidding. But I’m not going to murder my Pack. I love you guys.”
Shade hums. “I know, I made sure the model predicts your feelings. You’re a violent wildcard, but you’reourviolent wildcard.”
Blaze beams for half a second, arms folded smugly, until the rest of the sentence hits him.
“Wait.” His grin falters and then gasps dramatically, jabbing an accusatory finger at Shade. “Iknewit. You’ve been charting our feelings like we’re part of some fucking science experiment. AndI’mthe weird one?”
I nudge him with my shoulder, chuckling. “We’re all weird. You’re just the loudest… and the stabbiest.”
He slouches deeper into his seat with a theatrical pout. “Bet his little charts are color coded, too. Nerd.”
“They are,” Shade says without missing a beat, glancing at Blaze over his shoulder. “Also, I updated your risk category last night. You jumped twenty points after the hand-decapitation incident.”
Blaze jerks upright. “What!? No, Sparkles agreed that it was a necessary and sweet courtship gesture.”
“I did no such thing,” I murmur.
Viper snorts. “Didn’t know the scale even went that high.”
I cover my grin with my hand.
“You’re all assholes,” Blaze mutters.
“No argument there,” I say, still smiling. “But we know that you love us or we’d all be dead.”
He grumbles something unintelligible that sounds suspiciously like agreement.
I lean forward, trying to catch Shade’s expression. “Wait. You’ve really been… planning for this?”
He turns in his seat and looks at me over his shoulder with the faintest trace of a smile.
“Of course. I wanted to have all of the information for when you were ready. I just didn’t want to pressure you.”
My chest tightens.
There’s something in the simplicity of how he says it. A quiet confidence of someone who has already chosen me, and is waiting patiently for me to choose him back.
“I never thought I’d get mated based on a probability model,” I say, my voice low and a little shaky.
“The data didn’t make my choice, baby girl,” he says softly. “No formula shows how I feel about you. You’re an anomaly every model fails to predict, but you’re also the only variable that matters.” The truck settles into another stretch of quiet. An expectant exhale as we wait for the last, and possibly the most important, Pack member to make his choice.
