CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

KNOX

Grayson officiated because I chose him and because the alternative was Elder Petra, who was the most senior council member still present and technically the traditional choice, but who had spent forty-eight hours under pack arrest and was, I felt, unlikely to bring the appropriate energy.

Grayson took this responsibility with the gravity it deserved, which is to say he spent two days preparing notes and a further day arguing with Riley about whether he could include a joke and she said no and he didn't include the joke but you could tell it cost him something.

The ceremony was pack-only. Small. The inner circle — the wolves who'd been with us in Nevada, a handful of core pack members who'd made the trip, no elders from the old council. No ceremony hall. We used the property outside Reno that the pack had held for a decade, the one with the open land and the good sight lines, because Riley said she didn't want to be indoors for this and I didn't argue.

I'd left the dress in her bag on the road without a note, except for a note that said: *Only if you want to. —K.* I'd commissioned it weeks before the Council intercept, in the weeks when I was still counting days and not knowing how they'd end, and it had arrived via a courier who found us at a diner outside Elko and delivered it to Riley's hands without explanation.

She wore it.

The blood-red leather dress, the one that had been in my head since the day I'd seen her in the ruined white one — since I'd carried that image for five years as the worst thing I'd ever done. Red leather, fitted, with her red-pawed white wolf eyes still faintly visible at the edges when she wanted them, and Luna on one hip and Hunter on the other.

She walked into the field and every wolf present went quiet.

Not because she was intimidating — though she was, she absolutely was — but because the pack recognizes its own. Because what stood in front of them was the thing the old pack had been calling impossible for thirty years, the white omega mate of a black Alpha, something the old texts described as a sign of genuine completion.

I got on one knee.

The entire pack did the same. Not because I instructed it. It happened the way things happen when they're supposed to — instinct preceding instruction, the pack's nature expressing itself before anyone decided to.

I looked up at her.

"I rejected you when I should have fought for you," I said. My voice was steady, which surprised me, because nothing else about this moment was. "I'll carry that for the rest of my life and it won't be enough to cover it. I know that." I held her gaze. "I'm not asking because you owe me a chance. I'm asking because I have loved you since we were seventeen and stupid and you sat in the back of my truck reading a book about motorcycle paint jobs and you told me you were going to build something and I believed you before you'd even started." I stopped for a moment. "Will you let me stay?"

Luna, from her hip, with the timing and the volume of a child who has inherited her parents' most inconvenient traits in equal measure:

"Mommy. Say yes. He's been down there forever."

Hunter, nodding: "It's been like a hundred years, Mommy."

The pack laughed. The whole field. Knox laughed — the real laugh, the one that comes from somewhere unguarded, the one I'd stopped hearing six years ago and had apparently been saving for this exact moment.

I was crying. I'd been trying not to.

"Get up," I said.

He stood.

I put both hands on his face and he looked at me like I was every good thing that had ever happened to him, and I thought about the shoebox and the kitchen floor and the red bike and the barn in Utah and all the terrible years between seventeen and now, and I thought about what comes after terrible years when you survive them.

"You already stayed," I said.

He kissed me in front of the whole pack and the bond went gold — not metaphorically, actually gold, I felt it like warmth from the inside, and from what Grayson later described, it was also visible from the outside, a brief flare at the mark on my neck that made several people in the back row take a step forward to see.

Luna and Hunter cheered.

Grayson cried openly and didn't apologize for it.

Mara took a photo.