Chapter 20

Wren & Kade

The five years that followed didn't happen all at once, the way the worst nights sometimes felt like they had. They happened the way most real change happens — slowly, then suddenly, then slowly again, in a rhythm neither of them fully noticed until they looked up and found themselves standing somewhere entirely different from where they'd started.

Wren.

She learned to lead a pack the way Ezra had promised she would: badly at first, then less badly, then well enough that Nightshade's numbers doubled, then tripled, wolves drifting in from failing packs across the northern territories drawn by rumors of an Alpha who took in strangers and made something out of them worth having. She learned to control her power fully — not just the vanishing, but the lie-sense underneath it, sharp enough by year two that Ezra joked she'd put every dishonest trader in three territories out of business. She buried Petra in year three, gently, at the old woman's own quiet request, and grieved her the way you grieve someone who'd taught you, mostly through silence, that trust arrived on its own schedule and was worth the wait regardless. She watched Milo grow from a boy stirring pots into a young wolf who'd inherited her own stubborn insistence on doing things properly, and found, to her own surprise, that watching him grow felt something like being a mother, or at least like the closest thing to it she'd ever expected to get.

She let Rurik in, eventually, and then, two years after that, let him back out again, gently, both of them understanding without needing to say it aloud that whatever they'd built together had been real and true and simply, quietly, not the whole story either of them was actually meant to be living. He remained her closest ally after that. Some nights, she still wondered if she'd made a mistake letting him go. Most nights, she knew she hadn't.

The ache behind her ribs never fully left. She stopped expecting it to, somewhere around year three, and found, unexpectedly, that living alongside a wound instead of waiting for it to heal was its own kind of strength — quieter than she'd expected strength to feel, and more durable for it.

Kade.

He held Blackthorn together the only way he knew how: by never once letting it show how close he came, some weeks, to not managing it at all. The marriage settled into something functional, almost companionable in its own resigned way — he and Seraphine built a working partnership out of the wreckage of what the wedding had promised and failed to deliver, two people who'd stopped expecting romance from the arrangement and found, instead, something like genuine respect in its place. It wasn't nothing. Some days it was almost enough to distract him.

The ache never left him either. If anything, five years taught him to recognize its particular rhythms the way you learn the moods of a chronic illness — worse in winter, worse at night, worse on the anniversary of a ceremony he'd spent five years trying and failing not to count the days toward. Torren stayed beside him through all of it, steady, unflinching, the closest thing to family Kade had left that didn't come wrapped in obligation.

He heard about Nightshade constantly now — impossible not to, given how thoroughly the pack's reputation had grown, an Alpha whose name still, mysteriously, never quite made it into the markets, though everyone agreed she was young, formidable, and building something that northern packs increasingly wanted to be allied with rather than tested against. He'd stopped pretending, somewhere around year two, that he didn't already know exactly who she was. He'd simply stopped being able to do anything about that knowledge, buried as he was under a marriage, a pack, and a father who'd never fully recovered his old certainty after the night he'd admitted, once, that he didn't have the answers either.

Then, five years almost exactly to the week since a Moon Ceremony neither of them had ever quite finished recovering from, the summons arrived at Blackthorn and at Nightshade within the same day: a Five Packs summit, called by Ashborne, over a border dispute serious enough that every Alpha's presence had been formally requested, no exceptions permitted.

Kade read his copy of the summons in his study, alone, and felt something in his chest go very still.

Two territories north, Wren read hers in the small cabin that had somehow, over five years, grown into a proper pack house, and felt something in her chest do the exact same thing, though neither of them, obviously, could have known that.

Five years of careful distance, five years of half-answered rumors and buried certainties, and a single piece of parchment was about to undo all of it in one room, in front of every pack that mattered, whether either of them was ready for that or not.

Neither of them was ready. Neither of them, in the end, was going to get a choice about it.