“What?”
“A piece I used to conduct. I can hear the cellos.”
I hold still. Listening to him.
“I want to find it again,” he says. “The music. When this is over.”
My chest tightens.When this is overmeans he thinks there’s an after. An after where he’s not running, not caged, not sedated. An after that includes me.
Am I ready to think about that?
“We’ll find it,” I say.
His breathing evens. Sleep takes him gently. Just a man falling asleep with a woman in his arms.
I lie in the ember-light and think about the word that’s been sitting between us all evening. The one neither of us said by the fire when the conversation turned to bonds and wolves and the gravity of recognition.
Mate.
It sits in my chest the way his heartbeat sat under my palm for weeks. Steady. Patient. Waiting for me to stop pretending I don’t know what it means.
Outside the cave, Aurora’s people are looking for us. Brenna is waiting for an explanation. The world hasn’t stopped being dangerous because a man said my name the way every woman longs to hear it.
I close my eyes. His arm is heavy around me.
My wolf is quiet. Not dormant. Not suppressed.
Content.
That confuses me more than anything else.
Chapter 17
Rafael
The coals are nearly dead. Gray and white, with one vein of orange still pulsing near the center. I feed it a strip of bark and watch it catch; a small flame, barely worth the effort, but it pushes back the cold for another few minutes.
Sable sits across from me with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. She’s dressed, boots laced, hair pulled back. Ready to move. She’s been ready since before the light came through the entrance gap. But we’re both still here, in the cave that smells like woodsmoke and us, and neither of us has said“let’s go”yet.
I don’t want to go. I don’t want to break the spell and return to a world that has been unfriendly for too long. I want to stay here with her, where things are starting to make sense.
“When did you last eat?” she asks.
I think about it. The transport, maybe. Before that, the IV drip at Ravenclaw. Before that, whatever the facility pushed throughthe tube. My stomach hasn’t complained because my stomach learned not to complain, but now that she’s asked, the emptiness registers. Hollow. Deep.
“I don’t remember,” I say.
“That’s too long.” Her mouth thins. “For both of us. We need water and food, and we’re not going to find either in this cave.”
She’s right. The stream from yesterday is a long walk back, and we have no means to carry water even if we reach it. My body is running on post-shift metabolism and whatever reserves the wolf has been burning through, but that won’t last. Neither will hers.
“The snow’s stopped,” I say. “Sky’s clear.”
She nods. We both know what that means. Helicopters. Clear visibility. Thermal imaging. The window we had in the storm is closing.
“We should move,” she says. “Head downhill. There’ll be water lower, maybe game trails.” She looks at me. “And we need to think about making contact. On our terms, before they find us on theirs.”
I nod. She’s being practical. The healer with a plan. And the plan has steps that lead somewhere that isn’t a cave on a mountain with no food and no future.
