Chapter 65

By the time the moon had risen over the valley, the snow had hardened into a pale crust that gleamed like a carpet made of diamond dust and crackled softly underfoot. Lara stood at the edge of the trees with her hands in the pockets of the coat she didn't really need and watched her breath turn white in the dark. The world around her was all silver and black, branches glazed with frost, the trees long dark shapes beneath the winter sky. Somewhere deeper in the forest, something small moved through the brush and then went silent again.

He was late. Not by much. Barely a few minutes. Still, the delay sat inside Lara like a tiny splinter.

Then he emerged from between the trees. He came without hurry, his expression unreadable even before he stepped fully into the moonlight. Snow clung in faint damp patches to the hem of his coat and the knees of his jeans.

"You're late," Lara said.

"Yes. Sorry," he said, his tone perfectly unapologetic. "I had things to attend to."

It was such a perfectly Ethan answer that under other circumstances she might have smiled. Tonight she didn't. He stopped in front of her, not too close, not too far. Without another word, she turned and started into the woods. Ethan fell into step beside her.

They walked for a while in silence. Snow muffled the forest into something deceptively peaceful. Their boots sank through the thin crust with soft crunches. Bare branches clicked together overhead whenever the wind shifted. Here and there moonlight spilled across the ground in pale strips between the trees, making the drifts gleam and the hollows look blacker by contrast. Lara kept her pace even, unhurried.

When they were far enough from the road and the house lights no longer showed through the trees, she stopped and unbuttoned her coat. Ethan did the same. Clothes were folded and set under a leaning spruce with the automatic efficiency of long practice.

The change came easily to her. It always had. The brief, familiar wrench through bone and skin, the drop into another balance, another architecture of muscle and scent and hearing. Snow felt different under paws, more natural. The night rushed in all at once, rich with frozen sap, rabbit tracks in the fresh snow, and Ethan.

He landed beside her in his wolf form, enormous and dark, the low blue-black sheen of his fur catching what little moonlight the branches let through. He was broader than most full-grown males, and now, without that distracted edge to him, looked more like an alpha heir than ever. Lara watched him for a second too long. He noticed, of course.

She started moving before he could call attention to it.

They ran. At first the forest took them in easily. Ethan matched her stride without effort, without trying to dominate the pace. Snow kicked up behind them in pale bursts. The cold air burned sweet in Lara's lungs. For several minutes they might have looked, to anyone watching from far enough away, like what they were supposed to be: two young lupines cutting through the winter dark together under the quiet authority of old custom.

Lara took them deeper into the forest. Then, by degrees so slight another lupine might not have seen them as deliberate, she angled east, just a little. To her surprise, Ethan corrected at once. The change in his path was nearly imperceptible, but it was there, a smooth, immediate redirection that nudged the entire run back onto a safe track.

Interesting.

Lara adjusted again a minute later. Again, he corrected. This time she felt his awareness sharpen on her. He knew. Good. She wanted him to know. She wanted to feel, under her own paws and through the snow-packed earth, exactly what lay inside that new stillness of his.

The third time she angled east, he cut across her path outright. His head turned toward her once, amber eyes catching moonlight, and in that single look he told her very clearly that the game was noticed and he was ending it. Lara veered away first.

For a while they simply ran in silence. And then, just before they reached the ravine, they hit the scent of fox, thin and sharp in the cold night. The animal was moving low through frozen brush. Lara scented it first and altered course. Ethan followed, though with less interest than she expected.

The fox burst from under a half-fallen log in a flash of red-brown and snow. It was an older one, its red-brown fur dulled with age and thinned in uneven patches, its frame too lean beneath the winter coat. Weak enough to catch without effort. Strong enough not to die quickly. Lara hit it before it had taken three bounds. Her jaws closed across its hindquarters, not deep enough to kill, only enough to break rhythm and drag a screech out of it. The fox twisted wildly, scrambling in the snow, its back legs collapsing under it. Blood flooded the air all at once, hot and bright.

Lara let it go. The fox dragged itself forward in a frantic, useless scramble, front paws clawing for traction while the injured back end failed it over and over. It would not survive the night.

Lara turned her head to Ethan. He had gone perfectly still, still in the way of someone seeing very clearly what is being offered to him and seemingly disliking it even when something deeper in him wanted it. Good , she thought again. Feel it. Show us both if it's truly out of your system.

He looked from her to the fox once. Then he moved. He came down on the fox with one swift, terrible precision. The sound was brief, sharp, final. Merciful. The fox went limp at once. Silence poured back into the trees.

Lara stared at the dark red stain spreading under the snow. Then at him. Ethan released the fox and stepped back. His head turned toward her, giving her one hard look, and then he shifted. He straightened slowly, bare in the moonlight, steam still rising from skin marked by several faint silvery scars that had not yet fully faded. His face had that same sharpened look she had been seeing all week, focused enough to cut with.

Lara shifted a second later. Fur sank into skin in a rush of cold air. Bones pulled inward. The world changed scale. Snow bit bare feet. She rose into herself and dragged one hand through her hair.

For a moment neither of them moved.

"Don't ever test me like that again," he said without raising his voice, yet his tone carried no doubt.

Lara held his gaze. "Or?"

His eyes gleamed in the night. "Or next time I won't finish the lesson with the fox."

The words landed harder than they should have, even though they were spoken quietly. Because he meant them. She saw it in his eyes.

Lara wrapped her arms around her naked torso. "You've changed," she said.

He raised a single brow. "Have I?"

The question that had sat inside her all week moved up through her throat before she could decide whether it was wise to ask. "What happened that night," she asked, keeping her tone even, "in the forest? With the bloodkin."

Ethan went still in a way she had started to recognize as genuinely dangerous. He swallowed.

"Nothing that concerns you."

That stung. Lara hated that it did.

"What concerns me," she said carefully, "is whether the heir I'm supposed to stand beside is finally stable, or whether he has only gotten better at hiding his weakness."

He held her gaze without a blink. Whatever softness existed in him, if any, none of it touched his face now.

"This thing between you and me," he said, his voice flat, "is an arrangement made by our parents. Nothing more. It has never been anything more, and you know it."

The sentence cut with the precision of a knife. Lara's fingers curled inward. For one bare, humiliating moment she felt the wound of it like any ordinary girl might have, not because she truly loved him, but because it still hurt her personal pride.

When she answered, her voice came out lower than before. "That might be true, but you should also remember that I'm not the only one who loses if that arrangement falls."

That made him pause. Good. Let him hear that part, if nothing else.

She pulled her arms tighter around herself and stepped closer, forcing him to look at her, really look. "If this breaks," she said, "you don't simply lose me. If my father decides to take power openly, do you think he leaves yours standing?"

Ethan's face changed by a degree. Because he knew she wasn't wrong. That was the worst of it, really. For all their differences, Ethan understood the same world laws she did. Power. Lineage. What happened if one structure failed and another moved in to replace it.

"I know what falls with it," he said at last.

Lara searched his face. "And?"

He looked past her then, toward the west where Greystone land spread darker through the trees. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter.

"And that's the only reason I'm doing this. Out of duty. And respect. Nothing more." He took in a breath. "I'm sorry if you feel it's not fair to you. It's not fair to either of us."

The words sank into the snow between them. Lara let out one slow breath through her nose.

She bent to pick up the fox's limp body by the scruff, more to puncture the shape of the moment than because she wanted the thing. Then she dropped it again almost immediately. Let the forest have it. She had no use for it any longer.

Ethan watched her do it and said nothing. Instead, he shifted into fur and ran back toward the spruce.

Lara followed a beat later. Before she caught up to him, she understood two things. The first was that Ethan had not returned to the old version of himself. The second was that whatever had steadied him had somehow changed his connection to Kelsey Blackwell. He no longer pulled east because he no longer needed to. It should have brought her comfort. It should have brought him closer to her and the agreed future. But for some inexplicable reason, it didn't. And that part upset her more than she had ever dared to say out loud.