Ronan’s laugh carried across the training yard before I even saw him, high and delighted, and I turned in time to watch him tackle his brother into the grass with a battle cry that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual training exercise Killian was supposed to be running.
“That’s not how you block a strike,” Killian said, trying and failing to sound stern.
“It worked though.” Draven shoved Ronan off him, grinning, dirt smeared across one cheek.
At five, both of them had more energy than any three grown wolves combined, and more opinions than I’d had at twenty.
“It worked because your uncle wasn’t actually trying,” I called out, crossing the yard toward them.
“Don’t get used to people going easy on you.”
“Uncle Killian never goes easy,” Ronan said, scrambling up with the offended dignity only a five-year-old could manage.
“He said so himself.”
“I did say that.” Killian caught my eye over their heads, something warm passing between us that had become so familiar over the last five years I barely registered it as remarkable anymore.
Five years ago I would have flinched at that kind of casual warmth, waited for the catch behind it.
Now it was just Tuesday.
I still noticed the difference, though.
I don’t think I’d ever stop noticing it.
“They’re getting faster,” Killian said, once the twins had run off toward the training dummies, already arguing about whose turn it was first.
“Draven especially. He anticipates now instead of just reacting. That’s not normal for his age.”
“Is that a compliment or a warning?”
“Both, knowing this family.” He said it lightly, but there was real pride underneath it, the kind he’d never bothered hiding from me even in the early days when I hadn’t fully trusted it yet.
“You should be proud. They’re good boys.”
“I am proud.” I watched them for a moment, Ronan attempting to disarm a training dummy with more enthusiasm than technique, Draven already three steps ahead, correcting his brother’s stance without being asked.
“I still don’t know how they turned out this steady, given everything.”
“Given everything, maybe that’s exactly why.” Killian didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t need to.
We both understood what he meant.
Five years of being loved without condition did something to a child that I hadn’t fully appreciated until I watched it happen in front of me daily, building two boys who trusted easily in a way I still sometimes forgot how to do myself. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
I left them to Killian’s supervision and made my way toward the northern clearing, the one Damien had claimed as our regular training ground years ago, back when I’d barely been able to hold my own shift for more than a few minutes without exhausting myself completely.
The clearing looked different to me now than it had that first year — not because it had changed, but because I had.
Damien was already waiting, along with two of the younger pack members he’d recently started bringing to observe.
I’d gotten used to that too, the way certain pack members watched me train now like there was something to learn from it, rather than something to fear or pity.
It still felt strange some mornings.
Other mornings, like this one, it just felt like my life.
“You’re late,” Damien said, though his tone carried no real reprimand in it.
“The twins delayed me. Ronan wanted to show me a rock he found. It was apparently very important.”
“Everything is very important, at five.” Something almost fond crossed his face before he schooled it back into instructor’s neutrality.
“Today we’re working on sustained shift duration. You’ve held it for eleven minutes at your longest. I want to see if we can push past fifteen.”
Five years ago, the idea of holding my wolf form for even a minute had felt like something reserved for other people, people whose bodies had never betrayed them the way mine had by simply never producing a wolf at all.
Now the concept of *pushing past fifteen minutes* had become an ordinary Tuesday problem, the kind of thing I discussed over breakfast the way other people might discuss whether to take the car or walk somewhere.
I closed my eyes and let the shift come, and even after five years it still felt like something close to relief every single time — my body rearranging into a shape that had been locked away from me for twenty-six years, silver fur rippling into place, my senses sharpening into something that made the whole clearing feel larger and more alive than it did through human eyes.
I held it.
Damien counted under his breath, occasionally offering quiet correction when my form started to waver, and I let myself sink into the work instead of thinking about anything else — no Hellfang, no old grief, no lingering ache that still sometimes surfaced without warning even five years later.
Just the discipline of holding steady, breath by breath, minute by minute, proving something to myself that I’d once believed impossible.
Fourteen minutes in, my legs started to shake.
“You can release it,” Damien said.
“Fourteen is still progress.”
I held it anyway, stubborn in a way that had only gotten worse the more capable I became, until the shift finally broke on its own at just past fifteen, dropping me back into human form on unsteady legs that Damien caught before I could fully stumble.
“Fifteen,” he said, satisfaction plain in his voice.
“You beat your own goal.”
“Barely.”
“Barely still counts.” He studied me for a moment, something more serious settling into his expression.
“You’ve built something remarkable here, Maeve. I don’t think you fully let yourself see that some days.”
I didn’t have an easy answer for that. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Some days I did see it — I saw it in Killian’s easy pride, in Bastian’s ongoing insistence on ridiculous nicknames for the twins, in Lucian’s quiet, steady presence that had never once wavered in five years.
I saw it in my own reflection sometimes, a woman who barely resembled the one who’d walked out of Hellfang bleeding and broken, replaced by someone who trained until her legs shook just to prove she could.
Other days, the old wound still surfaced without warning.
A stray thought about Darius.
A flicker of a memory I hadn’t invited — his hand at my shoulder, the exact pressure of it, still somehow present in my body even after everything.
I didn’t let myself dwell on it long.
I’d learned, over five years, that dwelling didn’t serve me the way it used to.
It only kept old wounds open that had otherwise, mostly, healed.
By the time I made it back to the main compound, the twins had moved from training to chaos, currently engaged in some elaborate game with Bastian that appeared to involve him pretending to be a rogue while both boys “defended” the pack with sticks that were, generously, sword-shaped.
“I have been defeated,” Bastian announced dramatically, collapsing onto the grass with theatrical flair.
“Truly, I never stood a chance against such fearsome warriors.”
“We’re not finished with you,” Ronan informed him solemnly, poking him with his stick for emphasis.
“Mercy,” Bastian said, and caught my eye over the twins’ heads with a grin that hadn’t changed in five years, still exactly as unbothered and warm as the day I’d met him, hand wrapped around mine before I’d fully trusted anyone in this pack not to hurt me.
I sat down on the grass beside them, watching my sons finish off their fictional enemy with theatrical finality, and let myself feel, for a moment, entirely and simply happy.
Not cautiously happy, not waiting for the catch.
Just happy, the way I’d learned, slowly, over five years, that I was allowed to be.
It wouldn’t last forever.
Some quiet, watchful part of me had learned that lesson too well to ever fully unlearn it, and some days I still felt it humming underneath even the good moments — the awareness that peace, however hard-won, was never guaranteed to hold.
But it had lasted five years so far.
Five years of Draven’s steady seriousness and Ronan’s reckless joy, five years of brothers who’d chosen me before they had proof, of a father who looked at me some mornings like he still couldn’t quite believe I was real.
Whatever came next, whatever Hellfang eventually did with the knowledge that I was still alive out here, still growing stronger, still raising two boys who had no idea their father’s name yet — I had this.
Five years of it, built with my own hands, entirely apart from the man who’d once decided I wasn’t worth keeping.
I intended to protect every single day of it.