I feel him. His exhaustion. His pain. His relief so profound and so long held back that experiencing it on my end of the bond nearly steals my breath. And underneath all of that, I feel his love, steady and unchanged and as much a fact as gravity. The love of the boy who held on to a bent, gold ring in a dark prison cell because he needed one thing that was his.
Kain makes a sound beneath me. I feel the bond complete, the sacred click of what was always meant to be finally becoming so. And I feel his wolf surge in response to it, the way a sleeping beast wakes when it finally has reason to. Our mate bond is a wellspring, and it floods him with everything it has.
I sit back and watch. His shoulder wound starts to close.
Slowly. Imperfectly. But the bleeding around the blade is stemming, too, as the tissue begins to fight back. His breathing still sounds wrong, but less so. His animal is alert and working, throwing everything it has at the silver and the wolfsbane, holding the line. Kain and his wolf have something to fight for now, something that is sealed and permanent and cannot be taken away.
“Anne,” Kain says. His voice is wrecked.
“Don’t talk,” I say. My own voice is steadier than before. “Save your strength.”
“I have to—”
“Kain.” I take his hand in both of mine. “I know. I know everything you want to say. You can say it when you’re not bleeding on the ground, okay?”
The healers arrive seconds later at a dead run, and I am forced to step back and let them work. They put Kain on astretcher and take off running again. I see that Violet is in a similar situation, with Darius hovering over the people carrying her.
Standing now, I wrap my arms around myself and feel that my own body is beginning to heal. Ethan appears beside me and puts a coat around my shoulders to cover my nakedness.
“You fought like hell today.”
I look up at him. Suddenly, all the adrenaline leaves my body, and the reality of what I went through finally hits me. My legs go weak, but Ethan catches me by the elbow.
“Let’s get you to the medical center, too.”
I nod, and I feel the tightness in my chest start to loosen.
We made it.
We’re all still here.
Chapter Thirty
Kain
I open my eyes to a white ceiling and fluorescent lights.
I’m not in pain anymore.
I can still feel where the wound was—a deep ache centered in my chest that will take days to fade fully—but the acute sting is gone. The blade is gone. I can breathe without that wet, dragging resistance. I lie still for several seconds just to confirm this, taking one slow breath, then another, and I feel my lungs fill properly both times.
I am alive.
It comes back in pieces. Rushing to the Alpha’s mansion. Rick’s men going down around us. Rick himself, his voice, and the sting of the blade in my chest just as my jaws came down on his head.
Ten years of my life ended out there on the grass. The Covenant’s hold on me, the compound, the threat that kept me obedient across missions I don’t want to count—gone. All of it, gone.
Rick is dead.
I let that sit for a moment. I have thought about this—the end of him, the end of all of it—in the abstract for years, in the way you think about something you can’t afford to believe in too much in case it never comes.
But it has come, and I don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like setting down a weight I carried for too long.
It’s over. I exhale in relief.
Gradually, I notice a presence at the edge of my awareness that was never there before. Quiet and warm. I recognize it the way you recognize a voice you’ve known your whole life, even when it’s speaking from another room. It is not me, and it is not my wolf, but it is linked to us in a way that is new and permanent and right.
Anne.
