I reached up and traced his jaw. My fingers were trembling, but not from fear. "I'm forever yours."
Tears slipped down my cheeks before I could stop them. Not grief. Not relief either, exactly. Just the sheer overwhelming weight of finally, finally belonging somewhere that wasn't a cage.
26
Ivan
Days after Callum wasat the house, I was in the security hub buried beneath the west wing, behind a door that looked like a linen cupboard and required three separate codes. Maeve joked when she asked where I was going, calling it the murder basement, which was inaccurate because we did not murder people there.
Usually.
I was at the steel worktable with a whetstone and my favorite combat knife, running the blade in long, steady passes. The rhythm of it was meditative. Steel on stone. The whisper of an edge getting sharper. The monitors on the far wall cycled through their feeds, from the front gate, to the service road, east woods, nursery corridor, garages, south terrace, and the green lights told me everything was as it should be.
Then Maeve's scent drifted down the corridor. Champagne, storm-clouds, caramel. My body ached for her. My teeth ached more.
I could smell her from thirty feet away now. The bond sharpened everything. When Artem's teeth had broken her skin, something in my own chest had clicked into place with an almost audible sound, like a bolt sliding home. I hadn't been the one to bite her. Didn't matter. The claiming had rolled through the pack bond and settled in my bones anyway.
Gregor had been humming all morning.
He denied it, of course. He'd been polishing the same Sig Sauer for twenty minutes, making a low sound under his breath that was either another Taylor Swift tune or an electrical fault, and when I'd pointed it out he'd looked at me like I'd accused him of watercolor painting.
"You’re content," I said.
"I am operationally satisfied."
"You’re humming."
"There is no humming."
Maeve walked in, kissed his scarred cheek on her way to the nursery, and the alleged non-humming stopped so abruptly I nearly injured myself laughing. He'd glared at me for a solid ten seconds. I'd grinned back. It was the most entertainment I'd had all week, which said something grim about my recreational options.
She was ours. The house felt it. The guards felt it. Fergus, who had taken to sleeping on Gregor's tactical vest like it was a personal dog bed, definitely felt it. No one would ever take her again.
There was a dangerous arrogance in that thought. I knew it. Artem knew it. Gregor definitely knew it because he treated arrogance like an exposed wire in wet weather.
But after months of watching Maeve flinch at ghosts, after Prague and Edinburgh and childbirth and councils and her father in our sitting room calling her currency with a straight face, I wanted to believe the world had learned its lesson.
The world, apparently, was a slow learner.
My phone buzzed on the table.
I set the knife down and picked it up. It was an encrypted message from Yuri's network in Moscow. Yuri, who was now technically running the European corridor and celebrated his promotion by sending me intelligence reports with the same smug tone he'd once used to try to steal Artem's seat. Family was complicated.
I read the message twice.
Then I read it again because the first two readings had made me want to put my knife through the wall and I needed to be sure I wasn't overreacting.
I wasn't.
Callum McCarthy hadn't just left Surrey and licked his wounds. He'd made a call to Belfast. Pride had found pride. One weak man had handed another weak man a story about ownership and insult, and it turned out the past was now moving toward our gates with guns and an opinion.
Finn O'Shea.
The name had been an abstract shape in my head for months. The scar he’d left on my mate's throat was something that made me want to hunt him myself. I'd imagined killing him in more ways than I could count. Most of them efficient, some of them creative, all of them satisfying, and all while Maeve slept beside us unaware.
“We have a visitor on his way.”
Gregor turned to look at me. “Who?”
