"Cassidy Ellis," I say, and the clearing holds still. "Our pack Luna, Queen of Blackmoore. The sigil marks the title. Thetitle belongs to the woman." I look at her directly. "Both are permanent."
The Luna sigil ceremony is Brynn's domain—an old working, pack magic older than the council structure itself, the kind that takes the mark and binds it to the recipient's skin.
Brynn pulls one of her dress sleeves down, exposing more of her back, and performs it with her usual economy, three passes of her thumb against Cassidy's left shoulder blade, the sigil rising in the skin like something that was always there and has only now been revealed. A silver crescent moon with an intricate vine and leaf design, a sigil used for countless generations at Blackmoore.
Cassidy holds very still through it, and when it's done she turns her head and probes her shoulder with the expression of a scientist observing a phenomenon she can't fully classify.
"How does it feel?" I ask.
"Warm," she says. "Like it's been there a while. It feels like it belongs.”
I slide the sleeve of her dress up her arm and back into place.
The feast starts before the formal close of the session, because the pack is already moving toward the bonfire and the tables before Brynn finishes the final invocation, and she allows it.
The fire throws light and heat across the clearing, and the smell of woodsmoke and roasted meat pulls the remaining tension out of the air. An outside speaker system pumps upbeat music through the clearing.
I watch my pack eat and talk and exist without the weight of imminent threat pressing down on them, and feel something in my chest that has been clenched since before the Blood Moon finally, carefully release.
After Cassidy eats, I take her hand and pull her from the young wolves she’s chatting with.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Stealing you into the night.” I wink and tuck her hand into the crook of my arm.
“We’re running away from our own party?” she asks, quirking an eyebrow.
“For a little while.”
I guide her to the ridge overlooking the town, where the town lights brighten the valley from our overlook.
Cassidy hovers near the drop of the ridge and looks down.
“It’s strange to think you’ve always lived so close to them, but so separate,” she says.
“It’s how we protect ourselves,” I say.
“Not this time. Isolation and separation were almost your undoing. You need to come into the present and learn how to coexist,” she explains.
"Coexist," I repeat.
"We're behind. The world has been moving while the pack stood still."
"Gideon preferred it that way," I say. "Isolation was part of the control structure."
"I know." She's quiet for a moment. "That's what makes it fixable.
I look at the side of her face in the moonlight—the braid, the set of her jaw, the Luna sigil's faint warmth visible even through the fabric of her dress—and feel the particular clarity that comes when you understand exactly what you have.
"You've been thinking about this for a while," I say.
"Since the archive room," she says. "When I understood what Gideon was actually protecting by keeping the pack isolated." She turns toward me.
I reach out and take her face in my hands, and she lets me, and I kiss her— not the urgency of before a battle or the desperation of uncertain outcomes, just slowly, the way thismoment allows. She makes a soft sound against my mouth, and her hands find the front of my shirt, and the wolf surfaces in my chest with a warmth that has nothing of aggression in it—just recognition, just want, just the particular pull of a bond that has been earned.
I reach for the zipper at the back of her dress.
Her head tips forward slightly, giving me her neck, and I press my mouth to the line of her shoulder as the zipper gives and the fabric loosens. I draw her sleeves down her arms slowly, kissing the skin as it's revealed— the curve of her shoulder, her neck, her upper arm—until the dress holds only at her hips. I turn her so her back is facing me and I cup her breasts in my palms, my thumbs tracing the warmth of her skin as my mouth returns to her neck in open, warm kisses.
