CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

RILEY

He started writing the laws the night after.

Full yellow legal pads, a good pen, the kitchen table covered in pack law texts that Petra had provided digitally and Knox had printed because he thought better on paper. He wrote like he fought — methodically, without flourish, every word doing a specific job.

Grayson sat beside him reading over his shoulder and periodically saying "you can't do that" and Knox would write it anyway without looking up. I listened from the other room and kept a private tally. Knox: fourteen. Grayson: zero.

I brought the twins in around nine when they couldn't sleep. They climbed Knox immediately — Hunter taking the left knee as his established territory, Luna arranging herself across Knox's forearm with the ease of someone selecting a preferred chair — and Knox kept writing. The pen moved around Luna's head. Hunter fell asleep mid-question about whether wolves had to follow the same laws as humans.

"No," Knox said. "That's actually what I'm fixing."

Hunter was already asleep.

I leaned in the doorway and looked at the three of them — Knox still writing, Hunter asleep across one knee, Luna's dark lashes against Knox's forearm, the legal pad filling up with new law in his heavy clear handwriting.

Mixed-blood wolves: full pack standing, full protection, identical legal rights to pure-bloods. The law codified in language that left no room for interpretation.

Mate-bond rejection trauma: legally recognized. Grounds for restitution. The clause that made it illegal for any Alpha to do what Knox had done to me. I read it twice when I found it. Went to find him. He was in the kitchen.

"You made it illegal," I said.

"Yes."

"To do what you did to me."

"Yes."

I looked at him. "Good."

He looked back at me with the steady, even gaze of a man who knew what the law meant and had written it anyway because the only thing that made the past bearable was making sure it couldn't happen to anyone else.

The copies went out to every East Coast pack with a cover letter that said, essentially: this is how it is now. The tone was Knox's — factual, complete, not a request. Nobody challenged it.

Grayson asked about the pack name for the official registry filing and I said Harper-Blackthorn and Knox said Blackthorn-Harper and we looked at each other.

"I'll put a hyphen," Grayson said, "and let you fight about it later."

We never finished fighting about it. The filing went in as Harper-Blackthorn-Pack because Grayson made a unilateral decision and we'd been too busy to correct it and then it became the name before anyone noticed.

I found the first letter in the back of the shoebox, at the bottom of the stack. The one Knox had written at sixteen in that angular early-effort handwriting, starting with *I'm not good at this but I'm gonna try.* I'd had it for five years without reading it carefully, without letting myself.

I read it carefully.

I framed it.

Hung it in the kitchen of the new pack house without explaining it. Knox saw it on the third day. He stood in front of it for a long time without saying anything.

Then he went somewhere — I heard him in the study — and came back with a photograph. The one from the wedding day, the one he'd apparently kept somewhere for five years, the image of me in the ruined white dress with the blood on the skirt and the look on my face that was the worst thing and also somehow the most like me I'd ever been photographed.

He set it on the mantle.

"That's — Knox, that's a terrible thing to put on a mantle—"

"It reminds me not to be that stupid again."

I looked at him.

He looked at the photo, then at the letter in its frame in the kitchen, and then at me.

"We're even," he said.

We were not even. We were so far from even that the concept didn't really apply. But we were something, and that something had its own logic and its own weight and it was enough.

It was more than enough.