Chapter 89: The Second Love Scene

I got up off the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Come here," he said again.

"You are not strong enough."

"I am not asking to be strong. I am asking you to lie down." He moved over on the bed and pulled the quilt back. "I have been in a Council chamber and a boat and a slip and my heart stopped in front of five elders. I am not asking for anything but this."

I lay down.

He put his arm round me and pulled me in against his chest and I put my head on his shoulder and the pull in my chest settled and went warm and the wolf in the back of my head put its head down and closed its eyes.

We lay like that for a while.

"You stopped breathing in that chamber," I said.

"I know."

"I had my hands on your chest and there was nothing under them." My voice cracked. "I have never been frightened like that. Not in a mining town, not in the snow, not once in ten years. I have been frightened for patients and I have been frightened for myself and I have never once been frightened the way I was when I put my ear to your chest and heard nothing."

Ronan's arm tightened.

"I am sorry," he said.

"Do not be sorry. Be alive."

"I am alive."

"You are alive and you are in my bed and there is a stone in my pocket with a false bond in it and there is a Council coming in six days and there is a house in the north with wolves in it." I lifted my head. "And I have not slept properly in a week and I have not been warm since the mountain and I want one hour where none of it is real."

He looked at me.

"Then let us have an hour," he said.

He kissed me.

It was not a fierce kiss. It was slow and it was careful and it was the kiss of a man who had been carried up a hill and put in a bed and had woken up to find his mate asleep on the quilt beside him. He kissed my forehead and my closed eyes and the corner of my mouth and then my mouth, and I put my hand on the back of his neck and held him there.

The hour after that was ours.

I am not going to write down all of it. It was not like the bothy and it was not like the rented room in the Council town. It was slower than both and it was quieter and there was a great deal of holding on. He kept his hand on the silver mark over my heart and I kept mine on his, and at some point I started to shake and he stopped and said my name and I said, do not stop, and he did not stop.

When it was over we lay in the dark with the quilt over us and the fire burning down and his hand in my hair.

"Fiadh," he said.

"Hm."

"There is a thing I have to do tomorrow and I have been putting it off."

"What?"

"I have to name you Luna in front of the pack." He turned his head. "Properly. In the hall, with the mark and the words, the way it should be done. Not in a yard in a Council town with a Council clerk watching. In our own house."

I lay in the dark.

"There will be wolves who walk out," I said.

"I know."

"Maeve's faction is still there. The nine who signed her paper are still in this house and they came back to it when Bran left and they have been in the kitchen all evening not saying anything." I turned on my side to face him. "If you name me Luna in front of the whole pack, half of them will walk out of the hall and the Council will hear about it and Soren will have it in writing before the week is out."

"Let him have it in writing." Ronan put his hand on my face. "I have spent a year hiding things from this pack. I hid the false bond and I hid the shame and I hid the fact that I was dying and it got me a lost challenge and a Beta who went to the Council because nobody had told her the truth. I am not going to hide my Luna."

I lay in the dark with his hand on my face.

"Right then," I said. "Tomorrow."

He kissed me again.

And then, somewhere in the middle of the night, the wolf in my chest lifted its head and said, the stone is warm.

I sat up.

"What?" Ronan said.

"The stone." I got it out of my coat pocket and held it in my palm. It was warm. It had been cold since I put the thread through it and now it was warm and it was pulsing, a slow steady beat, like a heart.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. "What is it doing?"

"I do not know." I got up out of the bed and put the stone on the table and stood over it. "It has been cold since the chamber and now it is warm and it is beating."

The door opened and Padraig came in with a lamp in his hand and his face grey.

"Healer," he said. "I felt it from my room. The stone is awake."

"I know it is awake. What does it mean?"

Padraig put the lamp down on the table and looked at the stone.

"It means the false bond has found the other end," he said. "It has been in that stone for three days and it has been looking for a wolf to hold it and it has found one." He looked up. "Soren is alive. And he has a wolf with him who is holding the other end of that bond, and he is pulling."

I stood in the bedroom with the stone beating on the table.

"Then he is coming here," I said.

"He is not coming here. He is pulling from wherever he is and the pull is going through the stone and into you." Padraig looked at me. "Healer. You have a false bond in your pocket and a wolf in the north pulling on it and a true bond on your chest. If he pulls hard enough he will pull the true bond apart."

Down in the harbour, a bell began to ring.