ELENA.
The Nightshade pack dinner is not what I expected.
Which is to say: it is loud, overcrowded, smells aggressively of woodsmoke and roast meat, and at least four different packmates try to hug me simultaneously within the first ninety seconds of my arrival.
I have been gone for three years.Three years without having to think about what could and might have went wrong without my presence in there.
Apparently that is long enough to become the kind of person people are relieved to see alive.
“You’re thinner,” says Old Petra, the pack’s retired healer, pinching my cheek with the confidence of someone who has known me since I was eleven years old.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been skipping meals and you’ve started thinking too much.”
“I’ve been….”
“Busy.” She took the word out of my mouth, “Everyone’s always busy, but that shouldn’t stop you from eating.
Anyway, Come eat.”
Damien catches my eye from across the room.
He looks satisfied in the way that tells me he orchestrated every bit of this deliberately, the noise, the crowd, the deliberate, overwhelming normalcy of it all.
He knows what I need.
He has always known what I needed, even during the three years I wasn’t speaking to him.
I am going to have to address those three years properly.
It will require more than one sitting and probably significant quantities of our parents’ recipe for honey whiskey.
But right now there is food.
There are packmates.
There is the smell of a forest I grew up running in.
And my wolf is not howling tonight.
She is running.
Alexander finds me later on the back porch, which has a view of the tree line and a firepit that someone has sensibly lit against the October cold.
He brings two mugs and doesn’t ask if I want company.
“How does it feel?
I want you to be honest with me.” he asks, sitting beside me.
“Like being warm,” I say, which sounds odd until he nods like he understands it perfectly.
“Damien told me about your parents,” he says after a while.
“The rogues.
When you were fifteen.”
“Hmm…
I see he must have told you a lot.”
“He was very thorough.” Alexander wraps both hands around his mug.
“I lost my mother when I was seventeen.
But, under different circumstances she was human, my father’s mate.
Pack law was different then.
It wasn’t easy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m telling you because…” He pauses, choosing with the care of someone who has learned the cost of choosing badly.
“Because I know what it looks like when a wolf has been grieving so long they’ve stopped noticing.
I recognised it in you.”
“When?”
“The first time I saw you at the Ashford estate.
Three years ago.
You were standing with Dominic at a pack function, and you looked….” He stops.
“Like what?”
“Like someone who had decided to be fine so thoroughly that the decision itself had become its own kind of pain.”
The firepit crackles.
“You’ve been watching me for three years,” I say again, but it sounds different this time.
Less like an accusation.
More like something I am still learning how to hold.
“I have.”
“That could be considered extremely inappropriate.”
“It could,” he agrees.
“On balance, I prefer to think of it as thorough.”
I laugh.
A real one.
The kind that surprises me.
He’s watching me when it happens, and something in his expression shifts.
“Elena.”
“Mm?”
“I would like to take you to dinner.
Not a Nightshade pack dinner.
A real dinner.
Just the two of us.
Somewhere Damien is not ten feet away and his packmates are not watching you like you’ve risen from the dead.”
“I have some residual trauma around being reported dead.”
“I know.
I was there.”
“You were also in a car chase and got shot at.”
“I was.
I’d like to revisit the acquaintance under considerably better circumstances.” His eyes are steady on mine.
“You can say no.
There’s no pressure.
But I’ve been waiting eleven months to ask and I’d like to get it done before I lose my nerve.”
“You have the nerve to spare,” I say.
“I watched you walk into a federal interrogation room without breaking a sweat.”
“Different kinds of nerves.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
My wolf, who has been through so much.
Who has been wounded and patient and silent and then roaringly, furiously, completely alive.
Who chose me when I finally chose myself.
She is very certain about this.
“Yes,” I say.
He smiles.
It is quiet and real and asks nothing of me except to be present.