Page 107 of Leading the Pack

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re home.” She pauses. “Even if you snore.”

“I don’t snore.”

“Merric does. These walls are thin.” She steps away from the railing. “Greta was right about the south cabin.”

She goes inside. The screen door closes behind her.

I stand on the porch and watch the mist settle over the valley. Ravenclaw territory. The land that raised me. The land I left and came back to and will defend until there’s nothing left to defend it with.

The screen door opens again. Merric steps out. He stands behind me, wraps his arms around my waist, and rests his chin on the top of my head. I lean back against him. His chest is warm through his shirt, and I feel the steadiness behind it—calm, settled, the sense of two people who found each other twice and aren’t letting go.

“Willow’s going after the missing families,” I say.

“I heard.”

“She’s young. And stubborn. And she has no idea what she’s walking into.”

“She’s you. Twenty years ago.”

“That’s what worries me.”

He laughs. Low. I feel it in his chest against my back.

We stand together on the porch while the last light fades. The valley goes dark. The ranch lights come on one by one—the lodge, the barn, the cabins. The homes of thirty wolves who’ve survived against all odds and are still here, still standing, still Ravenclaw. And now, mixed among them, a handful of Frostbourne wolves who chose to follow their alpha south and are learning that home isn’t a place you’re born. It’s a place you choose.

“Merric.”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you. For coming here. For bringing Cameron home. For staying.”

“You asked me if I’d change things, if I could go back. This is me going back. This is the choice I should have made the first time.”

I turn in his arms. Face him. The mark on his throat is still visible in the dark, matching mine. His eyes are steady. His hands are warm on my back. And through it all, the mate bond connects us. Solid. Something built to last.

“I love you,” I say. Because I haven’t said it. Through all the fighting and the running and the sex and the politics and the terror, I haven’t said the words, and they deserve to exist in the air between us. Deserve to be spoken on this porch, in this valley, on this land. “I loved you when I met you. I loved you when you broke my heart. I loved you every year between then and now, even when I called it hatred. And I love you now.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. His hands come up to frame my face. He looks at me the way he looked at me in the bunkhouse, in the bed, in the clearing where he held our son and me and didn’t let go.

“I know,” he says. “I’ve always known.”

He kisses me. Slow. Unhurried. A kiss that isn’t going anywhere because it doesn’t have to. We have time now. Not borrowed time or stolen time or the desperate minutes between crises. Real time. The kind you build a life in.

The rain starts again. Soft. Warm. We stand on the porch and kiss in it, and neither of us moves to go inside, because the rain on our skin and the earth beneath our feet and the bond between our hearts is enough.

It’s more than enough. And it always will be.

But even as I bask in the warmth of Merric’s arms, something tugs at the back of my mind. I spent enough time alone out there to know that our world is not kind to magic-bloods. With Bern’s exposure on the horizon, who knows what he’ll be capable of, or how it will affect the families we’re looking for.

Willow is as strong and stubborn as I am; maybe more. But she’s walking into something that none of us fully understands yet. And I’m afraid that by the time we do, she’ll already be in too deep to pull her back.