The Change ripped through Fenris like a seizure, bones cracking and knitting with sickening wet sounds, fur retracting into searing flesh. One moment he was a wolf of shadow and rage; the next he was a naked man in agony, on his knees in the bloody muck beside Albi, the world swimming in a haze of panic. The coppery stench of the elk’s death-moment mixed with the sharper, wrong scent of Albi’s wound and the acrid bite of gunpowder.

  “Albi,” he rasped, the word tearing from a raw throat. He had never felt a fear this strong. He had never felt a panic this pure.

  He tried to lift her, to cradle her against him and run; he did not think how many miles separated him from Black Rock. He did not think about whether he could make it. There was no time to think about such things. The instant his hands slid under her back and thighs and lifted, agony, bright and searing, exploded in his own side. It was her pain, mirrored and amplified through the bond, a feedback loop of shared ruin that stole his vision in a burst of white stars. He cried out, dropped her weakly back to the ground, and nearly collapsed on top of her. His hands came away slick with blood that seemed to smoke faintly in the cool air. It was too dark, from places too deep, with a foul, metallic sheen.

  His palm touched something hard and cold on the ground beneath it. He pulled his hand back. A spent brass cartridge casing. He brought it to his nose. Powder. And beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the sweet-tainted reek of silver.

  Pure silver. The bane of their kind. Lead could be pushed out, the Change could knit the flesh. Silver festered. It poisoned the blood, corrupted their cells, and made their healing slow and insignificant. This was no accident. No hunter from the lowland villages would carry such costly, specific ammunition for deer. This was a message. An execution. These were wolf-hunters.

  Hroth.

  The name was a cold stone in his gut. The Alpha of Deep Water held the riverland. They were the gatekeepers between the Skoltha forests and the world of men. No wolf-hunting party could slip the river and fall this deep into Black Rock territory without being seen by Hroth’s Guardians, without being allowed. This was a declaration. A subtle, deniable war, beginning with this silver bullet.

  Through the bond, he felt Albi’s life ebbing. A slow, relentless draining. The warmth of her was leached away by the ground below, replaced by a creeping cold. Panic, colder than the mountain air, seized his lungs.

  A weak, trembling touch fell on his wrist; her hand, the fingers pale and slick with her own blood. Her honey-smoke eyes were glazed, struggling to find his face. Her lips moved, forming words she couldn’t find the strength to make. Then her thoughts, thin and fading, brushed against the walls of his mind instead.

  Fenris. It was less a name than a final anchor thrown in a storm. I lied…..I don’t want to die.

  The plea shattered him. He was Fenris of Black Rock, who had faced blizzards and famine and Challengers in the bloody circle. Here, now, he was utterly helpless. He could press his hand to the wound, try to stop its outpouring with brute force until his own strength failed. He could try to carry her, but every jolting step would be fresh torment for them both, would likely kill her sooner, and the village was hours away over rough ground. Despair, black and final, began to close its fist around his heart. He didn’t want her to feel that. He wished he knew, as she did, how to block the sensation from reaching her.

  Then, knowledge surfaced—not a thought, but an instinct, deep and old as the bones of the earth. His body was whole, thrumming with vitality. Hers was failing, poisoned by silver. The bond between them was a conduit, and it was thrumming with her fading pulse; asking him to share.

  He could save her. With himself. With the very essence of what their union had forged. It would be a violation of his and her boundaries of self, a sharing more intimate than any hunt, any coupling. It would require a surrender from them, a mingling deeper than flesh.

  He looked from her terrified, pleading eyes to the silver cartridge in his bloody hand, to the ruined men scattered in pieces on the forest floor only a few paces away. The political fury, the cold calculations of war, all shriveled to ashes. There was only the thread of her life, fraying in his grasp, and the terrifying, undeniable truth that she would die here unless he did something.

  He met her gaze, and through the bond, thick with her pain and his dawning, desperate resolve, he sent a single, unwavering pulse of understanding, of promise.

  I will not let you die, Albi. You are the mate of the Alpha of Black Rock. Do you trust me?

  Fenris sent the thought, a fragile thread in the storm of her fading consciousness.

  Albi’s eyes were glazed with pain so acute it no longer felt painful, only cold, dull and damp. They focused lazily on his face. She was not seeing him, not really. Through the bond, a cascade of disjointed images flooded into his mind: the milky, sweet scent of newborn Isangrim’s scalp as he nursed, drowsy and content. The determined, clumsy grasp of tiny fingers around a smooth river stone she’d placed in her palm for him to take. The sound of his raspy laugh, a bubbling, hiccuping gurgle that made her heart clench with a fierce, protective joy. They were the last, loose threads of herself unraveling, anchoring themselves to the only peace she had left in the world.

  She was trying to fade away, to sink into those soft, final memories. The place in his mind where she’d been was starting to become wider, quieter, more empty, more out of reach. She was saying goodbye to them both.

  Fenris’s hands, blood-slicked and trembling, came up and gripped her face, his thumbs pressing into her cold cheeks.

  “Albi,” he growled out loud, his throat too tight, useless. “Don’t leave me.”

  Her eyelids fluttered open. She blinked, heavily, and her gaze found him again, clinging to it.

  I don’t want to leave you.

  Fight it. The command was simple, a rope cast into the vast blackness that was becoming her slipping consciousness. Fight it like you fight everything else, Albi.

  You must know, Fenris…..you must know….

  A silence hung between them in the strange, shared space of their bond. Then, a soft, wondering thought from her, tinged with exhaustion and a startling vulnerability. ……how much you mean to me, Fenris of Black Rock.

  And Fenris saw. The wall made of forged iron that had kept him from the deepest parts of her mind now became as thin as glass. It cracked and shattered before his eyes.

  All the moments she had hoarded like her gifted coins. The stolen glances, not just at his face, but at the way his hands moved when he spoke with them, the crease of concentration between his dark brows, the way he bit his lip or pressed his tongue to the corner of his mouth when he was irritated. The rare, rough warmth of his laughter that felt like sunlight on stone when he played wolf-hunt with his son; crawling along the creaking wood of the longhouse floor. He felt the quiet, fierce pride that swelled in her chest when she sat beside him in the mead hall, upon the raised dais, and listened to him address the concerns of the pack—not a pride of possession, but of vindication to her own judgement, a silent Albi, he is good, to no one in the world but herself.

  All the times she’d felt him running his fingers through her hair while she slept; and the roar of warmth like a fire in her chest from the knowledge of Fenris’s affection for her.

  He felt the profound, bone-deep sense of safety his presence granted her; now, in this moment, even as death closed in as enveloping as the sea through a sinking boat, but also the memory of that same safety in those early, terrifying days when she was still human—a lifeline she had clung to even as she pretended for the world it was an anchor pulling her down.

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  He felt the warm, complicated pang of yearning when she watched his strong, scarred hands, hands that could rip a man’s limbs apart, cradled newborn Isangrim with a tenderness that made her throat tighten. He is soft. He is kind. And unbidden, leaping from that pang, came a fiercely bittersweet wish. The yearning of it held the edges of a guilt that made it feel sharp and painful in his chest. A dangerous, secret desire not just to bear his children, but for him to look at her—not as a wet nurse, or obligation of the Imprint, but as the mother of his young, with the same fierce, protective love he had for Isangrim.

  He made her miss for family, again; had made the hope of it sharpened and strong.

  He caught the scent of himself through her senses—wolf-musk, leather, and cold steel, but also a calm, earthy warmth, like sun heated pine. It had always soothed the most ragged of her nerves.

  Then how she would wake beside him, too early in the still sleeping longhouse, and watch his unguarded mind swirl with dreams of her while she leaned close and breathed the smell of him in by the skin of his arm, gently running her fingers over his brow, his nose, his lips, until she became drowsy enough with calm to sleep again.

  Her trust in him was not a choice; it was a complete fact, as irrefutable as the sunrise, built grain by grain over the last six, uneventful months.

  She loved him.

  Fenris had known none of it.

  He had prowled the edges of her mind more than he had his own, had seen her in sleep when her defenses were down, and had felt all the echoes of her pain. He had believed, in his arrogance, that he had mapped the darkest depths of her. He had never seen this sunlit country within her. The sheer scale of this world she had hidden from him was a testament to the monumental height of the walls she had maintained, stone by stone, around a heart that had dared to love him, within this secret place, all along.

  And he understood, with a sorrow that chilled him to his marrow, why she had walled it all in. A suffocating rush of guilt filled him. The warmth of what she felt for him was a betrayal across the darkness of the shearing, endless grief for her own lost babes; a wound kept agonizingly fresh by the sight of his son thriving in her arms. To let herself love him, to embrace his world, his people, and her own meaning as a wolf, was not just moving on. It was an acceptance of all the torment done to her, and a blinding of all that the wolves of Deep Water had stolen from her. It was an erasure of the suffering endured by Finn, by Edda, by Yiva, by Hemming, and by Katla. Loving Fenris felt like accepting a place in a world that had not offered her pleading husband or wailing babes a rain drop of mercy. It was a gift she could not give herself. It meant raising a banner of peace for a world that had she had sworn to her husband and children she would obliterate to fire and ash.

  Let me fight the world for you, let me in, Fenris pleaded to the dark vast in his mind where she was no longer, where she had faded to only a scent on the breeze, let me in, let me…let me fight for you……

  He kissed her.

  A desperate plea; a transfusion into a heart already stopped. He pressed his lips harder against hers, tasting blood and the faint, fading sweetness of her mouth. For a moment, there was nothing but the cold dread, the metallic tang on their joined lips; his warm and trembling, hers chilled and still.

  He felt a faint, warm tingling where their lips met. It spread as a slow, golden warmth seeping from his mouth into hers. Through the bond, the unraveled echoes of her thoughts began to weave back together and become louder in his mind. A strong pulse of vitality, his vitality, traveled down the connection to her.

  He deepened the kiss, his tongue seeking hers. Her mouth weakly opened under his, a gasp of returning life. The warmth intensified, becoming a heat that spread from their joined lips down his throat, into his chest, coiling in his gut. It was not just warmth he was giving; he could feel it being received. He felt the shudder that went through her body as the healing fire touched the silver-poisoned wound in her side, a searing-cold cleansing. He felt her weak hands come up, her fingers tangling in his hair to pull him closer, to drink from him.

  What began as a desperate act of salvation became a savage, hungry thing. Albi was no longer passive. She was kissing him back, her lips moving with a frantic, starving intensity. Through the bond, her consciousness was no longer a fading echo but a rising tide—a tide of sheer, willful need. She was fighting to live, and he was life, and she was desperate to consume him, to merge with him, to pull his strength into the hollow places the silver and the years of sorrow both had carved inside her.

  Their minds were already one river. Now their bodies demanded the same.

  Fenris pulled back only long enough to look into her eyes. The honey-smoke was alive again, blazing with a fierce, wild light.His hands went to her bare hips, her skin cold then hot under his touch. He felt her flinch as his fingers brushed near the weeping wound, and he felt that flinch in his own side. He lowered her head gently onto the bed of moss and dead leaves, the scent of earth and blood and sex thick in the air.

  He was inside her in one hard, desperate thrust.

  A shockwave went through them both. For Fenris, it was the overwhelming, silken heat of her, the tight clasp of her body welcoming him in. But layered over his own pleasure was hers: the shocking fullness, the piercing delight that edged into pain and then beyond it, the ancient, right feeling of being filled, claimed, connected. It was a feedback loop of sensation, each gasp, each shudder, each twitch amplified and reflected between them.

  He moved, and it was her hips that rose to meet his. She arched her back, a moan torn from her lips, and he felt the arch of his spine in response, a shared curve of ecstasy. He could feel the rough texture of the moss beneath her shoulders as if it were his own skin. He could feel the delicious, building tension in her core, a coil about to spring, and it was indistinguishable from the same tight, urgent pressure in his own loins.

  Fenris. “Fenris” Fenris. “Fenris.” she gasped aloud, in her mind, over and over, her voice ragged, her nails digging into the muscles of his back. He felt the sting, and through the bond, felt her own thrill at marking him.

  He drove into her, each stroke a pulse of life forced into her fading body. He could feel the silver-poison retreating, burned away by the heat they generated together. He could feel her flesh knitting, not with the slow, painful itch of normal healing, but in a rapid, miraculous reweaving, fueled by the coupling. Her legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him deeper, and the sensation was doubled—the pressure around him, the strength in her thighs, the need—it was his and hers at once.

  The pleasure was a single, rising wave upon which they both rode. He felt her climax begin as a distant tremble in his own belly, a fluttering tightness. It built, a screaming tension in her throat and in his, in the clutch of her internal muscles and the pounding of his heart. There was no her pleasure and his pleasure. There was only the pleasure, vast and all-consuming.

  When it broke, it broke over them as one entity; a shattering. The last barriers between mind and body, between self and other, dissolved. He was Albi—the scar of lost children, the stubborn hope, the fierce love for Isangrim, the raw, terrifying joy of the wolf-shape. And Albi was Fenris—the weight of the Alpha’s mantle, the grief for Ygrid, the cold fury for those who harmed those he loved, the deep, abiding love for his pack, for his son, for her.

  For a suspended moment, they ceased to exist. There was only a single, vast consciousness, burning in the clearing amid the scent of blood and sex and new, green growth. It was a connection more profound than love, deeper than passion. It was a fusion of souls, a fusion of energy as old as the Great Mother herself.

  As the wave receded, leaving them gasping and tangled on the ground, the separate senses slowly trickled back. But the line between them was now irrevocably blurred, a scar of gold where two separate metals had been melted and forged into one.

  He collapsed beside her, his body spent, his mind reeling. He turned his head to look at her. Her eyes were open, watching him, clear and alive. The wound at her side was closed, leaving only a pink, tender scar. Her hand found his in the moss, lifting it to bring slowly to her lips.

  Thank you.

  And in that quiet, shattered aftermath, with the taste of her on his lips and her essence forever woven into his own, Fenris knew a truth more absolute than any he had ever known.

  He had loved Ygrid with a young man’s passion, with the pride of a chosen mate. He loved Isangrim with the ferocious, protective love of a father.

  But this was love as Albi. It was a love that included her strength, her pain, her past, her future. It was a love that was now part of the fabric of his own being. He had never loved anything, or anyone, as completely, as terrifyingly, as he loved the woman breathing beside him, her life now inextricably bound to his, not by chains or duty, but by a fusion so complete that to separate them would be to tear the world in two.