We climb into bed without bothering to undress. Exhaustion drags at every muscle in my body, and Caelan curls against my side with her head on my chest. Her breathing slows within minutes. Sleep claims her fast.
I stay awake a little longer, staring at the ceiling and thinking about everything that’s happened. The battle. The defectors. Jonas. The traitor who turned out to be Caelan’s own blood.
Mordaunt is still out there. Bastian is still breathing. The war isn’t over.
But for the first time in sixteen years, I have something worth fighting for. A mate who chose me despite everything. A brother who might someday forgive me. A pack that’s willing to give me a chance.
That’s more than I ever dared to hope for.
Epilogue - Caelan
One year ago, I didn’t know this room existed.
Now I stand in the doorway of the Llewelyn-Grayhide Cultural Center and watch my mate teach a combat class to warriors from three different packs. Patrick moves through the group with the confidence of someone who has finally found his place. His voice carries across the training floor as he corrects a young Ambersky wolf’s stance, and the wolf adjusts without argument. Six months ago, that same wolf would have bristled at taking orders from a former Thornridge fighter. Now he just nods and tries again.
Things change. People change. I’m living proof of that.
The training methods Patrick brought from Thornridge have been adapted to serve the alliance instead of threatening it. He stripped away the brutality and kept the efficiency, and the result is a fighting force that moves like a single organism. Wolves from packs that spent decades as enemies now train side by side, learning to trust each other with their lives. I remember the first session Patrick led, how the wolves circled each other with hackles raised and teeth bared. Oren had to intervene twice to prevent actual bloodshed. Now those same wolves spar together like they’ve been packmates their whole lives.
Jonas is among them.
Patrick’s brother has filled out over the past year. He’s broader through the shoulders, with a steadiness in his movements that wasn’t there when he first arrived in Grayhide territory. Reeyan took him on as a student, and Jonas threw himself into his studies like he was desperate to believe in something. Pack history. Conflict prevention. The diplomatic strategies that keep wars from starting in the first place. Hespends hours in the archives every day, poring over texts that most wolves would find unbearably dull. But Jonas devours them like they hold the answers to questions he’s been asking his whole life.
He’s good at it. Better than anyone expected. Reeyan says Jonas has a natural talent for pattern recognition, for seeing the threads that connect past conflicts to present tensions. The skills that Thornridge honed for destruction, Jonas is learning to use for prevention.
He spots me in the doorway and raises his hand in a wave. I wave back, and a small smile tugs at his mouth before he returns his attention to the training exercise. We’re not close. We may never be. The shadow of what his pack did to mine still lingers between us, and some wounds take longer to heal than others. But we’ve found a way to coexist. We share meals sometimes. We talk about Patrick, about the weather, about nothing important. It’s more than I hoped for in those first terrible weeks after the battle.
“You’re staring.”
I turn to find my sister leaning against the wall beside me. Sera looks better than she has in months. The shadows under her eyes have faded, and there’s color in her cheeks again. Reeyan has been good for her. They’ve been good for each other. I remember how worried I was when she first broke the curse, when the weight of saving our entire pack nearly crushed her. But she found her footing. She found her purpose. And she found a mate who supports her through all of it.
“You have a dopey look on your face,” she teases.
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do,” Sera grins at me. “It’s the same look you get every time Patrick walks into a room. Like you can’t quite believe he’s real.”
I want to argue with her, but she’s not wrong. Sometimes I still catch myself watching Patrick and wondering how I got here. How the stranger I met in a bar became the husband I was forced to marry became the mate I chose to keep. The path from there to here was never straight, and most of it hurt like hell. But I wouldn’t change any of it. Not the fear. Not the fury. Not the long nights when I couldn’t decide if I wanted to kiss him or kill him. All of it led me here, to this moment, to this life.
“I’m not apologizing for being happy,” I tell Sera.
“I’m not asking you to.” She bumps her shoulder against mine. “I’m just saying you look ridiculous. In a good way.”
Movement across the training floor catches my attention. Patrick has stepped back to let the wolves run through the exercise on their own, and he’s looking at me. His amber eyes find mine across the crowded room, and a smile spreads across his face. His hard features go soft and open into something warm and unguarded that belongs only to me.
My heart does a little flip in my chest. A year of marriage, and he still makes me feel like a lovesick teenager. I used to think that feeling would fade. That the novelty would wear off and we’d settle into something comfortable but ordinary. Instead, it just keeps growing. Every day, I discover something new to love about him. The way he sings off-key while he cooks. The way he checks on Jonas, even when he pretends not to care. The way he holds me at night like I’m the most precious thing in his world.
“See?” Sera whispers. “Dopey.”
“Shut up.”
She laughs and starts walking away. “I have to go. Reeyan wants to show me something in the archives. Apparently, he found a reference to the curse in some old Llewelyn text that nobody’s looked at in centuries.”
“The curse is broken. Why does it matter?”
“Because understanding how it started might help us prevent something similar from happening again.” Sera shrugs. “Or so Reeyan says. Honestly, I think he just likes having an excuse to dig through dusty old books. The man gets excited about water damage patterns on three-hundred-year-old paper.”
“And you love him anyway.”
