"This was Yelena's vow to me," he explains in a soft murmur for my ears alone. "I'm not leaving her behind. But I'm done living in the past." He folds the bronze ring into Lukas's hand for safekeeping. Then he takes the new gold ring and slides it onto my finger. "This is for now. For you. For everything that's left."
I'm crying. I mean, duh. Who wouldn't be?
Then it's my turn. His left hand. The hand that wore the same ring for twenty years, that's been bare since the morning of the day he tried to die. There's a pale band of skin where the bronze used to be. I press my thumb over it, then slide the new gold ring home.
"Eyes open," I say. "On purpose. I choose you."
"Eyes open" he echoes. "I love you, Caroline Satyrin."
Lukas says something that means we're married. Wolf barks. Cass is sobbing. Jillian whoops. And then Afon kisses me. I'm trying to be careful with his split lip and his cracked ribs and the bruise on his cheek, but it doesn't matter. None of it matters.
We made it. We're here. We're both here.
That night, we have a room to ourselves. A real bed. A locked door. Wolf has been banished to the hall with a steak and his wounded dignity, but he'll have to get over it. My husband and I have a marriage to consummate.
But for a long time, we just lie there. He's still healing and so am I, in the ways you can't see. There's no rush. There's nowhere we have to be and nobody coming and nothing hunting us.
For the first time since I walked out of those trees, there is only this. Only us.
"I can't believe you came up that mountain," he says into the dark. His hand moves slow over my back. "I can't believe any of it."
"I told you I'm bad at boundaries."
He laughs and winces. "You're going to be the death of me."
"Not after all this. I went to too much trouble."
He turns onto his side and looks at me in the dim, flickering firelight. He's so beautiful to me. His bruised face. His damp eyes. "I'm sorry I left you that night, you know. It was the hardest thing I've ever done."
"You can be sorry," I graciously allow. "But you came back, so I'll forgive you. But you have to promise: No more leaving. No more deciding things for me in the dark. That's the deal."
"That's the deal," he agrees.
He kisses me then, more open than ever. There's no longer any story standing between us, no secret left to break my heart, no ghost in the corner of the room. He told me everything and I'm still here.
We both know it now, finally, in our bones: Some vows last forever.
He undresses me slow, taking his time with every article of clothing. He kisses every part of me he uncovers, my shoulder, the soft inside of my elbow, the new gold ring on my finger.
"I love you," he says. "I can't believe how easy it is to say. I should have said it the moment I saw you."
"Say it now," I whisper. "Say it as many times as you want. To make up for all the missed chances."
So he does. He says it into my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. He says it with his hands and his ruined, gentle mouth. We're slow because we have to be, because we're bothheld together with tape and stitches, but it doesn't matter, because slow is what I want. Slow is what we never got to have.
Every other time it was stolen, snatched out of the path of bullets and blizzards, hurried because we didn't know how much time we had.
Now, we have all the time in the world.
"Look at me," he says, when he finally moves over me, when there's nothing between us at all. "I want to see your face when I make love to my wife."
I look at him. The bruise and the split lip and the silver in his beard and the eyes that aren't concrete anymore, that haven't been concrete in a long time, that are open and bright and full of everything he spent twenty years refusing to feel.
"I'm yours," I tell him. "Whatever you need."
"I need you," he says. "Just you. That's all. That's everything."
And then there are no more words. Just the two of us moving together, careful and certain, the gold rings catching the dim light, the both of us crying a little and not ashamed of it. When the magic finally takes me, I moan his name. He buries his face in my neck and holds me like he's holding on through a storm. I feel him let go of every last thing he was carrying.
