“They’ll see exactly what Hatchett saw at the parley. Exactly what Bern saw in the kitchen. A woman who’s stronger than anything they’ve been aware of before.”
“Or they’ll see a threat.”
“Some will. We’ll handle it.”
“I’m glad you’re so confident.”
“I’m always this confident.” He reaches for my wrist, pulls me toward him, and lowers his mouth to mine. I’m breathless and laughing when he’s done kissing sense into me. But I don’t neglect my task.
The afternoon dissolves into packing and goodbyes. The Ravenclaw wolves gather in the yard, some I haven’t spoken to properly since my return, most I fought to protect from a distance. They look at me with the mate mark on my throat, and I see the range of reactions: pride, concern, curiosity, a few hard scowls from the older wolves who remember the first time a Frostbourne alpha broke their matriarch’s heart.
Arlen grips my hand. “You bring trouble down on Frostbourne, girl, you make sure it’s the right kind.”
“What’s the right kind?”
“The kind that changes things.”
Willow walks us to the vehicles. She hugs Cameron—fierce, brief—and then turns to me.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she says.
“That leaves a fairly wide range.”
“Exactly.” She grips my arms. Her eyes are bright. “Come back safe. All three of you.”
“We will.”
She turns to Merric. Extends her hand. He takes it.
“You break her heart again,” Willow says, “and I’ll come north with every wolf I’ve got.”
“Understood.”
“She means it,” Cameron says from the backseat of the truck.
“I know she does,” Merric says.
We pull out of the ranch at four in the afternoon. Merric drives. I sit shotgun. Cameron is in the back with his headphones on, which is either a teenager’s coping mechanism or a deliberate act of giving his parents privacy. With Cameron, it’s probably both.
The Ozark hills roll past. Green, ancient, familiar. My land. My home. I watch it in the side mirror as it shrinks, and the tug in my chest is fierce.
“We’ll come back,” Merric says, reading me.
“I know.”
“This isn’t goodbye.”
“I know that too.”
But it feels like something. A threshold. The ranch behind us, Frostbourne ahead. The girl who loved a boy in a field and the woman who fights her own wars, driving toward the place where it all went wrong, hoping it can become the place where it starts to go right.
Merric reaches across the console and takes my hand. I let him.
The road stretches north. My wolf is alert. Half terror, half anticipation, entirely alive.
I tighten my grip on his hand and watch the road unwind.
Chapter 24
