Page 239 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

The word entered me like breath into a body that had already accepted drowning.

Mate.

I had used the word before, but never like this. Before, it had been instinct and need, hope wrapped in terror, the wolf’s certainty with the man’s fear dragged behind it. Now Cassie said it with every horrible truth exposed. She knew what Silas had meant to do. She knew what I had believed. She knew I had tried to break us without giving her the choice.

She chose anyway.

“I choose him,” she said. “I choose us.”

The torn bond lifted toward her and I fought it for one last breath. Some stubborn, terrified part of me still wanted to protect her from forever with me. I had seen too much of what I could become. I had felt the wolf looking at Ronan’s throat. I had killed until the courtyard smelled like an opened body. Love didn’t erase that. Her choice didn’t make me harmless.

But Cassie had never asked for harmless.

She asked for me.

“If you are going to kill him,” she said, “then kill me too.”

The moon came through the clouds and the bond snapped into place. It didn’t close around my throat. It didn’t seize my will or drag me to heel.

It came home.

The pain I had made inside myself blazed white, then gold. Every place I had torn open in the dark of my own chest filled with her choice, her trust, her furious love. I felt the magic settle, and beneath the magic I felt something older than rites and cleaner than law.

Recognition.

The corruption had found us. It had used the open circle, the broken rite, the blood meant for another woman. It had tried to bend what it touched.

But it had not made this.

No corrupted spell could have made Cassie look at my wolf and see the man. No control rite could have made her return when freedom waited in the service road. No leash could have taught her to stand before death and demand the right to choose.

The bond was ours because she made it ours.

The wolf staggered and I came up through him, not conquering him, not forcing him down, but returning to myself with his grief and mine braided together. He had only ever wanted to keep her alive. So had I. We had both been willing to become monstrous for it.

Cassie stepped toward me.

Through the wolf’s eyes, I saw her more clearly than I had ever seen anything. Rain on her lashes. Blood darkening the side of her sweater. One shoulder bare to the moon, the mark glowing with a light that didn’t belong to Silas, Evelyn, Ronan, or me alone.

“There you are,” she whispered as she put her hand on me.

The sound of my name would have broken me less.

Her love did the rest. She said it once, and the wolf went silent around the words. She said it again, softer, and I understood that the first time had been spoken to the courtyard because she would not let them shame what was ours. The second time was for me.

“I love you,” she said. “I couldn’t let you sacrifice yourself one more time. Not for me. Not because of me.”

I had thought dying for her would be my first clean act. Hearing her, I understood the cruelty hidden in it. I had tried to make the last choice for both of us. I had taken her agency and dressed it as protection because sacrifice was the only tenderness I had ever trusted in myself.

Cassie saw that and came back furious enough to save me from it.

“So come back,” she said. “Because if I am going to die, I would like the goodbye kiss you were too much of a coward to give me.”

The wolf gave me back. The shift tore through me in reverse. Fur sank beneath skin. Claws shortened to shaking fingers. My bones folded down from the huge shape I had become until I was on my knees in the rain, naked, covered in blood, and trembling so hard I could barely lift my head.

Cassie caught my face in her hands before the last of the wolf had left my eyes.

Her palms were cold. Her touch was real.