She knows this. The relief of it is physical, through her whole body and the sweep of her tail and the lifting of her muzzle into the night air. She is not grieving anything. She is not bracing for pain. She is simply here, in the forest, on a cool night, with the moon up and her mate three feet away, and she is entirely happy.
I forgot what it feels like.
Kain shifts beside me. His wolf is the same black that I remember—enormous and scarred now in ways the younger version wasn’t, the marks of everything he survived written into this form, too—but carrying himself with the ease of an animal that has come home. He turns to look at me, and his eyes are bright in the moonlight.
He bumps his head against mine.
It is such a simple thing. The kind of contact that needs no translation—just warmth and presence and I’m here and so are you. My wolf leans into it immediately, her head pressing back against his, and I feel a release in her chest that I didn’t know she needed.
Kain takes off into the trees, and I follow without thinking.
We run the way we used to when we were young and the forest was ours and the future belonged to us: full out, no holding back, the trees blurring past, the ground flying under our paws, and the cold night air rushing over us. He is faster than me and always was, but he doesn’t leave me behind. He runs just fast enough that I have to work for it, just far enough ahead that catching up is possible, glancing back over his shoulder with those bright eyes every few seconds to make sure I’m there.
I am there. I am absolutely, completely there.
We bank through a stand of birch trees and come to a stop in a smaller clearing, moonlit and still. My shoulder hits his flank, and we go sideways together into the long grass, a tangle of paws and tails. The sound that comes out of me is not a howl or a growl but much more embarrassing: a kind of playful yip, the sound of an animal that is simply and thoroughly delighted.
Kain rolls upright and shakes himself, looking at me with an expression that manages to convey, even in wolf form, that he finds me entirely endearing.
I shake myself, too. Very dignified.
He drops to his elbows, the classic invitation to play, and I accept it immediately. We chase each other through the clearing like we are not grown adults who work office jobs and have been through actual warfare in the last month, and I do not care even slightly. My wolf does not care, either. She is running, and her mate is running beside her, and the moon is up, and it is enough. It is so much more than enough.
At some point, we end up lying in the grass side by side, breathing hard, flanks touching. He is warm against me, and his breaths slow and even out alongside mine. Through the bond, I can feel his contentment matching my own—the same as I felt over dinner, except larger out here, the forest and the moonlight and the run having made room for more of it.
My wolf puts her head on his shoulder, and he lets her.
We shift back at the tree line, human again in the moonlight, and dress in the clothes we left folded on the hood of the car. Kain’s hair is a mess, and I reach up to fix it without thinking. He lets me do that, too, standing patiently with his hands in his pockets while I try to arrange it properly with my fingers.
“It’s not going to lie flat,” I inform him.
“I know.”
“You have impossible hair.”
“I’ve been told.”
I give up with a giggle. He catches my hand as I lower it and presses his lips to my knuckles —to the bent ring, specifically, a deliberate gesture—looking at me over the top of my hand.
“Good?” he asks.
I think about the restaurant and the candlelight and his thumb tracing the band around my finger. I think about the way he ran just fast enough ahead of me through the trees. I think about my wolf’s head on his shoulder in the moonlit grass, and the grief I carried for ten years simply not being there anymore.
“Really good,” I say.
He gives me a smile. The real one, the one that reaches his eyes and transforms his whole face, the one that looks like the boy I fell in love with and also like the man he became. And also like something new that belongs only to me now.
I go up on my toes and kiss him.
He kisses me back, his free hand coming up to my face, unhurried, the forest quiet around us and the moon overheadand the ceremony a week away and all the time in the world stretching out ahead of us.
Epilogue
Anne
Violet will not stop adjusting my veil. Sienna, seated on the bed behind us with a glass of champagne, has been watching us with great amusement for the last ten minutes and doing absolutely nothing to help.
“It’s fine,” I tell Violet.
