“You silly warlock.” She laughs against my lips. “When are you going to get it through your head? I have always chosen you. And I’m always going to keep choosing you.” She pulls back to hold my eyes. “But I need you to choose me back, Aaron. Every time.”
I take her hand, bring it up, and press my mouth to the back of it. “Ready to see your new home?”
She smiles, and it’s the whole sun. “Yes.”
I start pulling her along, too eager, and she laughs and comes. When we reach Samara, she slips in and takes Mara’s other hand.
“I missed you too, you know,” Samara says.
“I’m sorry.” Mara’s face falls. “I just?—“
“It’s okay.” Samara squeezes her hand. “I get it. You needed to be with your pride.” Then she grins. “But now I get to meet my nephew.”
“Yes.” Mara nods down at her. “You do.”
I look at my mate. “Ready?”
She takes one last look at the cottage, at the long months of waiting she’s leaving behind, then lifts her chin. “Yes. I’m ready.”
I smile when she closes her eyes, and I bring my mate home.
She opens her eyes in the Glen, and her breath catches. I watch her take it in—the wasteland made over, humming with a magic you can taste on the back of your tongue. Witches and warlocks stroll the streets like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, alive. A handful drift overhead on brooms, weaving around each other in the bright air like traffic, and Mara’s mouth curves up watching them go.
She looks at me, and Samara crouches to pluck a flower from the path’s edge and holds it up to her. “Aaron lets me handle the landscaping.”
Mara takes it and brings it to her nose, her face going soft. “It smells like honey.” She smiles down at Samara. “You did beautiful.”
“Let me—“ I reach for her, meaning to carry her.
But Mara’s already moving, wobbling up the path with one hand under her belly and her tail swaying behind her. “No. I want to see.”
A couple slow in front of us, and the moment they clock me beside her they both drop into a bow. “My queen,” the woman murmurs.
Mara’s tail snaps up alert, and her eyes cut to me. I close the last steps and wrap my arm around her, then bow my head to the pair of them until they straighten and move off around us, smiling.
“I’ve been working on that,” I tell her. “They’ve been waiting on you for months. I can’t get a single one of them to drop the formal thing. They won’t ease up on me, so I knew they wouldn’t on you.”
“I want to look around.” She’s off up the path again, not waiting on me.
I catch up and settle a hand at the small of her back. “At least let me get you home first.”
She doesn’t so much as slow, so I give it up, and Samara falls in on her other side to show her the path. When we reach the market, Mara stops in the middle of it. She knows this place. It’s where it all nearly ended for us once, where the Glen tried to eat us alive—and now it’s stalls and color and noise, business booming on every side, witches pulling fudge into long ribbons with nothing but their hands and a flick of magic. Everyone she passes dips a head to her, warm and easy, and she presses a hand to her mouth and drinks it down.
She looks back at me, and the question I’ve been holding all this time is already answered in her face. “Do you like it?”
“Aaron. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” But her eyes have gone glassy, her breath coming quick. She sways.
I scoop her up into my arms as her knees start to go, and the half-eaten loaf tumbles from her hand. “That’s enough for now, baby. I’ll show you the rest, I promise. Let me take you home.”
“I’ll do some shopping and meet you there,” Samara calls, already drifting toward the fudge.
So I carry her home the long way, my mate cradled against my chest where I can feel every breath she takes. I take it slow soshe can look her fill—the cottages with their doors hung straight, the gardens, the witches calling greetings from their porches.
“I can’t believe you did all of this,” she says into my collar.
“You taught me how.” I keep my eyes on the road and my arms locked tight under her. “All that patience you carry, for people you’d have every right to quit on. The patience you spent on me—my stubbornness, my selfishness, every time I tried to decide your life for you. You stood with me through the ugliest of it anyway.”
She lifts her head off my shoulder to look at me, something proud and stunned in her face. “And look at the man it made.”
