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Felix stopped me once we’d finished our run as a pack and gotten dressed again. We were walking toward the outskirts of town where Sylvie and I had opted to keep the little cottage they’d set us up in instead of the larger house typically reserved for the Alpha in Silverback along Main Street. We both agreed the initial memories we’d created there outweighed the benefits of more size.
“Did you hear?” He asked.
“About?”
“The Coven made it official. They’re picking up small alliances with all the extremist cults of vamps scattered across the country.”
I nodded. “Preparing for all our war, most likely.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Let them,” I said. “But until they make a move, I’m choosing not to give a shit. I have a life worth living now, and I intend to live every moment of it.”
Felix grinned. “You’re a new man ever since that woman. It looks good on you, though.”
“When are you planning to find one of your own?”
He averted his eyes, then made a dismissive sound. “Just because you’ve gone soft to human ways and decided to settle down, it doesn’t mean I have.” He clapped my shoulder with a wolfish grin. “I happen to enjoy the freedoms of single life.”
He was full of shit, but I let him tell the lie for both our sakes. I’d found myself wondering several times if he’d been hoping to form some sort of relationship with Sylvie’s sister, but if he had, the interest was one-sided. She had since gone back to Blackridge and made it her home. She came to visit Sylvie often, but she preferred to spend most of her nights there with Steve, the vampire boyfriend of hers who had nearly gotten himself killed and dragged them into this world in the first place.
Personally, I found the guy completely unimpressive. He reminded me of the sort of guy who hung around high school parking lots when he was in his senior year of college—completely relying on his age and status to creepily land young girls he would’ve never had a chance with if the playing field was even. Steve had probably captivated her simply because he was a vampire, and I wondered how long her infatuation would last once she realized he was just one of a few thousand in this world.
I grinned, realizing that my protectiveness towards Sylvie had, at some point, extended to her sister as well. There I was fretting over her choice in men. But I supposed it wasn’t shocking. Sylvie cared so deeply about her sister that harm to Maisey might as well have been harm to Sylvie, which meant my charge was to keep both women protected at all costs. My efforts with her sister simply had to be less hands on and less frequent.
I retrieved the ring from the place I’d hidden it in beneath a rock behind our cottage. Yes, it was slightly paranoid, but I’d done a great deal of research into marriage rituals for humans and understood the surprise factor was very important. The story of the proposal, it seemed, was almost as important as the ceremony itself. Of course, I’d planned the perfect proposal. It would all start when she woke up and went looking for me.
50
Epilogue - Sylvie
* * *
I stretched in the bed, expecting to roll to my side and find Riggs waiting there for me to wake. He’d made an adorable habit of that. He said he liked the way I woke up—that I reminded him of some sort of forest creature with all the sounds I made and strange wiggling motions I did.
I loved that about Riggs. He had a way of seeing me that was greater than what I ever saw in myself. He celebrated all my little oddities and quirks like they were strokes of genius on some artist’s masterpiece. Nothing was unimportant to him and he was always discovering new things he seemed to find irresistible about me.
Odd as it may sound, he had a way of making me love myself more, which only made it easier to love him back.
But when I looked around our darkened cabin bedroom, I couldn’t find him. I wondered if maybe one of their pack hunts had gone longer than expected. He was always taking time to run with the pack during the day while I slept. I felt a little guilty about that, because I suspected his job as Alpha was supposed to be more involved throughout the day in the ordinary dealings of running a small town. Sort of like being the mayor.
But the schedule I forced him to keep by being nocturnal meant he slept through all but the most essential duties during the day and usually just made time for the pack activities in wolf form.
I took my time getting dressed and ready. One benefit of vampirism was that it seemed to be the long searched after secret for skin care. Just a little blood every week or so and you too could have perfect porcelain skin. Of course, I highly recommended werewolf blood, if you could come by it.
