“Don’t youMame.” She jabs a finger up at my face, and under the heat in her something’s already cracking. “I found out this morning I’m going to be a grandmother. My first grandbaby, Aaron. And you stand in my Conjuring Hall and tell me you mean to carry that cub into that dead, rotten realm? Absolutelyfuckingnot.”
“She’s not going.” The whole room stops on it, and for a second nobody breathes before it comes at me,what,andhuh,and Kiara’s smallwait.I make it plain, so there’s no soft place in it for them to push against. “I’m not bringing my son into the Glen. Look at what it is right now. What kind of life is that to hand a cub?”
Tiana’s the one who says it, slow, aiming it to wound. “So you’ll walk into that Glen and leave Mara and your son behind.” Her chin comes up. “Just like Eric did us.”
A flat, dangerous calm settles over me. I turn my head and look at her, really look, and whatever she finds there takes her back a step. “What did you just say to me.”
“Aaron—“
“I am not doing that to my mate. I’m not doing it to my son. Dragging the people I love out of their own lives and locking them in mine because I can’t stand to breathe without them in reach—that’s not protecting them, that’s eating them alive. That’s the thing Eric did. And I’d cut my own heart out before I’d become him.”
My mother’s hands come down slow. Her shoulders drop, and when she speaks again it’s quiet. “And does Mara get a say? Have you told her? Is she all right with this, you leaving her behind and carrying?”
I don’t look away from her. “She’s going to hate me. I’m expecting that. And she should.” My eyes burn. “But somewhere down the line she’ll understand I left because keeping them close would’ve been for me, not for them. I’ve made a whole string of selfish choices, Ma—ones that landed on her, on you, on everybody but me. I carry this one. Not her. I won’t set it down on her again.”
Samara’s come up close while I talk, and my littlest sister tips her head back to look up at me with wet eyes. “You’re a good man, brother,” she says, soft. “And you’re going to be a good king.”
“I don’t want you to go.” It’s Tiana, and my head comes around to her. Her arms are wrapped tight over herself, all the sharpness drained out of her, and what’s left in her eyes is the thing the two of us have spent our whole lives pretending isn’tthere. She’s loved me, and I’ve been her big brother every day of it. I stare at her, and the grin comes anyway, wet as it is.
She crosses the floor and slams into me, arms locking around me, her face buried in my shirt. Kiara’s there a second later, then Samara, the three of them folding in around me and holding on, and that’s the thing that does it. They’ve stopped fighting me, which means they know I’m really going—and I come apart.
It rolls up through me rough and ugly, and I wrap all three of them up. Samara cries into my side. “I love you, Aaron,” she gets out, fisting her hands in my shirt. “I don’t want you to go.”
I rub slow circles over her back and lift my eyes over the tops of their heads to my mother, who stands apart from us, watching her children break. “I know, baby,” I murmur into Samara’s hair. “I know. But I have to.”
My mother holds my eyes a long moment. Then her face closes and she turns and walks out of the hall without a word, her steps hard and fast on the floor. I don’t go after her, because she doesn’t want me gone any more than the rest of them do. She just can’t stand in this room and watch me choose it.
The girls peel off me one at a time, and I scrub the wet off my face. “I have to go,” I get out, rough. “There’s something I’ve got to do first.”
Kiara turns and throws herself into Tiana’s arms, sobbing, and Tiana folds her in and holds her, watching me over the top of her head. Samara catches my sleeve. “Will we see you again before you leave?” I don’t have an answer that won’t break her worse, so I don’t give her one.
I close my eyes and the magic takes me, and the Conjuring Hall blinks out around me like a snuffed candle. When I open them I’m standing in the last place in any realm I want to be—Solaris Pride.
It’s time to make it right with Mara’s father, and there’s no version of this that goes easy. The guards at the territory linecatch my scent the second I appear, two big lions in half-shift, and they come up onto the balls of their feet with their tails rising stiff, throwing their heads back to roar at me across the line—a wall of sound built to put a man on his back. I’m too tired and too gutted to be impressed by it.
“I don’t have time for this,” I tell them, and I keep walking. I don’t lift a finger. I just decide it, and both guards leave the ground at once, their legs cycling at nothing and their roars cutting off into startled, furious yowls. I hold them up there easy, no more effort than holding a thought, and I walk between them and up the path toward the alpha’s cabin while they hang in the air behind me.
Ahmal comes off his porch with a roar that rattles the windows in their frames, his amber eyes blown wide. He clears the steps in one leap and charges, all that weight and muscle barreling straight at me with his claws out, and it would have taken everything I had to stop him. It takes nothing now. He’s off his feet and floating before he’s closed half the distance, swiping at the air.
“I don’t want to fight you.” I mean every word of it. “I came to ask you for a favor.”
“I want you dead,” he snarls, twisting against the magic.
“Get in line.” Something that’s half a laugh and half not gets loose in me. “But what I came to say will make you a happy man, so hear me out.” I groan and set him down, the magic lowering him slow until his feet find the dirt, and he stands there breathing hard, too thrown to charge again.
“I’m leaving Wintermoon. Probably for good.”
A growl tears out of him. “And taking my Mara. I will die before I let you?—“
“I’m not taking her with me.” The growl dies.
“I’m here to ask you to watch over my mate.” The word sticks and I have to push it out, because handing her to anyone, eventhe man who made her, feels like cutting off my own hand. “And our cub.” It takes a hard swallow to get the last part out, and Ahmal’s hard face gives way.
The cabin door opens behind him and his sons come out fast—Dayo first with his shoulders filling the frame, Tunde a step back, lean and ready, both of them reading the air for a fight. Ahmal lifts a hand without turning, and they pull up short at the top of the steps and hold there.
“What have you gotten yourself into, warlock.” It isn’t quite a question.
I sniff hard and drag my wrist across my nose. “Some real shit I can’t bring her into. I love her too much to make her stand in the middle of what’s coming for me.”
