Page 105 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"I'm observing the room," I correct.
"That's the corner thing," she asserts. She looks at the gathering—the full, loud, warm entirety of it—and her face carries the specific kind of happiness that belongs to someone who has found their people and knows it. "It's a good party."
"Nora's cooking," I comment.
"And Declan's toasts," she adds.
"Four now," I confirm.
"I counted five," she counters. "The one about the wedding dress was particularly?—"
"Inspired," I offer.
"That's one word for it," she agrees, and her lip twitches in amusement.
We stand in the corner together for a moment, watching the room, and I feel the particular rightness of having someone beside me who understands exactly what I'm doing when I stand in corners at pack gatherings and doesn't require me to stop or explain.
"Come outside with me," I murmur.
She goes without asking why.
The mountain at night has always been the place I think most clearly.
We stand close to the end of the property where the clearing meets the treeline and the lodge light falls across the first real snow of the approaching winter—a dusting that has finally stuck to the frozen ground, the aspens visible as dark shapes against the white—and the noise of the gathering is warm and muffled through the lodge walls behind us.
Harper stands beside me, her shoulder against mine, looking out at the forest.
"Mateo's news," she says, after a while.
"Conservation status," I confirm. "Permanent protection. No one builds on this mountain."
"Ever," she notes.
"Ever," I agree.
She is quiet for a moment. "My car broke down on that road," she observes, looking south toward the logging road she would have driven in on. "If it had made it another two miles, I would have reached the valley and found a signal and called a tow truck and this—" She gestures at everything. "None of this would have been what happened."
"Your car broke down for a reason," I state.
She looks at me. "That's very unlike you."
"I'm making an exception," I confirm.
I can see a flicker as she fights back a grin. Then she does smile, fully and without managing it, and she turns and looks up at me, and the moonlight is doing what it always does on this mountain, making everything larger and more itself, and she is the most real thing I have ever stood next to.
"I love this mountain," she announces.
"I know," I tell her.
"I love this pack," she continues.
"I know that too," I confirm.
"And I love you," she states, plain and direct, the way she says everything that matters. "Which I realize I say regularly now and will continue to say regularly because it is true and I see no reason to be restrained about it."
I lose myself in her.
Then I pull her in, and she comes, and we stand in the dusting of first snow at the border of the territory I have spent my life protecting, and I press my mouth to her hair, and I feel the mate bond with the full, final, settled certainty of something that has arrived and is not leaving.
