Page 104 of Fate, Interrupted

I watch her absorb the fact that two men stood in an alley and treated her choice as a judgment on their lives. She didn’t ask for that.

“So, it was never really about wolves,” she says.

“It’s never really about wolves,” I say. “It’s about what choosing a wolf says about the world everyone else has agreed to live in. You didn’t agree. That’s the problem.”

“I didn’t know I was dissenting,” she says. “I thought I was just living my life.”

That gets me. I don’t let it show completely, but she sees it anyway—the small thing that moves through my expression before I get it back under control.

“The guy with the bruise,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“He knew he’d made the wrong call.”

“Probably,” I say. “He made a different choice than you did. And I think that’s what he couldn’t forgive.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

“It gets sadder,” I say. “Because he’s not wrong that it costs something. He’s wrong that the cost can’t be worth it.”

“Is that what you think?” she says. “That it’s worth the cost?”

I hold her gaze.

“I’m sitting in your house at ten o’clock on a weeknight,” I say. “What do you think?”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. I asked the question. I’m still sitting here. That’s the answer.

My hand moves from her wrist to her palm. My other hand finds her waist. She doesn’t resist it, doesn’t question it, just meets me honestly.

“Don’t tell me later you didn’t know what this was,” I say.

“I won’t,” she says. Nothing uncertain in it.

I kiss her—taking it for what it has been for longer than either of us has said out loud. She doesn’t hesitate. Her hands find the front of my jacket and she pulls me closer, and I let her, and the wolf goes quiet in a way it hasn’t gone quiet in weeks—the deep quiet of a wolf that has found what it was looking for and has no intention of letting go.

We walk into the bedroom, because there’s no hurry here. I undress her slowly, my hands following the path of what I’m uncovering, unhurried, attentive, giving each moment the weight it deserves.

When I look at her, her breath is slightly uneven, and her hands are over her head, trusting, enjoying. Her eyes find mine with the expression of someone confirming what she already knows but still needs to feel: that I want her.

After the alley, after tonight, after everything this city has been doing to make the space between us feel like a liability—she’s still here. Her hands on my arms now, loose—neither holding on nor letting go.

I think about the two men in that alley and what they wanted from her. She gave them nothing. She walked past them at her own pace, got in her car, and later called me because she had already decided they would not control what happened next.

There’s a cold thing sitting in my chest right now that the wolf has been keeping since the call ended.

I know what I’m going to do with the cold thing.

For right now, there’s this. Norah here, the house quiet, the city outside, the complete absence of anywhere I would rather be. That’s the thing I keep arriving at when I try to think clearly about any of this. Not the complications, not my father’s voice, or Logan’s warnings, or the city tightening around us. Just her hands, this room, this hour.

Paxton.

I’ve been turning that over since my cousin Declan said it at his wedding—offhand, over whiskey, not even directed at me—and it hit the way things hit when they’re answering a question you didn’t know you were asking.

Three hundred miles from my father and his order. Three hundred miles from a city building laws around what I am and calling it accountability. Three hundred miles from a company and pack structure that will keep running without me because Logan has always been the one it was built around.

Three hundred miles toward a pack that made a different choice and a town that doesn’t know us yet. We would get to decide what we are to each other before anyone else did.