Chapter 365

KAEL

My wolf had been patient.

That was the thing I needed to understand about him – not that he was angry, not that he was reckless, not that he was the unstable half of a partnership that had spent three years torn apart by a curse and stitched back together with the kind of scarring that didn’t smooth out with time. He’d been patient. Deliberately, strategically, with the specific patience of something that had learned waiting and had decided waiting was a more effective tool than demanding.

—

s

He’d been waiting since the curse broke. Since I’d stood in the bonding ceremony and made the choice that I’d made, and he’d not accepted it. That was the word I’d been using, had been telling myself, had been using as a foundation for the past eight months. He accepts the bond. He’s adjusted. He’s settled into it.

He hadn’t.

—

I knew this in the way I knew things that I’d been choosing not to examine too directly the way you know something is in the room before you turn on the light. The knowledge was there. The not-looking was a choice I’d been making daily.

He’d been waiting. And this morning, in Ivory’s clinic, with the specific quality of her crying and the specific quality of holding her and the specific feeling of her hands in his fur when he’d been a wolf and she’d talked to him about everything because she’d thought he wasn’t processing full sentences – this morning had moved him closer to the end of waiting than he’d been since the bonding ceremony.

I could feel it in the specific way I felt things that were his rather than mine. A pressure that lived behind the chest, not threatening, not aggressive, just present. The way a tide was present at the shoreline. You could stand on the shore and the tide being there was not violence. But it was coming regardless of your opinion about it.

The curse had done something to us that I’d never fully explained to anyone because there weren’t clean words for it.

For most wolves, the human and the wolf were layered – one over the other, informing each other, the animal instinct and the human reasoning working in a relationship that could be

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Chapter 365

tense or smooth depending on the person but was fundamentally unified. One thing, expressed in two registers.

The witch who’d cursed me had separated those layers.

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Not removed one. Not destroyed either of them. Separated them. Had taken the unified thing and pulled it into two distinct pieces and forced both pieces to exist simultaneously in the same body, neither one able to fully express itself, neither one able to rest, both of them conscious and aware and in constant awareness of the other.

For three years I’d been both and neither. The wolf form had my human consciousness inside it – aware, reasoning, knowing exactly what was happening and unable to communicate most of it. The human form, when I could hold it, had the wolf’s presence so close to the surface that the boundary between them was nearly nothing, that a moment of strong emotion could dissolve it without warning.

We’d fought for the first year. That was the honest account. The wolf had wanted things and I’d refused them and the refusal had cost me control in other ways, and eventually we’d reached something that wasn’t peace but was functional. A negotiated coexistence. We agreed on priorities – Shadowmere, the pack’s safety, Ivory and we managed the rest through

attrition.

—

The only thing we’d always agreed on, without negotiation, without the specific exhausting process of two separated pieces of one person deciding which instinct was going to govern which moment

–

was Ivory.

She was ours. She had always been ours. The human part of me had known it and the wolf

the part had known it and this had been the one place of rest in three years of fighting shared certainty that she was what we were pointed toward, that she was what we were protecting, that the reason surviving was worth the effort was partially the possibility of what came after surviving.

And then I’d made the choice. The choice that had broken the curse – the bond with Aria, the one that the curse required, the one that I’d made because breaking the curse was the right thing to do and the curse would have killed me and Ivory had arranged the solution.

I hadn’t consulted my wolf.

In retrospect, I understood this was the source of the specific quality of his patience now. It wasn’t just that I’d chosen Aria. It was that I’d chosen Aria without permission, without the partnership that the three years of shared survival had supposedly built between us, without the respect of at least acknowledging what I was asking of him.

I’d expected him to follow. Had expected that the bond forming would be something he accepted, would eventually come to accept, would find his own reasons to settle into. Had told

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myself the restlessness was adjustment and the pacing was temporary and the specific pull he felt toward Ivory every time she was near was just was old, was the remnant of the curse years, was something that would soften as the bond with Aria strengthened.

―

It had not softened. Not one degree. Not in eight months.

He’d been patient. He’d been waiting. For the perfect moment to make his case.

I was in my office, late in the day doing the work that had accumulated throughout a day that had been significantly more emotionally demanding than most. The coalition correspondence. The Sera documentation that Nina had forwarded with the specific thoroughness she brought to things she wanted permanently recorded. The investigation updates on Damon’s movements.

My wolf was present in the way he was present when he’d decided something was worth attending to. Not pacing – he’d stopped the pacing, which was worse than the pacing, because the pacing meant he was restless and the stillness meant he’d arrived somewhere and was holding it.

*Today*, he said. Not a word – he didn’t use words, it didn’t work like that. More a pressure that carried meaning the way a scent carried information. Specific and immediate. *She cried. You held her. And then you left.*