Chapter 8

The rooftop garden didn't look like something Ryder Kane would own.

That was the first thing she thought when he pushed open the door and the warm amber glow of string lights hit her face. Raised wooden planters ran along both sides. Lavender grew in dark clusters. A pergola framed the far edge, overlooking the city, and below it sat two chairs and a small table with a pot of tea already waiting.

Ava stepped out.

The evening air smelled like the plants and the city and the last heat of a setting sun. She turned once, slowly, taking it in.

"I didn't have you down as a gardener," she said.

"I'm not." He came to stand beside her. "The previous Luna designed it. I kept the plants alive."

She looked at him sideways.

He was looking at the lavender.

"How long ago?" she asked.

"Eight years." A pause. "She died in the border campaign. Year three of the war."

Ava turned that over carefully.

"I'm sorry," she said. And she meant it.

He gave a short nod — not dismissing the sympathy, just accepting it the way a man does when the grief is old enough that it no longer requires tending.

They sat.

She poured the tea and he didn't try to take over, which surprised her. He sat in his chair like someone who had decided, very deliberately, to be still.

"Tell me about Evergreen," he said.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Not the territory. Not the debt." He looked at her. "You. What it was like growing up there."

She wrapped her hands around the cup and looked out at the city below.

She told him.

Small things at first. The forest smell in the mornings. The pack bonfires on the autumn equinox. Her mother's garden — real flowers, not the strategic lavender of a penthouse rooftop, but wild and complicated things that grew sideways and smelled too sweet.

She talked about her mother's death when she was nine. The way her father had looked at her differently after, like she'd become a liability rather than a daughter. The long years of being *managed* instead of loved.

Ryder didn't speak while she talked. He listened. Not the performative listening of someone waiting for their turn — the real kind, where the other person's words land somewhere and you feel them settling.

When she stopped, the city had gone deep blue around them.

"You deserved better than what your pack gave you," he said.

"Most people do." She looked at him. "What about you? Before the war. Before all of this."

Something softened in him — barely, in the set of his mouth.

"There wasn't much before," he said. "I was seventeen when my father died and the Alpha title fell. There was no *before* after that. Just the next thing that needed doing."

"And now?"

He turned and looked at her directly, and in the warm string-light glow the crimson of his eyes was less sharp. More human. The line of his jaw was loose in a way she hadn't seen it yet.

"Now," he said, "I'd like a *during.*"

She felt the word in her sternum.

The night moved around them. Below, the city was a constellation spread flat across the earth. Above, the first real stars had appeared in a gap between clouds.

He reached across the space between the chairs and tucked a strand of her hair back behind her ear. Slowly. Like he was asking permission with the gesture itself.

She didn't pull away.

His hand stayed — fingertips resting at her jaw, thumb barely grazing her cheekbone.

She leaned in first.

She hadn't decided to. Her body made the decision before her mind had finished the argument, and then his mouth was on hers and the whole city dropped away.

Tentative at first. Both of them careful, like standing on ice they hadn't tested. His thumb moved along her jaw and she felt the soft exhale of him through the kiss, something released, some held-down thing finally set down.

Then it shifted.

His hand curved behind her neck. She gripped the front of his shirt. What had been careful became something else — hungry and honest and aching with everything the last four months had cost them both.

The gold came without warning.

She felt it flare in her chest — warm, expanding, uncontrollable — and her wolf rose up behind it without asking permission.

Every string light on the rooftop exploded at once.

The darkness came down hard.

They broke apart.

Ava pulled back, breathing fast, one hand pressed to her chest where the heat was still rolling in waves.

She could see him in the dark — the red glow of his eyes, the unsteady rise and fall of his chest.

"What was that?" he said. His voice was rough in a way that had nothing to do with anger.

"My wolf," she managed. "I don't — I can't always control it."

A beat.

Then, out of the complete darkness, she heard it — low and quiet and startled out of him, like it arrived before he could think to stop it:

He laughed.

Not the short, wrong laugh from the dining room. A real one. Quiet and warm and a little undone.

"My Luna," he said, "just blew out every light on the roof."

She laughed too.

She hadn't expected to. It came up from somewhere she'd kept locked for months and it felt like the first clean breath after a very long time underwater.

The darkness sat gently around them.

His hand found hers on the armrest.

Neither of them moved for a long time.