I press a kiss against his shoulder blade. “No more thinking,” I whisper. “Just you and me.”
“Need you,” he confesses. “Lying next to me. Healing me. Like the night of the snakebite.”
“Always.”
But something catches at the edge of my thoughts. Faint. Gone before I can turn toward it.
I stiffen.
“Eliza?”
“Nothing,” I say, too quickly. It isn’t nothing.
Kael glances over his shoulder, studying me for a long moment. Like he’s listening the way Torin did. Not to my words. To what’s under them.
The sky above us is wide and empty. It shouldn’t feel like this. Open and still watched.
I look back once more at the ridge. The air shifts. Just slightly.
Then it stills.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
KAEL
One Week Later
The ride back to Raven’s Ridge feels different. Quieter. The world hasn’t settled. It may never. But something in me has.
Eliza leans into me, her warmth steady against my back. The bond between us isn’t fragile. It doesn’t fade.
“Mine,” I whisper, and a contented whimper escapes her lips.
The word settles in my bones without resistance now. I no longer fear or fight it. I accept it to the bottom of my soul.
By the time we reach the ridge, they’re already gathering.
Wildbloods.
More than I’ve seen in one place in years.
Men and women stepping out of the trees, out of cabins, out of the edges of the land like they’ve been waiting for something to call them forward.
Or someone.
They gather at the Grange, where the council usually meets. That’s where we ride, too.
I slide off Tempest, reaching up to help Eliza down. “You ready for this?” I ask.
“More ready than I was for the glowing guys,” she chuckles, an edge beneath the joke. “Besides, I know many of these folks… better than you, I imagine.”
She has a point.
Inside, I’ve never seen so many chairs and still folks stand, faces caught between curiosity and unease. They whisper as Eliza and I pass—skepticism, judgment, and profound interest lacing their words.
“First generation.”
