I do not respond.
“Zaki is going to lose her mind when she meets our baby,” Kendra says, her hand resting over mine on her belly. “She’s going to try to train her before she can walk.”
“She will succeed,” I tell her, and Kendra laughs again and leans into me and I wrap my arm around her shoulders and hold her against my side.
The village is empty and it is just the two of us and the daughter who is not yet born. But Zaki will come home, and when she does she will not come alone. She will bring the scattered Bouda back to this land.
I hold my mate and our daughter kicks against my palm and my Bouda is quiet beside me. The sun is going down behind the pines and the village stands empty around us, the cabins waiting for the voices that will fill them, the fire pit waiting for its first flame. Zaki will come home. Our people will follow. But tonight it is just the three of us, and that is enough.
I press my lips to the crown of Kendra’s head and she smells like rain on dry earth and wild honey and the daughter growing inside her, and I close my eyes. I have guarded many things in my life. This is the one I was made for.
The End.
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ZAKI IS UP NEXT!
The Bouda do not kneel.
Zaki made sure of that — crossing an ocean on bare feet and fury, tracking the scattered survivors of her massacred clan through territories that wanted her dead. She returns to Wintermoon with a handful of Bouda and the scars to prove what it cost her. She has a village waiting, a queen who needs her, and a duty that leaves no room for anything else.
Then Tau arrives.
The alpha of a displaced lion pride, migrating to Wintermoon with what remains of his people after a war he almost lost. He fought for his land until there was nothing left to fight for, and the shame of surrender sits in him like a second heartbeat. He did not come to Wintermoon to start over. He came because there was nowhere else to go.
A sovereign warrior and a fallen alpha. Both carrying the weight of the people they saved and the ones they could not.
When Zaki’s ridge drops without her permission the first time his scent reaches her, she does what any Bouda warrior would do — she ignores it. When Tau’s lion goes still in his chest the moment she walks past him, he does what no displaced alpha should do — he follows her.
But Mother Fate does not care about pride, duty, or the walls two stubborn shifters have built around their grief. The mate bond is already burning, and Tau is not the kind of man who lets his prey walk away.
