Page 68 of Shifters Reckoning

One by one, around the room, the truce reassembled itself out of the wreckage. Not warm, not whole. I stood to the side, swaying on my feet, deciding with a clarity that I’d have traded anything to forget what I had just done.

I hadn’t persuaded them. I hadn’t led them through peace talks. I had reached into sovereign hearts without asking and linked a bunch of shifters without asking.

I bit back a sigh. It had taken less out of me than a hard morning at the clinic. Somewhere in the last two months, the gym accident had cost—no, gifted—me weeks of horror and the ability to overwhelm the self-determination of the most defended minds in the state.

As a result, the dissenters were afraid of me, and standing there in the ringing quiet, feeling all their pulses settle into the matched rhythm I had chosen for them, I finally stopped finding that unreasonable.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

emma

Six-Mile

That Night

Logan got me out before everyone saw my knees buckle, one arm girded under mine, growling something about maps.

Dr. Wise caught us at the gym door. She didn’t scold me. Instead, she peered up at me through her spectacles. Gently, she said, “I know why. For what it’s worth, I’d have likely done the same, and the truce may save us all.” A pause, precise as a footnote. “The one in 1849 started exactly this way, Emma. Small mendings. Good reasons. A paw full of heartbeats at a time. Let me finish reading before you do the next one.”

“No promises,” I said, and I meant it.

Outside, the November cool hit me, and the stars were doing their winter best over the tiny homes. My mate helped me toward the manor. We had days, dwindling on the clock.

You felt all that, I said through our bond, too tired to speak.

Every bit. His thumb moved on my shoulder. You put the fences back, Emma. Acheron never would. He’d have consumed them all. That’s the whole difference.

Is it enough of one?

He didn’t answer right away.

It’s the one we’ve got, my anchor said finally. Come to bed, love. Tomorrow, we build.

Above us, a raven soared, high and silent. The bird was one of ours, and she flew away south, past the territory boundaries, toward the darkness that wanted to consume the world.

We didn’t speak on the walk up from the gym.

Logan kept one arm hooked beneath mine, taking the weight I was too proud to admit I couldn’t carry. I let him because the alternative was folding into the gravel in front of our war camp.

“Stop it,” Logan growled as we reached the porch steps.

“Stop what?”

“Whatever you’re doing in there.” Beneath the November stars, he gripped my shoulders and turned me to face him. The lights from the tiny homes caught the scorched stripe where Acheron’s destruction had kissed him. “I can feel it going around and around. You kept hundreds of shifters from duking it out in the gym. That’s the whole of it.”

“You didn’t feel the part where I liked how easy it was.”

He didn’t flinch. He never once flinched from the ugly true parts of me, and God, I loved him so much in that moment it felt like a gaping wound in my soul.

“No,” he said, “but you released them, Emma.”

I said nothing, and he led me inside the headquarters.

The manor was quiet, the war planning paused. He brought me into the master bedroom, the alpha’s lair. Our room. God, the words still did something to me.

He left my side long enough to shut the door. My whole world narrowed down to the two of us, a made bed, and a window full of stars.

My hands trembled first, and the tremor spread through me.