Page 35 of Match Made In Growl
Kieran almost laughed. "I fought it for weeks. Told myself it was proximity, pheromones, the investigation throwing us together. I had a list of reasons it couldn't be real that I added to every night."
"What happened to the list?"
"Freya happened to the list." The warmth in his voice when he said her name was quiet and absolute. "She didn't do anything dramatic. She just kept being herself. Stubborn and brilliant and completely unimpressed by my attempts to keep distance. And eventually my list ran out of reasons that mattered."
Criss turned his mug in his hands, watching the coffee swirl. "And the claiming. The bond. When it locked in. What did that feel like?"
"Like coming home to a place I didn't know I'd been looking for." Kieran studied him. "Why?"
"Just wondering."
"You're not wondering. You're asking because something happened and you're trying to figure out if it means what you think it means." Kieran uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Does it?"
"Does it what?"
"Mean what you think it means."
The kitchen clock ticked. Sage babbled from the other room. Somewhere outside, a bird launched into its morning song with the aggressive optimism that Criss usually found irritating and today found unbearable.
"I don't know," he said. Which was a lie. He knew. His tiger knew. The animal had gone cathedral-quiet inside him, the kind of stillness that came not from uncertainty but from absolute conviction. The fight was over. The question was answered. The only thing left was what Criss chose to do with it.
And what terrified him, more than Rydan Ashkar and more than the collapsing ridge and more than the sixteen years of erased history sitting in Kieran's study, was the understanding that hit him somewhere during the night, lying in the dirt with Steph asleep on his chest. Claiming her meant vulnerability. It meant accountability. It meant becoming the kind of man who could be broken by losing someone, and Criss had built his entire adult life around being unbreakable by never letting anything matter enough to hurt.
She had to choose him. Not because his tiger demanded it or because fate had drawn some invisible line between them. She had to choose him freely, knowing what he was and what he wasn't, and if she didn't, he'd have to live with that.
"Kieran."
"Yeah."
"If someone's mate doesn't know about the bond. If the shifter knows but the other person doesn't. What happens if the shifter never tells them?"
Kieran was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was careful. "The bond doesn't go away. It just becomes something you carry alone. And it gets heavier."
Criss nodded and stood up.
"Thanks."
"Criss."
He stopped in the doorway.
"She deserves the truth."
Criss looked back at his cousin sitting at the kitchen table in the warm house he'd built with the mate he'd chosen and the life he'd earned through years of doing the hard, honest thing. Kieran, who had never once taken the easy road and had somehow ended up exactly where he was supposed to be.
"Yeah," Criss said. "I know."
He walked back to the guest cabin and sat on the porch in the morning sun and let the weight of it settle as he tried to decide if he was ready for something like this. But deep down he knew that didn’t matter anymore.
21
STEPHANIE
She filed the report with Tom's office before noon. Straightforward, factual, stripped of anything that couldn't be verified by a site visit. Trench collapse. Ridge face failure. Structural damage to the newly exposed chamber entrance. She included photographs, magnetometer readings, timestamps. She did not include the fact that the collapse had zero magical precursor, or that the crack patterns in the ridge were symmetric enough to suggest engineering. Those details she kept in her personal journal, locked in the bottom of her field pack.
Tom read it while she stood at his desk. His face did what faces do when people process information they'd rather not have received.
"I'm going to have to flag this for the preservation committee," he said.
