Page 100 of Shifters Reckoning

She groaned, and I made my way to the exit, intent on finding Olivia.

“I’ll be back,” I told her from the threshold. “I always come back. Ask Logan. Ask my mother.” I paused on the strange, enormous weight of the word, holding two women in it at once, and found, to my surprise, that it fit. “Ask both of them.”

I let the door to the trove room click closed, and I made my way to the infirmary in the parlor of the manor house. Olivia was awake, upright against a mountain of pillows in the next room, and furious about resting on every single one of them.

“There she is,” she rasped before I’d cleared the door. “The prodigal multimorph. Vanishes in the night, leaves me holding a bag with a war in it, and strolls back in glowing like a nightlight. Shut the door. You’re letting the pity in.”

Covering my grin, I closed the door. Then I settled on the edge of her bed.

Under the blanket, the center of her chest had been wrapped and braced, the skin at the edges of the bandage still pink where healing had dragged her back from death. Shadow hooks had done the damage, and shadow wounds took time to heal. Her gray eyes were bright with fever and the outrage of a woman who had fully intended to die usefully but had been overruled.

“You’re mad you lived?” I asked.

“I’m mad he carried me.” She said it like a confession she resented making. “He had the horde on its heels and the ritual half-broken, and he chose to haul my carcass to the infirmary.” She sighed. “I’ve told that man the mission comes first for years,” she hissed, “and the one time it mattered the most, he didn’t listen for shit, and now the bastard’s alive, and I’m alive, and I don’t know how to be grateful and furious at the same time, so I’ve decided to just be furious. It’s easier.”

I considered my mate’s beta, his second, his conscience, the woman who’d separated us and lectured him and run beside him for years, and it all dropped onto me at once.

“He made the hard call,” I countered quietly. “He stopped being willing to make it the cold way. That’s not the mission failing him, Olivia. That’s him finally understanding what he’s for.” I placed my hand over her braced chest, gently, and let a thread of light sink in, easing what I could. “He’s the anchor. You don’t cut the anchor loose to chase a storm. You would realize that if you weren’t so committed to being mad.”

She was silent for a second. Then, grudgingly, tears slipped over her cheeks. “He carried me the whole way. Talked the entire time. Told me if I died, he’d have to do his own paperwork.” A crack of a laugh that made her wince. “Threatened me with paperwork, Emma, for miles.”

“Sounds like him.”

“It sounds exactly like him.” She looked away as she let me heal her a little more without complaining. For today, from Olivia, it was the same as a welcome-home hug. Then she caught me up on everything that had happened while I’d been away.

Logan found me in the hallway of the manor-turned-hospital, and neither of us said a word. There wasn’t a word big enough. We needed to skip words altogether.

His face twisted, and tears obliterated my vision. Shit. My trembling wouldn’t stop.

I had met myself in a cave, and I had come back carrying a cost I couldn’t articulate, not to him because he’d pay the price too. He’d been to the Void and come back carrying his beta and letting Acheron live long enough to fight a different day.

We were opposite sides of the same coin but unclear how to be together again. My heart fractured. For all the new kinds of sex everywhere, I had also never been the other half of a long-term relationship before. We’d lived a lifetime, doing hard shit apart from each other. How were we supposed to reunite with the wall between us?

“I love you,” I whispered.

“You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved,” he answered. “You are my mate.”

“Why is it so hard to be us?”

“Multimorph fated to an alphahole leader of an affluent pack in the middle of a war. There is no map for us… and we have to fight our way through.” His mouth twisted into a smirk. “Or fuck our way through.”

A new iron depth reverberated through him. He had a steadiness to him that hadn’t been there when I’d left.

“We’re both different now,” I murmured.

His eyes brightened, and his jaw tightened. He didn’t ask what I meant.

“Logan, I⁠—”

Then he had me against the wall, and the kiss wasn’t gentle. His lips ground against mine, and his tongue stabbed my mouth, fierce and bruising, and I welcomed the onslaught. It wasn’t sweet. It had every hard thing we’d ever done in it.

I hate the wall… I pushed the thought toward him, knowing he could only sense the idea of it, not the words. Being apart was tearing us apart, killing us slowly.

“Emma,” he growled over and over. His hands framed my face, and my fingers fisted in his hair. Fresh-cut pine, cigar smoke, smoked whiskey. Home.

Whatever else I’d become, whatever I had to do to close the wound in the world… he was still the truest thing I had.

A crack formed in the wall between us, and he seeped through, and his wolf whined in my head.