My Ex-Mate Wants Me Back

Ryan carried me out of the ballroom before I could argue that I was perfectly capable of walking. The truth was that my legs had stopped listening to me somewhere around the moment Logan left, and my pride was not strong enough to pretend otherwise.

Behind us, Finn's voice rose over the buzzing crowd with the practiced cheer of a man who had spent his life cleaning up his brother's scenes. "Gentlemen, ladies, the music has not died, and the wine has not run dry, so I suggest we all return to enjoying the finest hospitality the north has to offer."

I heard the quartet pick up a waltz as the heavy doors closed behind us, and then there was only the sound of Ryan's boots on the stone and the distant crackle of torches in their iron brackets. He took the stairs to the upper keep without slowing, and he held me as if I were made of something rare that might shatter in the cold air.

When we reached his chambers, he set me down on the cushioned bench beside the fireplace and crouched in front of me. In the firelight his eyes were a deep, burning gold, and I could see the effort it cost him to keep the wolf behind them from rising.

"Tell me what you need," he said. "I can bring food, or water, or silence, or I can leave if you prefer to be alone."

I stared at my hands, which were trembling in my lap like leaves in a storm. "I need you to tell me this is not a trick of the Moon Goddess, because I have been the punchline of that kind of joke before. I was told for five years that I was unlovable, and I believed it so completely that I stopped checking whether it was true."

"Giuliana." He said my name slowly, as though it were something he intended to keep. "Look at me."

I looked, and I saw no pity there, only a steady and patient certainty that made my throat ache.

"I have lived for a hundred and some years," Ryan said, "and in all that time I have never once been lied to by my wolf. When he looked up at that balcony and said your name, he was not guessing. He knew you the way the tide knows the shore."

A tear slipped down my cheek, and I wiped it away angrily. "That is exactly what frightens me. I trusted an Alpha once because everyone told me it was right and fated and sensible, and he took everything I had to offer and used it to light his own fires."

"I am not him."

"I know that you are not him." My voice cracked. "But my body does not know it yet, and every time you touch me, some small cowardly part of me is waiting for the blow that always follows the kindness."

Ryan was quiet for so long that I thought I had insulted him. Then he reached out slowly, giving me every chance to pull away, and took one of my hands between both of his.

"I will not mark you tonight," he said. "I will not claim you in any way you have not asked me to, and I will not touch you unless you invite it. You may sleep in this room with the door locked from the inside, and if you wish, I will sleep in the corridor with my back against the wood."

"You would do that?" I whispered. "You are the King of the North, and you would sleep on a stone floor for a stranger?"

"You are not a stranger." His thumb moved gently across my knuckles. "Three years ago, on a night of freezing rain, I ran the northern border alone because I could not sleep. And I heard a wolf howling on the far side of the Blackwood hills, a sound so lonely that my own wolf answered it before I could stop him."

My breath caught. "I do not remember howling three years ago."

"You may not have known you were doing it." A faint, rueful smile touched his mouth. "I stood at the boundary stones until dawn, torn between crossing into another Alpha's territory and honoring the law. I told myself it was a lost rogue, or a trick of the wind, and I went home and swore I would never be that foolish again."

I stared at him, my heart doing something strange and tender and terrifying. Three years ago I had been a Luna in name only, and some nights I had slipped out through the servants' passage to sit in the cold garden and let my wolf cry because I was not allowed to do it indoors.

"You heard me," I said slowly. "All that time I thought nobody could hear me at all."

"I heard you then, and I hear you now." His gaze lowered to the bare skin of my neck, where Logan's mark had once been. "I will not rush you, Giuliana, and I will not demand anything you cannot give, because patience is the only gift I have ever been truly good at. A century of waiting has at least taught me that."

The fire popped softly, and for the first time since the night began, the knot in my chest loosened. I laughed, a small and shaky sound that surprised both of us.

"You are very difficult to be afraid of," I admitted.

"I will take that as the highest compliment I have ever received."

I tried to stand, intending to cross the room and look out of the tall window at the moonlit mountains, but the floor tilted beneath me as though the whole fortress had been built on the deck of a ship. Ryan caught my elbow instantly, his expression sharpening.

"What is wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong. I only stood too quickly, and I have not eaten properly in days." Another wave of dizziness rolled through me, and this time the edges of the room began to blur and darken. "Perhaps I should sit down again."

"Giuliana." His voice was suddenly very far away. "Your scent has changed."

I wanted to ask what he meant by that, but my tongue had turned heavy and clumsy in my mouth. The firelight stretched into long golden streaks, and the sound of my own pulse swelled until it drowned out everything else.

Ryan's arms came around me as my knees buckled, and I heard him shout for his brother in a voice raw with a fear I would never have believed he could feel. The floor rushed up, and his hands cradled my head before it could strike the stone.

In the last moment before the darkness took me, I felt something that terrified me more than any blade, and it was not the cold or the pain.

Beneath the frantic rhythm of my own heart, there was a second, smaller beat, fluttering stubbornly like a bird trapped inside my ribs, and it was not mine.