Solomon on my left and Lucian on the right. Mira asleep in my arms before we’d cleared the first ridge, her breathing evening out with the complete surrender of a body that had finally been given permission to stop.
The cabin appeared at sunset.
Small, weathered, tucked into the clearing where the creek bent south and the trees opened just enough to let the light through.
Mira stirred when I stopped walking. Her eyes opened, unfocused, and found the cabin through the haze of exhaustion.
“Oh,” she said.
The word carried everything. Recognition. Memory.
The weight of a place that had been our first home when we didn’t know it yet.
The location where a bookshop owner and her three alphas had stumbled into a bond that rewrote the rules of two worlds.
“We came back,” she said.
“We came home,” I corrected.
She smiled. Small. Devastated in the way that only good things could devastate you, the way a door opening could break your heart if you’d spent long enough believing it was locked.
Lucian opened the cabin door. Solomon stepped in first, because Solomon always stepped in first, scanning for threats in a building that held nothing but dust and memories and the faint smell of old books and honey.
I carried Mira over the threshold.
The four of us stood in the cabin as sunset poured through the windows and painted everything in amber. No hunters or lycans other than us.
Just a cabin and four people who’d walked through the worst of it and come out the other side carrying three heartbeats that hadn’t existed when this story started.
A new beginning.
75
— • —
Mira
The bookshop smelled of sawdust and paint with the faint ghost of old books that no amount of renovation could erase.
I ran my fingers along the shelves. Same arrangement I’d designed months ago, every section exactly where I’d placed it before it burned down.
Romance alcove in the back corner. Poetry by the window. The reading nook with its worn armchair that Solomon had rebuilt because I’d mentioned once, exactly once, that I missed it.
Lucian had hired a caretaker and never told me. Just quietly ensured that the building was restored and maintained while I was busy dismantling a paramilitary organization and growing three humans.
The man’s idea of romance was property management and honestly, in this economy? It worked.
The bell above the door still chimed when I walked in.
Some things survived fire and war and the complete restructuring of your worldview, and a brass bell on a hinge was apparently one of them.
I hadn’t named the shop yet.
Still couldn’t bring myself to commit those words to a sign. But the fact that I was thinking about it, turning names over in my head while I straightened spines and dusted shelves, told me I’d crossed a line I hadn’t noticed.
The woman who’d been too scared to put down roots was standing in her rebuilt bookshop with three claiming marks on her throat and a belly full of triplets, thinking about signage.
Growth. Terrifying, inconvenient growth.
