“Right,” I said, and squealed as he swatted my ass the moment I got within reach. “Celebrating.”
“You’re damn right.” Henry stalked after me, still naked and dripping water all over the carpet. He wrapped me up in a bear hug and lifted me off the floor, nosing into where the towel folded over my breasts. “We have a lot to celebrate. Tonight won’t be long enough to do it all.”
I looked down at him and kissed the tip of his nose. “But you’re going to try, right?”
His hands squeezed my ass and he dropped me on the bed, looking down at me with an intensity that made my stomach clench and my toes curl. He grinned and leaned down to pull at the towel. “Bet your sweet ass I am.”
And then he pounced.
Lips and hands and tongues and legs and skin. It was like I forgot where he stopped and I began, or where I stopped and he began. There wasn’t time or space to think about anything but that moment—being with him. Being with Henry. Being his and him being mine. If that was what being a mate was, I was all in.
And he was right. We’d won the day at least, and it was a hell of a way to celebrate. No doubt there would be more battles in our future, but hopefully none of them had sorcerers on the other side. Wherever Rocko ended up, we would deal with him when the time came. I held onto Henry as he moved me to my knees on the bed and reared up behind me, and I moaned as his hands dragged my hips back against him. We had a lot to celebrate, and if I had my way, we’d spend the rest of our lives doing exactly that, no matter what life threw our way. We could conquer anything together. And we would.
Epilogue
Ophelia
We stayed for two weeks after the confrontation with Rocko, though Henry started daily video calls with the pack in Montana. Nola still wasn’t quite right, though neither Deirdre nor I could figure out what had gone wrong. She didn’t feel like herself and couldn’t explain what was different, so we were at an impasse. Eventually it became clear that traveling could be difficult for her, so flying back wasn’t an option. Not that I minded the idea of a long, cross-country drive in a car that didn’t break down every other mile.
Silas remained a wolfman, though he seemed to settle down a little when it became clear no one would hurt or provoke him. He still prowled the storm cellar under Deirdre’s house and occasionally went up into her yard after the guys built an unfortunate enclosure in the empty lot behind the garden. Apparently Miles purchased it months before when it came up for sale but hadn’t yet decided what to do with it. A zoo cage for a wolfman was a sad thing to need, but at least they had the space and means to give him options.
No one really talked about what would happen if Silas didn’t get better on his own, and when I asked, Henry changed the subject. It made my stomach hurt to think about, since it was clear that he couldn’t just keep on in the shape he was in. It made me hate Rocko even more, though I hadn’t thought it possible.
Deirdre and I worked every day to search through her books for a possible solution, though nothing seemed to help cut through the magical fog that Rocko left around Silas. We couldn’t even see what Rocko had done, so didn’t have a place to start in undoing it. I tried not to despair, since Deirdre had the kind of grim determination it took to conquer worlds and I had full faith that she would figure something out.
I liked her less as she made me practice exercises for controlling my magic and reactions, since it was draining and annoying to constantly feel like I failed at everything and couldn’t do what she did in a snap of her fingers. She damn well encouraged my frustration too, under the guise that it helped test my control, although I assumed it was just the perverse pleasure she took in someone else’s suffering. She claimed that wasn’t it, but she sure smiled a lot as I huffed and cursed and threw things around the workroom when I couldn’t light a goddamn candle.