Finn makes another sound. I'm fairly sure it's his laugh disguised as something else.
I pull the blankets up.
My nest is around me—the shirts I've gathered without quite deciding to gather them, one from each of them, the layered scent of my pack wrapping around me in the dark. Juniper and coffee and burnt wood and ash. Something warm that's just Finn, just ink and rain without any alpha marker, which is its own kind of scent and its own kind of comfort.
All of them. Here. Mine.
Tomorrow I'll go see Ragon and say what needs saying.
But tonight, surrounded by my pack, I drift off in my carefully built nest. Malcolm's rumbling purr vibrates through the mattress on my left while Rhys's halting one starts and stops on my right. Below, Finn's measured breaths rise from his blanket pile, and beside me, Alex radiates a steady, grounding heat against my side.
Safe.
Chosen.
Home.
Chapter 34
Vee
The registry building looks exactly the same as it always has.
That's the thing about institutional spaces. They don't register what happens inside them. The same fluorescent lights, the same grey carpet, the same faint chemical smell underneath everything else. These rooms have seen me at every stage. A child being evaluated, a teenager being assessed, a young woman being placed and returned. But they never change. The walls absorb our stories and forget them just as quickly, like water through a sieve. The building remains, indifferent, while we are the ones processed and moved along.
Chase walks beside me. He doesn't say much. He's good at reading what a moment needs.
"You okay?" he asks at the door.
"Yes," I say.
And I am. That's the thing I keep noticing. I'm walking into this building to face the man who spent five years treating my love like a contingency plan, and I'm okay. I’m content in myself in a way I haven't been in years.
The pack is in the parking lot.
I thought about that on the drive over. The five of them out there waiting, which means five different versions of reluctant acceptance—Malcolm's jaw tight, Finn's hands in his pockets, Alex's careful stillness, Rhys who couldn't come anywhere near the building because Ragon is inside it and Rhys's relationshipwith Ragon is one of contained potential violence, which Chase was very clear about.
Rhys had looked at me for a long time before I got out of the car.
"I'll be right back," I said.
He'd reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. Then he'd nodded and let me go.
I'm carrying all of them in here with me. That's the difference between this version of me and every previous version of me who walked through a registry door. I'm not alone anymore.
The room Chase leads me to is small. Not the hearing room. It’s something more private. A mediation space with a round table, four chairs and a window that looks out at a courtyard. Neutral. Designed for difficult conversations.
Ragon is already there.
He stands when I come in.
He looks… I take him in honestly, the way I've learned to look at things instead of filtering them through what I want to see or what I'm afraid to see. He looks older. Not by years but by something else. Like a weight has dropped into him that wasn't there before. His hair is down, no bun. It's longer than I remember, and his eyes when they find mine are the eyes of a man who has been sitting with something enormous for weeks and hasn't found a way to set it down yet.
"Vee," he says.
"Ragon."
Chase takes a chair at the edge of the room. Present but peripheral. This is mine.
