White wolves were myths mothers told their children.

He knew she was a white wolf since she mentioned it in Orosia. But actually seeing her stunned him into stillness.

Xeon didn’t wait, ripping through him so fast he didn’t realize the shift was happening until he landed on the ground on four paws.

Fin: Was that necessary?

Xeon: Go to sleep.

Aurelia lay on the ground where the shift had deposited her, sides heaving, adjusting to the sensation of a body that was hers but felt like someone else’s.

Fin: I can’t feel Serena.

Xeon: Serena is resting. It’s just her wolf.

Xeon pressed his nose to her scruff and gently nudged her to stand. She took one step, then another.

Her left hind leg gave out immediately. She hit the ground with a sound that was half impact, half frustration. Her ears flattened. Every signal from her brain was arriving half a second late, routed through pathways the silver had burned to ruin.

She got up again. She took a step. Then another. Her legs held, barely, each stride a negotiation between instinct and a body that had never been used in this form.

The silver had done more than suppress her shift. It had atrophied the neural pathways that should have been present from birth, the ones that made a first shift feel clumsy rather than impossible.

After four steps, her right foreleg buckled. Xeon blocked her fall with his shoulder, and she flinched at the contact.

It hit Fin through the matebond like ice water.

Fin: She flinched.

Xeon: I felt it.

Fin: She doesn’t understand why you helped her.

Xeon: I have eyes.

Xeon held her, letting the rhythm of his ribcage press against hers. She pulled away the moment her legs would hold her and didn’t look at him.

After seven steps, her hind legs crossed and she went down again, this time sideways. Xeon’s nose was under her ribs before she fell, fully supporting her weight. She stiffened.

Fin: Smooth.

Xeon pulled away once she was on her paws, then licked her face shamelessly. She jolted, eyes wide. He nuzzled into her neck, rubbing his scent along her scruff with the subtlety of a six-hundred-pound wrecking ball.

Fin: You are scaring her.

Xeon: No.

Fin: Good rebuttal.

Xeon licked her one more time then nudged her forward. She blinked at him. Then turned away and moved. After a few steps, she stopped, looking back for him.

Xeon: See. She wants us.

Fin: She’s falling again.

He closed the gap, catching her with his nose and helping her stand.

Aurelia steadied herself, then looked at him. Her gold eyes held his for ten full seconds, searching for something that she knew but couldn’t access. Recognition without context. The unsettling certainty that a stranger wasn’t a stranger.

Xeon held still and let her search. Whatever piece of him she was looking for, whatever fragment she was trying to match, he would stand here until she found it.

Déjà vu carved through Fin in tandem so deeply it ached.

Fin: Have I met her before?

Xeon: Yes. She was made for us. But I do not have the memories, so that means we didn’t mate in that life.

They kept going. Aurelia getting further each time. Xeon paced beside her, matching her stride exactly, close enough to catch her if she fell.

After twenty steps, she pressed her nose to his shoulder. Brief. Light. The wolf equivalent of a hand brushing someone’s arm. Plausibly accidental.

It was not accidental.

Xeon went so still Fin thought his wolf had stopped breathing. Six hundred pounds of apex predator, locked in place, because the white wolf had touched him on purpose and the feeling it produced was so big that movement would have shattered it.

Fin: Big feelings there, buddy.

Aurelia’s tail moved. Once. A single, tentative wag that she seemed startled by, as if her own body had betrayed her with joy she had not authorized.

Xeon rumbled low in his chest. The sound was pure satisfaction.

Then she looked at the forest stretching out in front of her, and bolted. Poorly at first, her hind legs overcompensating, her turns sloppy and wide. But it was movement, uninhibited and wild. Joy so raw that it ripped through their matebond and hit Fin like a shockwave.

Xeon surged after her. His instincts were screaming in a single, deafening chorus: chase, catch, claim.

She fumbled over a log, and fell, which sent the wolf-equivalent of a laugh rumbling through him. The look she shot him over her shoulder required no translation.

Mate play. It was instinct distilled to its purest form. A male chasing a female.

Aurelia wove between trees, her fur catching moonlight. She changed direction mid-stride, and circled back the way she came, forcing Xeon to scramble and overshoot his mark by three body lengths.

He recovered and closed the distance. She lunged, catching his ear in her teeth and tugging once before releasing him.

He went absolutely still. The wolf-equivalent of having his entire brain short-circuit and reboot at the same time.

Fin: Did she just...

Xeon: Silence.

Xeon pressed his nose into Aurelia’s scruff and breathed her in, his chest vibrating with a low, reverent sound. When she nuzzled back into him, he purred. An apex predator with a body count, purring.

Xeon: Mine.

Fin: I think she knows.

✦✦✦

Across Skardos, Dex sat in the back corner of the pub, slouched against the wall, one arm draped over the bench. Gavriel was next to him, holding the bottle like a man who had forgotten glasses existed.

The bottle was two-thirds gone and neither of them had any business finishing it.

"She used to do this thing," Dex said, words slurred at the edges. "When I’d say something stupid, she wouldn’t argue. She’d just look at me."

He laughed, hollow. "I’d know before she opened her mouth that I was wrong."

"She does that," Gavriel agreed.

Dex took the bottle. Drank. "I miss her so much it’s hard to breathe."

Gavriel stared at the far wall for a long time. Then he said it.

"I’m in love with her."

Dex turned his head. Slowly. The room was still tilting, but his eyes found Gavriel’s with the precision of a man who had just been stabbed and needed to identify the hand that held the knife.

"Since the moment I saw her," Gavriel continued, voice flat and drunk and honest in the way only alcohol could make him.

Dex stared at him. His wolf surged, territorial, slamming against his ribs. The alcohol dulled it to a roar instead of an explosion.

Silence. Long and ugly and soaked in whiskey.

"She loves you," Gavriel slurred. "For whatever that’s worth coming from me."

Dex’s jaw worked. He took the bottle back. Drank until his eyes watered.

"You’re my best friend," Dex muttered. "I hate that."

Gavriel’s mouth twitched. "Likewise."

The door to the pub swung open and Thor Crushturn walked in like he owned the building. He assessed the scene in half a second, crossed the room, and dropped onto the bench between them. One arm went around Dex. The other went around Gavriel. Neither had invited this.

"I heard drinking," Thor announced. "My ears are finely tuned to the sound of emotional vulnerability and uncorked liquor."

Dex closed his eyes. "Get out, Thor."

"Can’t. I’m already seated. Momentum is gone." He grabbed the bottle from Dex’s hand, took a swig, and grimaced. "This is terrible. Love it. What are we sad about?"

"Nothing," both of them said at the same time.

"Incredible. Two liars. My favorite combination." Thor settled deeper between them, making himself catastrophically comfortable. "Is this about Frostborne? It’s about Frostborne. Everything is about Frostborne lately. I respect it. She’s stunning."

Dex’s head slowly turned towards Thor.

"If you look at her again," Dex said, drunk enough to mean every syllable, "I will kill you. I will kill you, Thor. With my bare hands."

Thor blinked. Considered it. "Define ’look.’"

Dex lunged. Gavriel snagged him by the collar with one hand and the bottle with the other, because priorities.

"Relax," Gavriel said. "He’s too stupid to be a threat."

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me," Thor replied, visibly moved.

The three of them sat in the back of the pub, passing a bottle. Thor was talking about his pre-flight ritual with Styx. Gavriel had stopped responding with words and moved to sounds. Dex’s eyelids were losing the war against gravity.

At some point, all three of them passed out in the booth. Thor in the middle, arms still around both of them, snoring like a bear with a sinus infection.

None of them would remember any of it in the morning.

Dex’s eyes snapped open hours later. His chest was heaving, heart slamming against his ribs. His matebond was ringing like a struck bell, carrying an emotion he couldn’t name because he had never once felt it from Serena’s end.

Joy.

Pure, wild, uncut joy.

He blinked at the ceiling of the pub. His head was splitting. Thor was drooling on his shoulder. Gavriel was curled around the empty bottle like a child with a stuffed animal.

What the hell was that?

The feeling was already fading, dissolving into the hangover that was rising to replace it. He tried to hold onto it, to trace it back to its source, but the alcohol had turned his senses to mud.

A dream. Had to be.

He shoved Thor off his shoulder, put his head back down on the table, and was unconscious again in seconds.