Page 222 of Feralheart

We gathered by the fire as full darkness settled. The flames sent shadows dancing across our faces.

The food tasted like dirt, but I forced myself to chew and swallow. My body needed fuel even if my mind couldn’t register hunger.

“We need to reach the Oracle together,” I said in a low voice.

Pack, Selira sent through the bond. Pack survives together.

“Maybe the Oracle will kill us all for asking,” Lyndie said.

“The next leg of the race will probably kill us anyway,” Reece snapped. “At least this way we choose how we go.”

Fen was watching me. “We’ll refuse to follow their rules.”

He threaded his fingers through mine, his pulse jumping through my palm.

“Let’s swear on it,” I said.

Lyndie frowned. “Like shaking hands when making a deal?”

“Something more.”

Yes, Selira said in my mind. Form pack.

When I was small, I’d asked my mother why the elite needed ceremonies and bands of metal to make a bond. She’d said, wild things don’t need permission. They just need a witness.

I told them what she’d said.

Reece’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean for us?”

“I’m not sure yet.” I looked at Selira.

She was already watching me, waiting.

Show me what pack looks like, I said. What it costs.

She answered in the way she always did when language wasn’t enough, by sifting a memory into mine.

Wild dragons in a hollow, old stone around them. Gathered close. Sharing everything. They hadn’t done this for a very long time. The hunt had driven them apart. Now too few remained, and those that still lived were scattered, hiding.

But they craved what they’d had before the nobles broke them apart.

Pack wasn’t a ceremony or a promise. It was a fact you made true by choosing it.

It holds, she said. Or doesn’t. No middle.

“We put our hands together,” I said slowly, working it out as I spoke. “And we mean it.” I looked at each of them. “We decide the others matter as much as the wish. That’s what we need to swear.”

Reece was quiet for a moment. “Even if it costs all of us the wish?”

“Even then.”

His throat worked, and he looked at his dragon. “Willa needs me to come home. She and my wife are all I have.”

“I have a younger brother who’s dying,” I said. “Fen has Aristus. Lyndie has her mother.”

The fire had burned down to coals between us, but nobody moved to rebuild it. It felt like the dark had been waiting too.

“We’re each holding someone we love,” I said. “And we’re choosing to hold each other too. All of it at once.”