Something cracked in his chest—some wall he’d built so long ago he’d forgotten it existed. He stood frozen by the window, unable to move, unable to respond, unable to process what she was saying.
He had never thought of it that way. It was easier to see himself as a coward, as a male who had given up rather than fight for what was his. The shame was familiar, comfortable in its way. Reframing his choices as something noble was foreign and terrifying.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he managed.
“I know exactly what I’m saying.” Her voice was closer now, and he realized she had crossed the cabin towards him. “I know what it means to be trapped by expectations. To have everyone see you as one thing when you’re really something else entirely. I know what it costs to choose something different, even when everyone around you says you’re wrong.”
Her scent wrapped around him as she moved quietly to his side, and his beast stirred with desperate longing.
“Ember—”
“You’re not a coward, Rykan. You’re not a failure.” She stopped in front of him, close enough to touch but not quite touching. “You’re someone who made an impossible choice and lived with the consequences. That’s not weakness. That’s strength.”
Something changed in her silence—a shift he felt rather than heard. Then she reached for him, her small hands finding his chest in the darkness.
He caught her wrists, holding her still. “What are you doing?”
“I want to touch you.”
“Why?”
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice was soft and uncertain. “I don’t know. Maybe I want to comfort you. Maybe I need comfort myself. Maybe I just need to be close to you right now.”
His hands trembled on her wrists. Every instinct screamed at him to pull her closer, to bury his face in her hair and let her warmth chase away the cold that had lived in his chest for six long years. But another part of him—the part that had learned the hard way not to trust, not to hope, not to let anyone close enough to hurt him again—held back.
“You should go back to bed,” he said, but the words had no force behind them.
She didn’t move. “Should I?”
The question hung between them.
He should say yes. He should put distance between them before this went any further, protecting both of them from the inevitable pain of hoping for something that could never last.
Instead, his hands slid from her wrists to her arms, drawing her closer.
“No,” he heard himself say. “Stay.”
She melted against him, her head finding the space against his chest like it had been made for her. He wrapped his arms around her small form, feeling the warmth of her body seep into his bones, feeling something in his chest slowly, painfully begin to unclench.
They stood there in the darkness, holding each other, neither one speaking. The fire crackled behind them. The wind howled outside. And for the first time in six years, he didn’t feel alone.
CHAPTER 13
Ember woke to find herself still wrapped in Rykan’s arms. For a long moment, she didn’t move. Her cheek rested against the warm plane of his chest, rising and falling with his steady breathing. One of his hands curved around her hip, heavy and possessive even in sleep. The other had tangled in her hair at some point during the night, his fingers still loosely threaded through the strands.
She should have felt trapped, held so completely by someone so much larger and stronger than herself. Instead, she felt… safe. Protected in a way she’d never experienced before.
This is dangerous,she thought.This feeling of safety.
The fire had burned down to ash during the night, leaving the cabin cold enough that she could see her breath misting in the air. But she was warm, impossibly warm, cocooned in furs and wrapped around a body that radiated heat like a furnace. She didn’t want to move and break this fragile bubble of peace they’d somehow found in the darkness.
But her mind was already spinning, replaying everything he’d told her the night before.
His father. His stepmother. His brother. Lysara.
The betrayal that had driven him from his home and his people.
She thought about what it must have cost him to walk away. To turn his back on everything he’d been raised to be—Alpha’s son, future leader, rightful heir—and choose solitude instead. He called it weakness. She called it love.
