I look at her. “How much do you know?”
“Enough. Word travels.” She uncrosses her arms, letting them drop to her sides, and the change in her posture is the closest Brynn gets to standing down her guard. “They’re going to mandate her destruction unless she demonstrates control. And your club is involved.”
“My club is helping train her. We have time, but not a lot of it.”
“And in the middle of all of this…” Talon says, finding his voice, “… your fated mate turns out to be a vampire. The universe has a spectacular sense of humor.”
“No one’s laughing,” I say.
He has the good sense to leave it there.
Kade turns and heads for the edge of the tree line, and I follow. In two hundred years, that’s always meant the same thing—he wants privacy. We stop in the dark between two pines.He stands with his hands at his sides, and his face turned toward the distant mountains, and I wait.
“You understand what this means,” he says. “For the bloodline?”
The words land in a place I’ve had six days to prepare for and still find unprepared. My jaw tightens. The wolf in my chest, the part of me that runs older and quieter than the man, draws in on itself in a way that is not quite pain and not quite grief—it sits somewhere between both with no clean name for the distance.
A vampire’s body is undead. Fixed at the moment of turning. The biology of life, of warmth, change and continuation, doesn’t exist in it.
Charlie’s body will never carry a child.
Mine will father none with her.
Others will carry it forward.
But my branch of it, the line that runs from Kade through my mother through me, ends here.
Not through tragedy or violence, but through the simple, absolute truth of whatsheis.
My wolf cries out at it. Not the howl-at-the-moon kind but the low, private sound of something ancient being told a door is permanently closed. I’ve heard it five times in the last six days, in the dark, in the hours when Charlie sleeps, and the cabin is quiet enough to hear my own thoughts clearly. Every time it has sounded the same. Every time I have held it until it finished. Every time I have looked at her since, the wolf has said the same thing. I would pay the price again without hesitation.
She is worth the cost.
Not because she is extraordinary.
Not because of the bond.
She is worth it because she ismine.
The wolf doesn’t distinguish between the children we won’t have and the woman who stands at the center of everything it recognizes as home.
It is not a negotiation.
It is not a trade.
It is the price.
Both of us know it, and both of us have looked it in the eye and chosen each other anyway.
“I understand what it means,” I tell him.
Kade is quiet for a long moment. When he looks at me, the alpha is still there, but behind it is the man who carried me on his shoulders through the fields outside Oslo when I was four years old, and the world was large and uncomplicated.
“You’ve made peace with it,” he asks.
“I’ve made a choice.”
Kade is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, it’s to the mountains, not to me. “Your mother would have had opinions about this… strong ones. Mostly about you, but some about me, for letting it happen.” He glances sideways. “I don’t think she would have stopped you. I don’t think I can either.” He studies me for a moment more. Then he nods once, slow and final, then turns back toward the others.
