Chapter 576

“Yes,” Jordan said. “She did.”

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The specific quality of his voice said the rest without saying it. I sat with the implication of it the shape what he wasn’t saying, the thing he’d noted and wasn’t going to put words to yet because putting words to it would make it a different kind of real.

*Silver.* I said.

*1 feel it.” she said.

*What is it.” I said.

*I don’t know,” she said. *But I’ve been feeling it for days. Something about how she holds the notes.”

*You noticed that too,* I said.

*I’m your wolf, she said. *I notice.*

“At least,” Jordan said, with the tone of someone shifting deliberately away from the edge of the thought, “he didn’t lock Aria in a dungeon and mate with Ivory.”

The path absorbed this.

“What,” I said.

“Jordan.” Nina said, and her elbow connected with his ribs with the specific precision of someone who’d been doing this for years.

“What,” he said. “I’m just saying – in context – it could be worse. Kael’s father took his chosen partner and made her his hidden family while his actual mate-” he paused. “While the Luna was alive and present and didn’t know. That’s what he did. He chose Killian’s mother and kept her separate and maintained the performance of the bond.” He looked at me. “Kael isn’t doing that. Kael hasn’t done that. Whatever he’s feeling about Ivory, whatever is still there, he’s–he’s trying to actually choose. That’s different from what his father was.”

“It is different,” I said.

“I’m not excusing the *you told me to say it thing,” Jordan/said. “That was-”

“Catastrophic,” Nina said.

“Catastrophic,” Jordan confirmed. “But the foundation underneath it is – he’s trying. In the specific way of someone who has twelve layers between feelings and words and keeps getting snagged in the layers.”

“I know,” I said.

“And she’s not going to steal him,” Nina said, looking at me. “Ivory isn’t going to–she gave him up. She

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meant it. She’d do it again.”

how,” I said. “I know that.”

“Then what do you need! Nina said.

I sat on the path in the nightbloom light and thought about what I’d been trying to name since I left the quarters.

“I need him to want me,” I said. “Not choose me as a responsibility. Not be faithful because he said he would be. Want. The way he-” I stopped. “The way I’ve watched him look at things he wants. The way his whole self goes toward something.” I looked at the nightbloom. “I want to be something his whole/self goes

toward.”

Nina was quiet.

“Yes,” she said, finally. “That’s fair.”

“That’s what everyone deserves,” Jordan said.

“Can I get it,” I said.

Nobody answered immediately.

Killian said, eventually: “I think he’s getting there.”

I looked at him.

“The integration,” he said. “The bond. What he said at the book club.” He paused. “He’s

there. He just

-he says the wrong thing at a very specific ratio. Every fourth sentence is exactly the right one and the other three are-”

“Catastrophic,” Jordan offered.

“Adjacent to what he meant,” Killian said.

“Generous,” Nina said.

“I’m practicing being generous,” Killian said. “He gave me a room.”

“He gave you a room,” Jordan confirmed. “In the wing he sealed.”

“In the new part,” Killian said.

Nina looked at Killian with the expression she had when she was doing an accounting of someone and finding the totals moving in a direction she hadn’t initially projected. I’d seen her do it with me, in the early months. I recognized the quality of it now.

“The fated mate situation,” she said, to Killian.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re not going to do anything about it,” she said.

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I’m not going to force anything,” he said. “I can’t make her feel something. I can’t make her- he paused.’s can’t make anything happen by wanting it to happen. The bond is the bond. It sits there. What she does with

her decision.

“And what you do,” Nina said.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m in the pack. I’m building–something. Whatever it is” He looked at the nightbloom. “I’m not going to spend my time trying to make her love me. I’m just going to be here.”

Nina looked at Jordan.

Jordan looked at Nina.

Something moved between them – the shorthand of two people who’d been in each other’s orbit long enough that the communication was mostly below the verbal.

“We should tell them,” Jordan said.

“Not tonight,” Nina said.

“Eventually,” Jordan said.

“Eventually,” Nina agreed.

“Before the war,” Jordan said.

“That’s a very specific deadline,” Nina said.

“It’s a practical one,” Jordan said. “If things go badly in the war-”

“They won’t,” Nina said.

“But if they do,” Jordan said. “I’d rather Kael and Ivory know, before. That we had this. That it worked out for some of us.” He paused. “They deserve to know that it can work out.”

Nina was quiet for a moment.

Then she took his hand, there on the path, in the nightbloom light.

“After the pack meeting,” she said. “Before the war.”

“Before the war,” he confirmed.

I sat on the path between them and Killian and looked at the nightbloom and felt the specific weight of all of it-

the complicated architecture of six people trying to love each other and the people they’d chosen and the people the universe had chosen for them.

Silver said: This is your pack.*

*I know,” I said.

*All of it,” she said. *The complicated parts too.*

“Especially those, I said.

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We sat on the path for a while longer.

For people in the dark, the nightbloom luminescent around us, the pack settled into its night.

Nobody dying.

Just living, in the specific complicated way of people who’d found cach other through the worst of things and were still, improbably, here.