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I laughed and kissed him. When I laid my head back down on his chest, over his heart, a sense of belonging filled me for the first time.

Welcome to the pack, Ruby Lockridge.

I heard him. He didn’t say it aloud, but I heard it in my head, the same way he’d told me that he communicated with his pack.

I didn’t just find a name.

I found a home.

EPILOGUE

CONAN

The first time I took her into the closest town, Briton, the leaves were turning.

We walked the whole way, down the old corridor with its clean-cut sigils and across the crossing, and into the market square where the stalls stood crowded under striped awnings. People stared. A wolf in the open, in daylight, with a woman beside him. I stared right back until they found something else to look at.

At the far end of the square stood a stall with bolts of wool in every color. I stopped in front of it.

“I meant to buy you a cloak,” I said. “One that fits you properly. Nellie’s coat is too long in the sleeves.”

Ruby looked at the stall, then at me, and waited. She knew there was more.

“Then I realized I’d be choosing it for you,” I said. “The color. The cut. All of it.” I shook my head. “You’ve had enough people choosing what you wear.”

She went quiet. Something moved across her face, soft and surprised, the way it still did sometimes when I got something right.

“You remembered,” she said with a grateful smile.

Ruby turned to the stall and took her time. She ran her fingers over the wool, testing its weight. She passed the browns and the grays, and didn’t even cast a glance at any shade of red.

Then she stopped at green and touched one in the color of the deep forest. She held it up to the light. “This one.”

“Why that one?”

She looked at the wool for a long moment, and then past it, toward the hills rising beyond Briton where the trees went on forever.

“It reminds me of home.” Her gaze came back to me, and she smiled. “Of the life I have now. With you.”

My heart panged. “It’s perfect.” Just as my home was perfect now with her in it.

We continued walking through town, her wearing her new cloak, and she stopped in front of a store.

“Now I want to get you something.”

“I have everything I need.” I squeezed her hand.

“Come on.” We stepped inside a market and she picked up a jar of honey. “For your tea.”

I smiled at her. I’d mentioned we didn’t have honey the first time I’d made her tea. “You remembered.”

A month later, after another run into Briton, she made us tea and added honey to mine, putting the jar down on our table. “What’s going on, Conan? You’ve been nervous for a week. On the walk home, you kept touching your pocket.”

“You’re observant.” I nodded.

She sipped her tea. “I’m a trained observer.”

It was true. I’d slipped away to meet a jeweler while Ruby was shopping.