But this place has its hooks in me. You can’t choose the things you love. You can’t make your heart obey when it refuses to hate the place that made you.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
I let the drums work their way inside me. The drums and the fire and the occasional howls of celebration, and I’m too much of a wolf not to admit that this gets to me. I might not like pack politics or my family’s dynamics, and I’ve grown to hate the weight of the expectations on me, but there’s something about waiting for the full moon to hit just right.
It makes me remember exactly who I am. It lets mefeelthe power in me. The power the moon gave me, like new blood inside me. A different, better homecoming.
I haven’t run beneath a full moon in a long time.
I can feel the urge inside me the way I always do. It’s a drumbeat all its own. It feels the way Ty makes me feel—and it’s all wrapped up together. Longing for the change, the lightning burst into fur. Desperate to run as hard and as fast as I can, barreling through these woods and deeper into the mountains, free and whole and covered in moonlight.
The longing for him, too. To meet him in our wolf forms on a night like this and let that magic I know we have between us explode, taking us to a place I’m not sure I can really imagine.
I know that it will change us, that claiming. What I don’t know is how.
Much as I like to pretend it isn’t there, down deep there’s that part of me that’s just a girl. A wolfgirl who was taught from birth that her greatest purpose in life was to carry the king’s babies and make this pack stronger.
It’s not that I don’t want those things. I just want them inmytime, not anyone else’s.
I feel certain a woman can have any number of great purposes.
I have to physically restrain myself from looking back toward Ty, then. I don’t need to catalog his expressions when he looks at me to know how sick of my shit and my timeline and myresistancehe is. He’s made that clear.
Most recently earlier this afternoon, when he found me in the little cottage where I live, down in Jacksonville on the oracle’s land, something I decided I should do back when we all believed we’d have to trick Winter into figuring out her visions of the rising death goddess.
Ty was not exactly thrilled with that choice, mostly because he knew perfectly well that the main reason I’d made it was to distance myself from the pack. From him.
Again.
When he showed up this afternoon, he held me down, pinning my wrists high up over my head while refusing to sink deep inside of me, and he got directly in my face.
Up close, no matter how pissed he is, he’s even more beautiful than he is at a distance. It’s truly unfair.
Tonight, Maddox,he growled at me.I’m not playing with you anymore.
So I bit him.
I gave him something else to worry about. He gave me a number of ways to repent for that choice. And we ended up the way we always do. Sweaty and torn open and tangled around each other like we were supposed to be fused into one from the start. Like maybe the moon got it wrong.
I can feel him watching me as I move around the fire, making my way across the hilltop. I feel him the way I always do. His gaze, the weight of it—he might as well have his hand wrapped around my throat.
I can feel that, too, and my whole body goes hot at the image. The memory. The anticipation.
Still, I don’t look back.
There’s too much wolf in me tonight, teeth bared and pressedjust therebeneath the surface. I’m too close to forgetting myself.
I wind my way through the crowd. And the pack might like to growl to indicate they think I’m falling down on the job of being Ty’s queen—which isn’t unfair, it just isn’t as black and white as they’d like to believe—but they’re still my pack. I’m still theirs, they’re still mine.
I get smiles and hugs now that I’m within reach. Heads tipped to mine. Those already wearing their fur whine slightly and butt their snouts against me. Unlike humans, wolves touch. This is how we remind ourselves who we are. This is why this place and these people were so hard for me to leave.
This is why I came home instead of running away, every summer. This is how I entangled myself with Ty in ways that can never be undone, when the smart move would have been to get on a plane and fly to a wolfless place and let them figure it out however they could in my absence.
I missed my chance on the planes, thanks to the Reveal. Any wolfless places out there are now firmly out of reach.
When I get to where my family sits, they’re lounging around in their usual configuration toward the back of the gathering. The better to highlight my family’s elevated status. To indicate they’re not like everyone else milling around—though not asclearlynot like them as they’d prefer.
My uncles squeeze my hands as I pass. My aunts press their shoulders against mine. They all murmur their greetings without the hint of a reproving growl.
