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“But,” he continued, “if you’d like me to dismember anyone out of sentimentality, I’d be more than happy to oblige.”
I patted his arm. “Let’s try to make it through the night without maiming anybody.”
A curious male shifter glanced over at us, and Cole growled at him. “No promises.”
“I can handle myself, remember?” The male was a bitfriendlyin his appraising looks, but my mate mark was on full display, and no wolf would disrespect that.
“Yet I find myself rather sentimental.”
I rolled my eyes and walked off, trusting Cole not to immediately hunt the shifter down. Despite his words, he was confident that I belonged to him—and him, me—just as I was confident he wouldn’t actually gouge out the eyes of any male who looked at me.
A whimper came from behind me and I suppressed a wince. Okay, reasonably confident.
I found Daphne embroiled in a heated conversation with Ian, the Fang Alpha.
“Am I interrupting?” I asked.
She lit up, whatever argument forgotten as she embraced me. “You made it!”
“I did.”
She released me, her gaze going up and down. “I can’t get over how different you look.”
A glance down at myself revealed I looked the most normal I ever had. “This is the exact same thing I wore all the time, before...”
I trailed off. Somehow it never got less awkward to say “before I died.”
Daphne shook her head, long tresses of hair falling in front of her face before she brushed them back quickly. “That’s just the thing. It’s not the clothes you wear. It’s how you carry yourself.”
“You mean I’m not constantly cowering in fear of the Alpha Clique?” I laughed. It felt good and strange to be able to laugh at the figures that had once defined the bars of my prison.
“No, you were never half as afraid of them as youshould’vebeen. You gave as good as you got, even if you couldn’t physically win a fight the way you can now. It’s more than that. There’s this sense of… peace around you. Like you’ve finally found your place. The pack where you belong.”
She was right. I had found a place. It wasn’t a conventional pack—Daphne would always be part of mine no matter where we were—but I had found people who cared for me. People I would do anything to protect.
“I guess I did. This dying thing worked out after all.” Across thecrowd, I found a pair of amber eyes watching me, and my heart fluttered.
Daphne twisted to follow my line of sight, a sad smile twisting on her face.
“Thinking of Hector?” I asked quietly.
“In the chaos, it was easy to put my grief aside. But now that everything is done, it keeps bubbling up. I wish it would stop,” she confessed.
I wrapped her in my arms, squeezing her tight. “You have to let yourself feel that grief. You owe it to both of you.”
“I guess.” Her voice wavered. “Is he really in that awful place? When we were in the library, I came across a book that talked about the under-realm. It was awful, Avery. Awful.”
I wished I could lie to her. “He is. That’s what happens in the cycle.”
Wetness touched my shirt. I gripped Daphne closer, wishing I could take away the pain.
“Will he ever be free? Like how you got free?” she asked.
“Maybe,” was the most I could manage. “It’s not the way of things. Tartarus doesn’t like to part with the souls that fall to it.”
Yet as I spoke, another thought came to me. The barest glimmer of possibility. I tried to push it aside and focus on comforting my friend, but she sensed the change in me. She might not have magic of her own, but she had known me since we were pups.
“What is it?”
