Page 180 of Knot Who She Claims
The scars on his face—pale rivers of healed tissue that map his survival—only make him look more beautiful to me. They tell a story of pain endured and overcome, of a man who chose to live rather than hide. I reach up and trace one with my fingertip, feeling him lean into my touch like a flower turning toward light.
“Happy birthday, my sweet obsession,” Kylian coos, his voice dripping with theatrical adoration.
He wraps his arms around both Colter and me, his warmth pressing against my spine, and begins to kiss the back of my head repeatedly, each press of his lips a punctuation mark of love.
“Mom! Dads! Gross!” Cassian laments, his voice cracking on the edge of puberty, his face screwed up in exaggerated disgust.
Kylian simply laughs, gives me one last kiss that lingers like a promise, and then steps away—probably to tease Cassian mercilessly about his crush on Harper’s omega daughter. We all see the yearning stares he gives her when he thinks no one is looking, the way his ears turn pink when she laughs…
As a boisterous rendition of “Happy Birthday” rises up—voices discordant and joyful and utterly without harmony—my mates surround me, their hands finding my waist, my shoulders, my heart. Luka's fingers intertwine with mine, Ridge's palm spreads wide against my lower back, Colter's arm anchors me to his side, and Kylian hovers close enough that I can smell the cedar and spice of him.
I look at them—at this life we've built from the wreckage of war and sickness and fear, brick by careful brick, love by stubborn love. I look at my brother, crowned and content, his family a testament to second chances. At Harper, finally victorious over the cake—buttercream, I note with a smile—her mates trailing behind her with napkins and infinite patience. At Brock, raising his glass from across the room, his pack around him. At the Nóthos princes and their strange, beautiful family, their love as fierce and undeniable as gravity.
Then I look at my children—ourchildren—five impossible dreams made flesh, laughing and living and loving without the weight of what came before. They’re unburdened, free, their futures written in blank pages rather than blood.
The music starts, something soft and sweet, a waltz my mother used to play on rainy afternoons, the notes falling like petals. Colter takes my hand, his palm calloused and warm. Ridge takes my other one. Luka and Kylian flank us, and somehow we move together, all of us, a constellation in motion, orbiting the same center of gravity, stepping on each other's toes andlaughing as we collide. We probably look ridiculous and silly and undignified, a tangle of limbs and love spilling across the polished floor…
But…it’s perfect.
They’re perfect.
“I love you,” Colter whispers against my hair, his breath warm and his voice trembling slightly with the weight of the words, as if even now, after all these years, saying it still costs him something—and gives him everything.
I close my eyes and let it wash over me—the warmth of their bodies like a fortress wall, the sound of our children's laughter chiming like church bells, the certainty that this moment, this perfect impossible moment, is real. Not a dream. Not a wish.Real.
“I love you,” I reply, turning my face into Colter's shoulder, feeling Ridge's thumb stroke circles against my palm, feeling Luka's breath against my neck, feeling Kylian's laughter vibrating through all of us. “I love you all, so, so much.”
And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, with a certainty that burns in my chest like an eternal flame, that I finally got my happy ending.
Not the one I expected.
Not the one I planned.
But the one I was always meant to have.
