I kiss the top of her head, the scent of her filling my senses. “Not alone,” I say. “I’ll look with you. I’ll stand guard with you.”
“No,” she says, pulling back to look me in the eye. Her expression is fierce. “We stand together. No more carrying the weight alone. We’re a team now. You and me.”
I look at her and the truth is undeniable. She’s the only one who can carry the weight of the future with me.
“Together,” I agree, the word a final, binding seal.
I look back at the chapel, at the empty chair still visible through the open doors. I think about Turi. I think about the man who raised us, the man who betrayed us, and the man who died to save us. I think about the parents we lost and the brother she mourned.
The grief is still there. It will always be there, a quiet ache in the background. But it doesn’t define us anymore. It’s just the soil we’ve planted this new life in. It’s the dark that makes the light so much brighter.
I reach down, taking her hand in mine, our wedding rings catching the light.
“Let’s go home, Amara,” I say.
“We’re already there, Alessio,” she says, her smile breaking over me.
We walk down the path together, leaving the chapel and the dead behind. We walk toward the house, toward the family, toward the long years stretching out before us. The war is over. The secrets are told.
As we join the others, as the laughter and the music of the reception drift through the mountain air, for the first time in twenty years, the quiet doesn’t feel like a trap. I’m not looking for the threat.
I’m just living.
I’m the man who keeps what is mine. I am her husband.
The feral energy that has driven me for so long hasn’t disappeared, but it’s changed. It’s no longer a weapon used to keep the world at bay. It’s a fire that keeps us warm. It’s the fierce, unyielding love that will protect this home and everyone in it until the day I take my last breath.
I am Alessio Costa.
And for once, I believe I can be whole.
We reach the house, and the doors swing open to welcome us. The family is inside, their voices a loud, chaotic roar of a life finally earned. We step over the threshold, hand in hand, and the world outside fades away.
The last twenty-four hours have already been a lifetime—her clothes folded into our dresser, Tyra’s wolf triaged and discharged with full honors, the chapel below glowing with Sienna’s peonies, a bonfire at Lucia’s with two families getting loud around it. And now the house gives us this: a door opening into the rest of our lives.
There is only this. The warmth, the love, the solid, unshakable reality of us.
We are home.
EPILOGUE
AMARA
Mountain air doesn't just sit in the lungs; it bites. It’s a clean, sharp snap of pine and ancient stone, a daily reminder that the exhaust and desperation of the city no longer have a grip on me.
Mist rolls off the peaks, a slow-motion tidal wave swallowing the valley. The wood of the back deck is cold under bare feet, a grounding sensation that confirms this isn’t a dream. No safe houses. No hotel rooms with one hand on the car keys and the other on a weapon.
Home.
The word still sounds like a foreign language. For a decade, it was a theoretical endpoint to be reached only after the ledgers were balanced and the blood was paid for. Now, the amber ring weighs heavy on my finger, catching the first weak rays of the sun. The percolator bubbles in the kitchen. Three months after the wedding, the duffel bag sits at the bottom of a closet, buried under a pile of winter coats destined for next year.
Alessio’s oversized flannel shirt provides a shield against the chill, smelling of sandalwood, soap, and that faint, metallic tang of a man who spends his life fixing what’s broken. My skin still hums from the way he woke me an hour ago—his touchpossessive even in sleep, pulling me back into the heat of his body as if I might evaporate if he let go for more than a second.
He’s still in bed, a sprawling mountain of a man who hasn't quite unlearned the habit of listening for intruders in every floorboard creak. We’re both unclenching, one jagged muscle at a time.
A fox darts near the tree line, its fur a vibrant red against the deep green pines. It pauses, eyes fixed with an intelligence too heavy for a wild animal, then vanishes into the brush.
"You're going to freeze your tits off, Amara."
