Page 97 of Nikolay

We flew.

Through brush. Over stones. Along a narrow animal trail that bent around a stand of pines so old their roots looked like the knuckles of buried giants. The cold burned sweet in my lungs. My paws struck earth in a rhythm that felt older than memory. Once Sage caught up enough to grab a tuft of my ruff in his teeth and tug. I twisted, knocked him sideways with my shoulder, and we went down together in a tumble through ferns and leaf mold.

He was on his feet before I was fully upright, black tail high, eyes bright with challenge.

I sprang at him.

We collided chest to chest, all play and force and grinning teeth, then broke apart and ran again before the moment could become anything slower or stranger than joy.

And inside me something long clenched had opened.

Not fixed. Not solved. But opened enough for air.

When the first lights of Ironwood glimmered through the trees again, I slowed only because the pack around me did. The wave gathered itself, bodies converging toward the clearing in looser groups now, breath steaming, paws quieter over familiar ground.

I emerged from the treeline with my chest wide open and my soul feeling, for the first time since I left Texas, like it had been allowed to remember its own shape.

We shifted back in the clearing in scattered pockets of steam and bare skin, wolves becoming men and women again beneath the moon with that same matter-of-fact ease I had grown up around. My body hummed in the aftermath—legs pleasantly heavy, lungs scrubbed clean, hair damp at the temples from exertion and night air both—and I felt almost foolishly happy as I dragged my clothes back on.

Sage pulled his shirt back over his head a little way off, moonlight catching along his bare shoulders and the long lines of his torso before cloth covered them. I looked once and then made myself stop because I was not sixteen, and yet my body noted him anyway with rude enthusiasm.

By the time we made it back inside, the gathering had narrowed.

The great room still held life in it, but not the whole pack. Families had peeled off. Children had been claimed and carried toward baths or bed, or whatever version of moon-night collapse happened in a place this large. What remained centered itself around the fire now rebuilt higher and hotter than before, a tighter inner circle of the same people I recognized from Obsidian and dinner.

A low table had been set with dessert and more of that dark Ironwood wine. Miniature tarts. Something chocolate layered and dense enough to make a grown woman weak. A bread pudding drowned in caramel. Fresh berries no season had any right to provide this beautifully. Somebody had brought out coffee too, though the smell of it barely cut through the sweeter things.

I sank onto the end of the sofa with a sound I did not bother to hide.

Loralee grinned. “That good, huh?”

I took the glass of wine somebody put into my hand—Sloan, I realized a second later—and laughed. “That good.”

“Honest impressions,” Moriah said, one brow lifting. “We insist.”

“They do,” Sage said from across the low table, where he had taken the chair opposite me. “It is one of their less charming habits.”

“Liar,” Loralee said. “You love post-run validation.”

“I love accurate reporting.”

I should have been more guarded. Instead, I looked around at all of them, at the fire, at my own glass catching orange light, and told the truth.

“I loved it,” I said.

The room quieted just enough to receive that properly.

My fingers tightened around the stem. “I mean really loved it. I didn’t realize how much I’d been missing until I got out there.” I shook my head once, trying to find language big enough for a body-memory. “I forgot what it felt like. To settle into a pack rhythm that way. To run with enough wolves around you that your own senses stop straining so hard. I haven’t had that since I left Texas.”

Sloan’s expression softened first. Then Tristen’s stern face eased by a degree.

“Yeah,” he said, voice rough with agreement. “That tracks.”

“It was beautiful,” I admitted. “And fast. And exactly what I needed.”

Sage said nothing.

He only watched me from across the room with that unreadable stillness of his, one forearm resting on the arm of the chair, wine untouched in his hand. If I had not already learned how dangerous quiet men could be, that look alone might have taught me.