He reaches across the table and turns my hand over, his thumb tracing the bent, gold ring on my finger. “How long have you been wearing this?”
“Since the morning you gave it to me.” I look down at it. “I haven’t taken it off.”
He is quiet for a moment, his thumb still moving along the band. “I want to get you a proper one. Before the ceremony.”
“This is proper,” I say.
“Anne.”
“I mean it. I don’t want a different one.” I turn my hand over and lace my fingers through his. “This is the one you kept for ten years. I don’t want anything else.”
He looks at me for a long time. His expression does the thing it does when he has been disarmed and is trying not to show how completely.
“All right,” he says finally. “This one.”
We talk through dinner the way we have started to talk—easily, about everything and nothing, filling in the years between us piece by piece. He tells me things I didn’t know, such as that he spent his first year in captivity counting the days by scratching marks into the underside of a cot frame. That he taught himself to sleep lightly, to wake at the smallest sound, and that this is a habit he is now slowly and deliberately trying to undo. That the thing he missed most, in the years when he couldn’t remember details clearly, was the smell of the woods at the edge of Moonvale in autumn.
I tell him things, too. That I’ve always kept a particular blend of coffee in my apartment because we used to drink it together as teenagers, and I couldn’t make myself stop buying it. That Ihad a nightmare about losing him so frequently in the first years that I learned to recognize it mid-dream and pull myself out. That Sienna once told me the healthiest thing I could do was let go, and I smiled and nodded and went home and talked to his photograph for twenty minutes.
He listens to all of it. He doesn’t flinch from any of it.
“We wasted so much time,” I say. Not bitterly, just as a fact.
“No,” he says. “We survived. That’s different.”
I look at him through the candlelight. “The ceremony is next week,” I say.
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
He squeezes my hand. “I’ve been ready for ten years.”
After dinner, we drive past the edge of the pack settlement to the tree line, where the woods begin in earnest—old growth, dense, the kind of forest that goes quiet when you walk into it, in the particular way of a place that has been undisturbed for a very long time. The moon is up and nearly full, flooding the clearing at the tree line with silver light.
Kain parks, and we sit in the car for a moment, looking at the forest.
“When did you last run?” he asks.
“Before you came back,” I reply honestly. “A long time before that, actually.”
He looks at me, lines creasing his forehead.
“It was too much,” I say simply. “My wolf remembered you. The grief was worse in my wolf form, without the human part of me managing it. So, I stopped shifting.”
He is quiet for a moment. I feel his reaction move through the bond—it’s not pity, nothing as simple as that. It’s more like sorrow on my behalf, and underneath it, there’s a fierce and uncomplicated gladness because that particular reason no longer applies.
“Come on, then,” he says softly.
We shift at the tree line.
The change moves through me in a wave, and when I come down onto four legs, the entire forest opens up—sound layered on sound, a hundred scents where there was one, the ground solid and detailed beneath my paws in a way that human feet never quite feel. The night air is cold and clean and smells of pine resin, wet earth, and the deep-forest aroma that has no human name.
My wolf stretches.
Not in a hurry. Not checking for threats. Just the long, deliberate extension of a body that has been folded up for too long. Her spine arches, her chest drops low, and her legs reach out behind her in an enormous, luxurious stretch that seems to come from somewhere deep and essential.
Yes, I shifted for the fight. She remembers. But that was about survival—four legs and teeth and desperation, nothing joyful about it. This is different. This is the first time in years I have shifted just to run.
