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WHEN I GOT back to my dad’s place, I was agitated.

I was second-guessing myself. Should I have been so dismissive of Damian? He and I had so much history, after all, and losing him had essentially put my entire life on hold for fifteen years. I was only now beginning to feel as if I was surfacing, as if I’d been underwater for all that time, practically drowning.

Why was that happening? Maybe this was temporary. Maybe I was being ridiculous.

I paced in my room, feeling unsure, feeling confused, and my wolf began to strain inside me.

Well, I’d come here because I wanted to give my wolf a chance to run, hadn’t I?

I shifted.

It flowed over me, as easy as the current of the river, and then I ran in the darkness, under the moon, through the forest, glorying in the goodness of it.

As I ran, I began to feel a sense of peace come over me about Damian.

I wondered if I had finally actually done it—achieved closure.

I had come back to Riverside for closure, hadn’t I? Maybe I had it. I was moving on from him, and it felt good. I had kept everything in motion for so long, because I had thought we were still some epic love story. Now, I realized… we were not.

Damian was not my perfect match. He was a flawed man who I’d been hyperattracted to because of some hormonal shifts in my body.

I knew about scent matches, obviously. Having one meant that I had spent as much time as I could researching every peer reviewed study (and some that weren’t peer reviewed) that had been done on them. I knew that no one really understood why they happened, but that they were not mystical. They had a biological cause and a biological presentation.

A scent match presented as intensified sexual arousal and heightened fertility. It was some kind of evolutionary quirk that popped up in werewolves to improve the odds of breeding. It had never meant that Damian was my soul mate or something.

I guess, however, I’d wanted it to mean that.

It was nice to think that was all sorted out, that I had a built-in mate and that we were perfect for each other and that we’d live together in harmony, totally happy with each other, for the rest of our days. It was a nice, safe feeling to think that was all done.

It was scarier to make a commitment to someone who wasn’t a sure thing, someone who could break my heart, who could leave me, who could treat me badly.

The truth was, however, Damian had done all those things to me.

This time, when I fell in love, I wanted to fall in love with someone who’d proved to me that he cared about me, not someone who I was tied to by some quirk of biology.

I leaped through the foliage in the woods, feeling free and alive and part of nature, in touch with the world around me, happy in a way I could hardly explain.

And there he was.

Another wolf, there in the distance, standing between the trees.

Vincent.

I was so startled, I shifted back.

I ran to him.

He stayed in wolf form, looking me over, and I could swear, his wolf face was smirking. Did he think we were going to…? Was he expecting me to…?

I shifted back to wolf form.

He took off into the woods, and I followed him.

We ran together for some time.

Eventually, we ended up back at my dad’s cabin. I shifted back. I had left a robe hanging outside to put on, and I shrugged into it.

He shifted in a crouch, a naked man in the darkness, looking up at me. “I’ll call you tomorrow?”