“Still what, Aaron?”
“My Ember.” His eyes closed. “I have to sleep.”
Still his. She hadn’t ruined it all. The wolf mates had been right: Aaron forgave her. Her eyes burned. When she moved to get up, he held onto her hand. Slowly she untangled their fingers, loosened his until all hers were free. By then he was fully asleep.
She must talk to Quinn. Soon. Not about Poppy but about all of this. He might feel the same about her seeing his wolf form, though Nicole had said they didn’t all hold old shame anymore. Oh, she hoped not. Quinn had no story like Aaron’s. But shame would fit with his insistence that first day, that she be nowhere near during the full moon.
She cleaned the kitchen and poked her head into the living room when she’d finished. Aaron still slept, upright with his head tilted back. Maybe she should try moving him to a position less likely to mess up his neck, but she’d never pull it off without waking him. As she stood undecided, the back door opened, and he woke anyway. He was asleep, and then he wasn’t, no grogginess at all. He stood smoothly, frowning.
“Mal?”
Adrenaline shot through her. She turned slowly toward the door, and some part of her brain expected to see not the man but the giant golden wolf.
He stood in the doorway. “Ember.”
The gravel in his voice seemed magnified by the hostility seeping from him—his taut shoulders, his cold eyes. He entered the house, shut the door behind him.
Aaron’s voice came over her shoulder. “We should talk.”
“What I came for,” Malachi said.
The night of the bear, she had finally glimpsed Malachi as a layered person. Now she again saw only the alpha: a figure of authority she had angered. “Malachi, I—I have to apologize to you.”
A snarl ripped from his chest. She jumped out of reflex but stood her ground. Nothing she said would be adequate, yet deep inside came an urgency to say it. That she spoke the words, however paltry they sounded in her ears… It mattered. It mattered for her and Aaron, whatever their future held or didn’t hold. It mattered for all the pack though they weren’t even here. And it mattered to Malachi. He would likely growl in her face, but she had to speak now, to him. The urgency within her knew somehow. She braced herself for the response of the wolf inside him—the seventeen percent that made him more powerful, more terrifying, a leader of men including her baby Quinn who was no longer a baby.
“I’ve grievously wronged you,” she said quietly. She shivered under his gaze, but she didn’t look away from it. “I don’t even know how grievously.”
A low growl, nearly too low for her ears to pick up, came from the alpha. It continued. It didn’t break.
Ember lowered her voice further, but she finished the words that throbbed to be spoken. “And I’ve wronged your pack, each of them including my nephew. I’ve wronged Aaron beyond what I knew I could do to him.” She drew a long breath, courage for the end, and bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Malachi.”
The growl faded to silence. The amber eyes remained on her, cold and feral. Then he looked past her again, turned, and left the house.
Aaron stepped around her, his hand brushing her shoulder. “I might be a while.”
He followed the alpha outside, closing the door Malachi had left open. At this rate her poor wolf would never get to sleep.
Some reflex in Malachi always chose to stand at the steepest dip of the hill on which Aaron’s cabin was built. He stood there now, his gaze on the tree line past the back yard. He didn’t move as Aaron came to stand beside him.
Deep quiet settled over them. He knew what Mal would say, whenever he decided to say it. He was pretty sure he’d never heard words more painful than the ones coming.
“She saw,” Malachi said at last.
No way to deny the fact.
“We can’t remain here.”
Not the words he’d braced for. Not at all. Aaron’s heart kicked against his ribs. “What’re you saying?”
“Pack tradition. When shame is brought to a location, you leave the shame behind.”
“That’s—that’s tradition? What, like the wolf who dies of unrequited love?”
Malachi met his eyes at last, amber turned to ice. “Tradition kept by wolf packs for a thousand years, and I can’t—” His teeth bared but not in aggression. The freezing rage in his eyes melted to pain. “I can’t change it.”
“So…what, we sell the property? You want every wolf here to give up his land, his home, and start somewhere fresh?”
“In the old days, it wasn’t even sold. It was abandoned. Overnight in many cases.”
