He looked away, over my shoulder at the caves beyond, as though looking for someone.
“You care for her,” he stated. I didn’t need to ask who he was talking about.
“I do.” I did. There was no point in arguing. The beautiful stranger had completely entranced me.
"How much?"
"She is kind," I said slowly. "Gentle, despite everything she has endured. She helps me with the healing work without complaint, even though she still tires easily. She plays with the children, learns our language, and she makes me laugh. She..." I paused, searching for the right words. "She fits here. With us. With the pack."
With me.
"She is human," Rivik said. His voice was still flat, but something sharp edged the words. "And they were travelling somewhere. She will not remain."
"Perhaps she will."
"Why would she?"
"Because she might choose to," I said quietly. "Because she might find something here worth staying for."
His eyes flashed, amber turning briefly to wolf-gold before he forced the shift back. The air between us grew thick with tension I didn't understand.
"The pack will not accept a human mate," he said, each word carefully measured.
“For a wolf maybe, but for me…” Surely they wouldn’t care? they wouldn’t want me taking a wolf shifter mate, that had been made clear to me when i reached adulthood, though i doubted Rivik knew about the conversation the elders had had with me. As an adult, I could leave the pack, find my own kind, or stay with the pack who had raised me but accept I would always be the lowest status, that I would never find a mate or have a family of my own. As a young bear who didn’t remember his own kind, it hadn’t been a hard choice to make. Rivik, and even Ryke, were my family, my brothers. They were my friends, and I would never give them up. I had chosen the pack. But now, now I’d met Ellie and everything was different.
"You are already an outsider, Daska. Taking a human as a mate would only—"
"She is my fated mate."
The silence that followed was absolute. Rivik went completely still. His face drained of color, then flushed, emotions flickering too fast for me to name.
"What?" His voice was barely above a whisper.
"I felt it the moment I saw her." The confession poured out of me now, unstoppable. "When I was treating her wound, carrying her, tending her. I feel it every moment I’m with her, and when I’m not. The bond… it was like coming home to a place I had never been." I met his eyes, needing him to understand. "She is mine, Rivik. The Mother sent her here for me."
He flinched. Actually flinched. I'd seen Rivik take a spear through the shoulder and not flinch.
"Rivik." I said his name carefully, the way I might speak to a wounded animal. "Brother."
"The pack—" he started, his voice rough.
"I know what you will say." I leaned forward, urgency making my words tumble faster. "That the pack will not accept her. That I am already an outsider. That taking a human mate will make things harder." I shook my head. "But they accepted me once, when your parents brought me here. They can accept her too. Fated mates are sacred, Rivik. Even wolves know this."
“And does she return your feelings?” he asked stiffly.
"She kissed me," I said softly.
The change in him was instantaneous. His head snapped toward me, eyes gone full wolf-gold now. His lips pulled back from teeth that had sharpened to fangs. A low, menacing growl rumbled from his chest. Rivik had never made that sound at me. Not once in all the years we had known each other. I had heard him growl at challengers, at threats, at wolves who overstepped. I had heard the low warning rumble he used to settle disputes before they became bloodshed. But this—this was different.
"Rivik—"
"Do not." His voice was barely human, rough and guttural. "Do not speak."
Rivik was losing control.
In all the years I had known him, years of hard hunts and harder winters, of watching him hold himself together through grief and pain and the slow, grinding weight of leadership—I had never seen this. Not when old Makris had screamed at him for the collapsed den. Not when the Greywash Pack had come to our borders with drawn weapons and bad intentions. Not even when his father had slipped away in the night and Rivik and Rykehad raced away into the night, following the darkness with their howls of sorrow.
I'd seen Rivik angry before. I'd seen him in battle, covered in blood and howling victory to the sky. I'd seen him face down challenges to his leadership with cold, calculated violence.
