He looks at the bodies.
He looks at me.
“Sure,” he grumbles.
And something in me, something that has been watching wolves choose me for centuries without ever quite understanding why, suddenly, finally, clicks.
Varro at the edge of the fire. ‘You are wasting yourself.’
Sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, each one steady and purposeful and pack-minded, showing me the same thing in a hundred different ways across a thousand different years.
This is what you build.
This is what lasts.
I look at Lucien, this last wolf, this descendant of the first one, bleeding quietly and waiting to see what I do next, and I think of everything Varro’s line has been trying to show me.
Not what to burn.
What to keep.
I think of Nyx in the doorway. ‘I hope you find it before the looking hollows you out.’
I think of the thing I couldn’t name when she asked me what I was looking for.
Maybe this.
Maybe it was alwaysthis.
“Come with me,” I say.
It is not a command.
It surprises us both.
He considers it for exactly three seconds, those gold-ringed eyes tracking the room, the bodies, my face, and then he nods.
That is how it begins.
Not with a proclamation, not with ceremony, not with blood sworn on ancient stone while the Coven watches from the dark.
A vampire and a wolf are standing in a room full of bodies, and a decision is made between two beings who are finally ready to build something worth staying for.
Varro showed me what a pack could be.
Lucien helps me build one.
And for the first time since a woman with furious eyes smiled at me like a warning I didn’t read—I feel something other than empty.
I feel like I’m going somewhere.
Somewhere Eternal.
Chapter Two
CRAVE
Another Century Later
