He's alive.
He is alive and he wasstandingin that corridor. I keep coming back to that. Two years of running the math on what condition he would be in if we got him out — best case strapped to a gurney, worst case unrecognizable, every plan we built had a stretcher in it, every cache had a sedation kit, we drove a truck up here with a cell in it because the version of him that was likely to come out was the version that could not come down a mountain in human shape — and what came out of that cell was Thaw. Thaw the way Thaw looks. Tall. Steady. Gold eyes working the corridor like he had never left it. Dropping orders in the alpha-voice the way he used to drop them at the kitchen table when we were teenagers.
"Dean. North door. Hold it."
Like it had been a week.
Like he had not been gone for two years.
I check the mirror. I cannot see her. The partition is closed and the mirror won't show her to me. I check anyway. I have been checking it for hours. Every few seconds.
She is back there.
That is the other thing I am not going to be able to do anything with for a while.
We have a mate.
I keep waiting for it to feel real. It just keeps sitting there on top of being true. I am thirty-one years old and a woman I have never met in my life looked at me through a gap in some bars in a Syndicate corridor and my chest did the thing my pack told me could happen.
I saw her hair first. Dark red and tangled, the only bright thing in the corridor.
Then I saw her face.
I have not been able to stop seeing her face.
She is fucking gorgeous. She was standing behind Crull with the alarm light strobing across her cheekbones and her jaw set. Brave. She wasbravein that corridor. A Syndicate facility coming apart at the seams and she kept her feet under her.
Now there is a thread in my chest that points at her, and the thread does not have an off-switch.
I am going to try not to think about the thread. I know I am going to fail. I am going to try anyway.
I am going to drive the truck.
The trees lean in. The gravel gets worse. The headlights stay off.
She made a sound a minute ago.
A sleepy sound. Through the partition. Just a little catch of breath. She is sleeping in the back and the bond is happy about it and I am happy about it and Dean is happy about it.
I check the mirror because some part of my brain refuses to trust that the situation is the situation. The situation is that we got our brother and we got the female and we got Crull and Harek and Fen.
Two years.
Two years of operations and the night went clean.
I cannot get over it.
I am not going to be over it for a while.
I check the mirror.
The partition slides open.
Dean slides through headfirst, barely fitting. He pulls the partition closed behind him.
He looks at me. I look at him.
He says, "Fuck. Fuck, Daron."
