Brenna’s composure cracks. Just a fraction. Mine does too.
“There’s a process,” I say. “I can’t just leave. The pack needs to vote. It needs to be done right. Publicly, formally, so there’s no question about the transition.”
“How long?” Cameron asks.
“Tomorrow. I’ll call the pack together tomorrow.”
Cameron nods. Goes back to his toast. But I catch it: the change in his shoulders. The tension that drops away, the way it began to drop when I sat next to him in the truck on the road south. A boy who’s just been told he’s going home, and is trying very hard not to show how much it means.
Brenna hasn’t moved. She’s standing at the counter with her coffee cooling beside her and her eyes on mine. There’s something in that look. Not relief. Not gratitude. Something quieter.
Trust.
The trust of a woman who asked a man to choose her once and watched him choose something else. Now she’s standing in a kitchen eighteen years later, watching him choose her, and is letting herself believe it.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” She picks up her coffee. Takes a sip. “But if you’re stepping down as alpha tomorrow, you should probably tell Rook before he hears it from Sienna.”
“How do you know Sienna—?”
“Bond.” She winks. “I felt the whole conversation. You were about thirty feet outside my range for the first ten minutes, and then you walked closer, and I got the gist of it.”
She takes another sip. Watches me over the rim, lips curling into a smile.
“Sienna’s right, by the way,” Brenna says. “This is the right choice. Don’t let me talk you out of it.”
“You just tried to talk me out of it.”
“I had to make sure you’d push back. If you’d folded, I’d have known you weren’t sure.” She sets the coffee down again. “You didn’t fold.”
“No.”
“Good.”
She walks past me. Squeezes my hand as she goes; brief, firm, the kind of touch that carries a whole sentence in the pressure of her fingers. Then she’s heading for the bedroom, already planning, already being Brenna.
Cameron catches my eye across the table. “Thanks,” he says. “For choosing us.”
My throat tightens. “Always should have.”
He nods.
I reach under my shirt. The leather cord is warm from my skin… eighteen years of warmth, eighteen years of carrying a thin gold band against my chest because letting it go meant letting her go. I pull it over my head. The ring slides free and sits in my palm, light as nothing.
“Here.” I set it on the table beside his plate. “This was your mother’s. I’ve been holding it for her. But I think it belongs to you now.”
Cameron looks at the ring. Doesn’t touch it right away. He studies it the way he studies everything: carefully, completely,reading the history in a circle of metal that’s been worn smooth by years of being held.
“You wore this the whole time?” he says.
“The whole time.”
He picks it up. Turns it once between his fingers. Then he puts it in his pocket. Not on the cord, not around his neck. In his pocket, where it sits against his thigh, close and private and his.
“Okay,” he says. And goes back to his toast.
