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I understood that. I’d never push her.

But I was ready. I’d have liked nothing more than to fill this old house with our children. To hear their feet thundering down from the loft, and their laughter in the garden, and their shrieks at the river when Gage taught them to swim, the way his mother had once taught him.

Ruby looked up and caught me watching. She held my gaze for several heartbeats.

Then she handed little Sara back to her father, carefully, the way you’d hand someone something precious.

“She’s beautiful,” she told him.

Gage tucked the shawl around his daughter and nodded. At the door, he paused beneath the carved wolf and looked back at Ruby. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. So much had passed between them that it didn’t need to be said aloud. Then he walked down the lane beneath the sunlight with his baby cradled to his chest.

Ruby stood at the window watching them go.

I came up behind her and slid my arms around her waist, resting my chin on top of her head. She leaned back against me. Outside, the chimney sent up a thin, crooked thread of smoke.

One night, I held her at the window, just like that, and she said, “Conan, ask me again.”

“About what?”

She turned in my arms and looked up at me, and her gray eyes were bright.

“About having children.” She smiled in the slow, sure way of a woman who’d made up her mind.

My heart thumped hard. I gulped. “Ruby, do you want to have children?”

She reached up and placed her hand on my chest, over my heart, where she often did.

“Yes.”

I pulled her into my arms and held her there by the window, with the quince tree blooming outside and the chimney smoking.

Four years ago, I’d sat alone in the Hermit’s Hut waiting for the woman the Order had sent to finish me. I’d made my peace with dying there. I’d been so tired. So tired of the killing and the graves and the long nights listening to wolves howl for their loved ones, tired of being an alpha who’d spent too much time burying the dead.

I’d opened the door to a conversation, expecting it might be my last.

Instead, she’d stepped inside, wary but not closed off to a discussion by the fire.

And that had changed everything.

My wolf rested quietly inside me. His restlessness had stopped.

We’d found peace.

I’d spent twelve years fighting to survive. I’d never imagined I’d have a reason to live instead.

A reason to love.

I held my wife, my mate, by the window, and I thought of our children thundering down from the loft someday.

I wasn’t tired anymore.

EPILOGUE

RUBY

Iwoke before sunlight and listened to the soft sound of Conan breathing behind me. His arm draped over me, as it often was when we slept, now with his hand spread wide over the curve of my belly.

The baby kicked, and he let out a contented sigh, even in sleep.