Brenna is waiting at the cabin. Cameron beside her. Bags already packed because Brenna is Brenna, and she had everything ready before I walked into the lodge. Her eyes read my face the way they always do, searching for the damage underneath the composure.
“Well?” she says.
“Jonas is alpha. Edda voted for him. Rook’s staying as second.”
“You’re okay?”
I look at her. Beautiful eyes. Mate mark on her throat. The woman I loved and lost and found again, standing in front of me with her arms crossed, her chin up, and my son at her side. The truth between us settles… two people who chose each other over everything else and are done apologizing for it.
“I’m okay,” I say. And mean it.
We load the trucks. We head south.
We go home.
Chapter 35
Brenna
The Ozarks welcome us with rain. Not a storm. A slow, warm rain that comes off the hills and turns the dirt road to mud. It makes the whole valley smell like green and stone and the petrichor of Ravenclaw territory that I’d know blind and deaf and a thousand miles away. The scent hits me through the open truck window, and my wolf goes calm inside me.
The road winds through the valley. Past the old fence line, past the creek crossing where the water runs copper in the rain, past the oak grove where my mother used to take me to practice ward work when I was small, and the magic was new and terrifying. The trees are taller than I remember. Or maybe I’m smaller. Maybe grief and distance shrink you, and coming home is the thing that gives you back your real dimensions.
Willow is on the porch when we pull up. She’s not alone. Thirty wolves are with her, most of them standing in the rain because apparently the return of the matriarch and her newly matedalpha is an event that warrants getting wet for. They’re all here. Faces I know and some I don’t recognize, wolves who joined while I was “dead,” drawn by word of mouth or desperation or the gravity that Ravenclaw exerts on magic-blooded wolves who have nowhere else to go.
Greta has an umbrella. She’s the only one.
I get out of the truck. The rain hits my face, and I stand in it for a moment, eyes closed, feeling the power in the earth beneath my feet. The wards recognize me. I feel them adjust, expand, welcome me back into the environment. My magic reaches down into the earth, and the earth reaches back.
Merric comes around the truck. Cameron climbs out of the back, squinting at the rain, looking at the valley with faraway eyes. Not the assessment of a new territory, the way he looked at Frostbourne. Something softer. Something that remembers being five years old and running barefoot through this grass.
Sienna, Dane, and Briar emerge from the second vehicle, looking around at the ranch with fresh eyes—the repaired barn, the gardens heavy with moisture, the settlement in its river valley with the old-growth forest rising behind it like a wall.
Willow comes down the steps. She looks at me. At the red mate mark on my throat. At Merric standing at my side, his platinum hair dark with rain, his hand near my back without quite touching it. The restraint of a man who knows this moment belongs to my wolves and me and is making himself small enough to let it happen.
“You’re back,” she says.
“We’re back.”
“All of you?”
“All of us. Sienna, Dane, and Briar, too. They’re staying.”
Willow’s eyes sweep the new arrivals. Then she nods—once, firm—with the decisive economy of a woman who doesn’t waste gestures.
“Barn’s finished,” she says. “Dane’s going to be disappointed.”
“I’ll find something else,” Dane says from behind me. He’s already looking at the south fence like a workman who’s spotted structural flaws. Some things are wonderfully predictable.
The pack closes around us. Not ceremony. Warmth. Hands on shoulders, murmured greetings, the physical language of wolves welcoming their own. Arlen grips my arm with his gnarled hand and nods at Merric with something that might be approval.
“You bring trouble down on Ravenclaw, girl,” he says, the same words he said at the parley, “you make sure it’s the right kind.” He looks at Merric. “He’ll do.”
“High praise from Arlen,” Merric says.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
Greta takes Cameron by the elbow and steers him toward the kitchen. Cameron goes without protest, which tells me the time at Frostbourne has filed down some of his sharper edges. Or maybe he’s just hungry. With seventeen-year-olds, it’s hard to tell.
