Chapter 13
Chapter 13
I recognized this box.
One afternoon at the estate, after a long time together, he'd stretched and sat up and opened the desk drawer to get something.
Right at that moment, I started talking about the three rules. I asked his opinion.
He had the box in his hand.
He stayed very still for a moment. Then he put the box back. He said, calmly:
"I don't have any objections."
...
I realized something.
The person whose eyes went bright whenever he saw me.
Was gone.
Tears came without warning.
One. Then another. Dropping onto the floor.
Everything in me caved.
I couldn't hold myself up. I slid down and sat on the floor.
I held my knees.
My voice was broken.
"Cain. Come back, okay?"
"I changed my mind."
"..."
And then, through the blur, a familiar shape appeared in the doorway.
Cain walked in holding a stack of papers.
I couldn't move.
He looked at me. Surprised. Then his face broke into something.
"You're awake."
"Cain?"
He smiled, stepped forward, and pulled me in.
I could feel his heartbeat through my cheek, exactly like it always had been.
I was crying, barely getting the words out.
"Cain. I want to be Marked."
Cain went still.
Two seconds.
Then, from above me, his voice came out trembling.
"Okay."
Beside us, Elara was watching through red eyes.
I found out the full story later.
When the rescue team reached us three kilometers downstream, Cain had one hand gripping my arm and the other locked onto a sharp rock at the bank. The rock had cut into his palm, and blood had been running into the water the whole time. He hadn't let go once.
For three days he had stayed beside me without leaving. Elara had come to bring him a change of clothes when the healer called him away for something, and that was when I had woken up.
Elara told me herself, later.
"I lied. That night I found him holding the ring box, talking in his sleep. I heard enough to know that this person who never let anything matter — had one day when he was very, very careful. And the thing he was afraid of was you leaving."
She said it without bitterness.
"I've loved him my whole life. But I want him to be happy."
As for Declan.
He was wedged between two rocks when they pulled him out. It saved his life. But his legs were paralyzed from the waist down.
He signed a statement clearing Vivienne. She was still held accountable — the Alpha Council ruled she had caused serious harm through recklessness. One year of Pack confinement.
After the verdict, Declan wheeled himself to see her.
"Vivienne. I heard everything you said at the river. I didn't know you felt that way. I'm moved."
He said it in the measured, sincere tone of a man who had finally arrived at an important moment.
"I don't blame you. Take care of yourself. I'll be here when you get out."
Vivienne turned him down on the spot.
She could do that math clearly enough: one year in confinement, or the rest of her life tied to it.
Declan sat there in his chair for a very long time.
Like something carved in place.
The beginning between Cain and me was rough and unplanned.
But the ending was everything.
One year later.
A Bonding Ceremony at the lakeside estate.
Everyone in the Pack was there.
People still looked stunned. The rigid, serious Finance Director — now the Alpha's Mate?
My two subordinates swarmed me.
"Wren, you're so beautiful today!"
"Does this mean we're untouchable now?"
Someone remarked how lucky I was to have found Cain.
He corrected them immediately.
"No. I'm the lucky one. Wren could have spent her whole life alone and been fine. She chose to let me in. There is no one luckier than me."
Elara was there, quiet and composed in the way she always was now. She'd gone to study abroad for a year and come back for the ceremony. She was not alone — there was a young man beside her who talked constantly, peeled food for her, tried to stop her from drinking. She tolerated all of it with exasperated patience and never actually pushed him away.
Partway through the ceremony, a sudden gust of wind swept through.
Guests scrambled to hold down tablecloths.
But the new mates stood in the middle of it, and they looked pleased.
They stayed in the wind, holding each other, kissing, for a long time.
The way people who have done this before, a hundred times, always do.
People remembered that wedding later for the wind. For the couple standing in it, unhurried, like nothing else was happening.
Afterward.
Cain kept the white hair. He had it permanently fixed with a new treatment.
Years later, in the garden by the lake, our children ran up to him.
"Dad, why is your hair white?"
I was in the chair nearby, reading, and I had to look away.
The answer was obvious. Because it suited him.
Everyone said so.
But Cain gave his own answer with complete satisfaction.
"This way your mother can never leave before me."
I paused.
A question I'd asked carelessly, years ago on that stretch of road, had just received its real answer.
Everything I had ever said to him.
He hadn't forgotten any of it.