CHAPTER ELEVEN

RILEY

Mara came into the shop on a Tuesday with two coffees and the expression she only gets when she's decided to have a conversation I'm going to find uncomfortable.

I kept painting. "Whatever you're about to say—"

"Tell me about the mark." She set my coffee next to the brush tray. "The real version. Not the version where you say it's fine."

I put the brush down.

We sat on the floor of the shop with our backs against the workbench, the way we used to sit in her apartment the first year in Seattle when the floor was all we had and the floor was enough, and I told her.

The mark is — it's hard to describe to someone who doesn't have one, who didn't grow up in a world where mate bonds are physical things with physical weight. The best I'd been able to manage with Mara before was *like a bruise that never heals*, which was accurate but incomplete. What it actually feels like, day to day, is more like pressure. Low and constant, located somewhere in your sternum and in the back of your neck where the mark is, like something is pulling toward a direction that isn't there anymore. Like losing a tooth and your tongue keeps going back to the gap. Not unbearable. Just persistent. There every morning and every night and every time you lift your collar in the mirror and see the faint scar where his bite should've blazed alive and stayed.

For five years I'd been telling myself it was getting better.

"Since he got here," I said. "It's different."

Mara looked at me. "Different worse?"

"Different — awake." I tried to find the right word. "Like every nerve in my neck is just turned back on. Like someone lit a pilot light."

"Riley—"

"I know." I picked at the edge of the coffee cup. "I know."

"He doesn't know it still hurts?"

"He knows now. It's just — it's complicated."

"Most disasters are."

She was furious on my behalf, which she expressed by going very still and looking at the middle distance with compressed lips. Mara's anger is contained and terrifying, which is why she's brilliant at the business side of the shop and why every vendor we deal with eventually learns to answer her emails on the same day.

I picked the twins up from their playdate at four. Their friend Marcus had a very nice townhouse with a very relaxed mother who provided juice boxes and asked no follow-up questions, which were my two primary criteria for acceptable playdates.

Knox was already there.

I stopped in the doorway of Marcus's living room. Knox was on the floor — long legs folded up, because the floor of a four-year-old's playroom is not designed for six-foot-six Alpha werewolves — in the middle of what appeared to be a complex block-and-plank structure while Hunter explained the engineering requirements and Luna supervised from an armchair she'd claimed as a throne, pointing at things that needed adjusting.

He was listening to Hunter. Actually listening, not adult-listening where you're nodding while thinking about something else. Fully present, fully in it, occasionally asking a question that made Hunter's whole face light up with the particular joy of being taken seriously by someone you want to impress.

I stood in the doorway and watched for a moment too long.

Marcus's mother appeared at my elbow. "He yours?" she asked.

"It's complicated," I said, which had been my answer to that question for about three weeks.

She watched Knox redirect Luna's pointing toward a structurally sound solution with patience and good humor. "Seems like a natural," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "He does."

We walked home. Knox fell into step beside me without being invited, which I'd stopped commenting on because I was saving my arguments for things that mattered, and the twins ran ahead arguing about something involving Gerald the wolf. The evening air was cool and smelled like rain coming.

We walked in silence for about half a block.

Then I felt his hand — barely, barely — brush the back of my neck. His fingers against the mark, so light it might've been accidental except that with Knox Blackthorn nothing is accidental.

I flinched.

Not away. Just — the mark flared like a match, every nerve in it lighting up at once, and I couldn't stop the flinch.

He stopped walking.

"Does it still hurt?" His voice was very quiet.

I thought about lying. I'm good at it — I've had five years of practice, five years of telling the twins daddy just isn't around yet and telling Mara I'm fine and telling myself the ache in my neck was something I could get used to.

"Every day," I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved through his face that I didn't have a name for — not guilt exactly, deeper than guilt, heavier.

He stopped walking.

"I'm going to fix it."

"You can't." I said it the way you say true things. "You can't un-break a bond by—"

"Watch me."

He walked ahead. Not fast, not storming off — just walked, long strides, and didn't look back.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched him go, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to cry or run after him. I did neither. I called to the twins to slow down and then followed at my own pace, and I thought about what it would mean if he actually could, and I thought about what it would cost me if he tried.