Page 43 of A Wolf's Revenge

Amy listened without speaking, and in her listening, I felt the particular generosity of a woman making room inside her understanding of her husband for a person she’d never known. That generosity cost something. She was giving it freely.

“There’s a thing I haven’t said,” I told her. “Because I’ve never said it to anyone, and because for thirty years, I believed saying it would be a betrayal of you.”

She waited.

“Kerra was my mate.” The word came out level, the way the hardest things have to. “My wolf knew it the first time I caught her scent, in a corridor, before I’d said three words to her. I spent six months refusing to hear it because hearing it would have made the work impossible.Then she died, and the bond went with her, and I burned.” I looked at the wine in my hands and not at Amy. “I’ve spent eleven years believing that what I gave you was the part of me that was left over. That you’d married a wolf with a dead bond and I’d let you do it because I was too much of a coward to tell you that the best of me had already burned down in 1989. That you deserved a mate, and what you got was a man pretending he could be one.” I made myself look at her then. “That’s the thing I was most ashamed of. More than Kerra. More than the child. That I let you bond to me knowing I had nothing real to give back.”

Amy was very still.

And my wolf — the one that had gone quiet in a fire and stayed quiet for thirty years, the one that had come back to its feet two nights ago in a poisoned building with her scent in my throat and our son in my arms — was not quiet now. It was doing the thing it had done exactly twice in my life: once in a school corridor, and once in a stairwell in Red Hook. It was recognizing her. Not for the first time. For the first time that I’d let myself feel it.

The bond I’d believed was dead pulled tight from my side, and answered hers, and held.

“It wasn’t leftover,” I said. My voice wasn’t entirely steady now. “I was wrong about all of it. A wolf doesn’t bond once — a wolf bonds once and survives it, and if he’s very lucky, he gets to find out the hard way that surviving it isn’t the same as being finished. The quiet wasn’t because there was nothing left. It was a wound. And it’s been closing since the night I came up those stairs and found you holding a piece of metal, ready to fight your way out with your bare hands.” I stopped. “You’re my mate, Amy. You have been for eleven years. I just couldn’t feel it through the burn until I almost lost you the same way I lost her.”

For a long moment, she didn’t say anything.

Then her hand came up and pressed flat against my chest, over the place where she’d been able to feel, for eleven years, only the faintest answer — and I watched her feel the difference. Watched the bond complete on her side the way it had just completed on mine, the thing she’d carried alone since a dinner party eleven years ago, suddenly carried by both of us. Her eyes went bright and stayed there, and she let them.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. Her voice cracked on it. “You let me wonder for eleven years, and the answer was that you loved me so much it took a kidnapping to wake the part of you that already knew.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the short version.”

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else, and pressed her forehead to mine the way I had pressed mine to Kerra’s in a burning room, except that this was the opposite of that — this was a thing that was beginning, not ending.

“I still need time,” she said. “With the human part of it. With the fact that you hid her, and the child, and let me build a life next to a locked room. The bond doesn’t erase that. I won’t let it.” She pulled back enough to look at me. “I need to be able to feel what I feel about it without managing your reaction to my feeling it. Can you give me that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I need you to understand that I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “That’s not what needing time means. It means I’m going to stay, I’m going to be honest with you about where I am, and some of those places are going to be difficult, and you’re going to have to sit in them with me.” She paused. “The way I’ve been sitting in things with you for eleven years. Except now, you’re going to feel me doing it. There’s no quiet for you to hide in anymore.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Good.” She looked at me for one more moment. Then she said: “Come here,” and I did. She put her head against my shoulder, I put my arm around her, and we sat there together while Noah slept in the next room, and for the first time in thirty years, I was not alone inside my own skin — the bond a low steady thread between us, hers and mine, running both directions at last.

I sat in the quiet of Amy’s breathing, the weight of her against my side, and held the full truth of everything I was, everything I had done, and everything I had somehow, despite all of it, managed to build.

It was not clean. It would never be clean.

But Kerra had been right about consequence. Every choice I’d made had branched outward into some other version of this life, and in most of them, I was a worse man, or a deader one, or a man who’d never come up those stairs in time. I had not earned the version I was sitting in. I knew that. I intended to spend the rest of it trying to.

Amy shifted against me, her hand finding mine, the bond moving warm and certain between us.

She had heard all of it. She had said she was staying.

And this time, I could feel that she meant it — not for now, not as much as she was able, but the whole way down, mate to mate, for as long as we both kept choosing it.

That was everything.

34

We buried Jeff Alli on a wet morning in April, in a cemetery upstate where the grass hadn’t fully come back yet, and the ground gave up the hole reluctantly, the way old ground does.

There weren’t many of us. There didn’t need to be.

Amy stood beside me with her hand in mine, and Noah stood in front of us both in a coat he’d already outgrown at the sleeves, holding very still in the way he’d learned to hold still over a bad week in September and hadn’t entirely unlearned. Vincent Marr came — drove himself, which I hadn’t expected, an old man in a black coat who’d known Jeff for eight months as a number on a chain and had decided that was enough to stand in the rain for. And that was all of us. A wife who’d never met him until the night he died for her son. A boy who knew him as Daddy’s friend a long time ago, who was trying to be again. An old broker who’d taken him on because a man hungry to atone won’t fold. And me.

Four people for a man who’d spent sixty-some years in a world that ran on hundreds. It should have been sadder than it was. But Jeff had spent the last of those years making sure the people who’d grieve him were the right four, and four right ones is more than most men get.