Page 53 of The Bear Between Us

"Yes," she says. Simply and completely. "On those terms, yes."

I reach for her left hand. The changed mark warm under my fingers, and I don't say anything else because there isn't anything else required and we both know it.

The bond, which has been deep and settled since the shrine, shifts once more. Not dramatically. The way something that is already solid becomes something you stop checking because you know it will hold.

Elowen looks at our joined hands and then at me and then at the room full of people who have spent six weeks in various configurations of this situation and have arrived here together.

"I should tell you something," she says.

"What."

"Nessa has been taking notes this whole time. In her phone. She thinks I haven't noticed."

I look across the room. Nessa, in the middle of her card game, has her phone at a very unconvincing angle.

"She's going to have questions," Elowen says.

"She always has questions."

"I'm going to answer them. All of them. She deserves the full picture."

"I know."

She squeezes my hand once and then releases it and crosses the room toward Nessa.

I watch them from the east window and the forest behind the glass is quiet and dark and present, and the territory around the building is clean and alive and in the right relationship with everything in it, and the pack and the people Elowen brought into this space are occupying the same room with the ease of ten days of becoming normal.

Brennan appears at my shoulder.

"Well," he says.

"Well," I agree.

"She's going to be difficult to work with," he says. "In the operational sense. She doesn't defer."

"No," I say. "She doesn't."

"Good," he says, which is not what I expected, and he moves off toward the food.

I stay at the window for a while longer.

Outside the forest is still. Inside the building is warm and loud and full of people who chose to be here.

I chose this.

All of it.

The Alpha and the mate and the partner and the man standing at the window watching the woman he claimed and who claimed him right back move through a room full of people, completely herself, completely free, completely his in the only version of that he ever wanted.

The future is secured.

Not because everything is resolved or perfect or finished. Because the people in it chose it with full information and are capable of what it requires.

That's enough.

That's everything.