AidenElla had stopped looking at me like I might disappear if she blinked.I noticed it around midmorning on the third day, when I came back from a brief meeting with Leo and found her sitting up in bed with one of the books from the packhouse shelf open across her knees. She looked up when I walked in and said, "There's tea on the table if you want it," the way a person says something like that when they've been sharing space long enough to start knowing each other's habits. Casually. Without the measured caution she'd had when we first got here.It was a small thing. I stood in the doorway for a second longer than I needed to, and then I went and got the tea.The truth was, I had been handling her as if she might break, and she had noticed, and she had decided at some point to stop tolerating it. I wasn't certain exactly when the shift had happened. Somewhere between the moment she'd said I know in response to my confession about the mate bond, and now. She had decided, in that qui
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