Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 8

Ryan POV

We talked for four hours.

I know it was four hours because the party inside went from loud to louder to suddenly very quiet as the last stragglers were herded out by university security, and still we sat on that bench in the dark with the slight breeze moving her hair and the city glowing orange beyond the campus trees.

She told me she was studying biomedical engineering. That she wanted to develop medical equipment that people in underfunded hospitals could actually afford. That she had chosen this school because of its research programme and its proximity to a teaching hospital where she could intern. She said all of this the way people say things when they have known what they want since childhood and have simply been walking toward it ever since. There was no hesitation in her. No performance.

I found it extraordinary.

Rhy found it unbearable in the best possible way. He kept making small contented sounds in the back of my head, like a large animal settling into somewhere warm.

I told her I was going to be a teacher. I told her about the Rogers, not everything, but enough. I told her they were the best people I had ever known and that I had wanted to be like them for as long as I could remember. She listened the way good people listen, without preparing her next sentence while I was still speaking. Her eyes stayed on my face the whole time.

At some point she moved fractionally closer on the bench. I do not think she knew she had done it. But Rhy noticed, and I felt him go very still the way he did when something mattered.

"She's doing it," he said softly.

"Doing what?"

"Closing the distance. That's what mates do. They always close the distance."

I didn't answer him. I was busy watching her laugh at something she had said herself, her head going back, the sound of it entirely unself-conscious.

My chest hurt.

Not painfully. Just the particular pressure of something large trying to fit into the space where your heart already lives.

…

Before she left she made me put my number in her phone under "Not a Serial Killer" which Rhy thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened to either of us.

She texted me before she had even reached the bottom of the stairs outside.

It said: "The cinnamon rolls at Delroy's on Fifth are the best in the city. Saturday morning. 9am. Don't be weird about it."

I stood on that empty balcony and read it three times.

Rhy was howling.

I was smiling so wide my face hurt.

"OK," I texted back.

She sent a thumbs up.

Then: "Stop smiling like that. People will think you've lost it."

I looked around the empty balcony.

There was nobody there.

I texted back: "How did you—"

She replied: "Instinct. Get some sleep, peanut."

I stood there for a long time after that, looking at her last message. Rhy had gone quiet too. The comfortable quiet of something decided. Something settled.

Aunt Joan had told me once that the mate bond felt like gravity wearing a face.

Standing on that balcony with my phone in my hand and the city spread out below me in the dark, I finally understood what she meant.

…

We had six months of dating before I knew with any certainty that what Rhy had identified on that balcony was not an instinct but a fact. Six months of Saturday mornings at Delroy's and long walks through parts of the city we had no particular reason to be in and evenings that started as dinner and became midnight without either of us noticing. She was never bored. She was never performing interest. When Cassandra Rogers paid attention to something, she paid it completely, and for six months the thing she paid attention to was me.

It was the most disorienting experience of my life, and I had turned into a wolf during a high school football game.

Three more months of long conversations that stretched into the early morning. She learned about the pack, about the night in the woods, about Nat and the Rogers and Aunt Joan who never aged and kept her own counsel. She did not flinch at any of it. She asked questions the way she did everything — with precision and genuine curiosity — and she sat with the answers for as long as she needed before she asked the next one. She never pushed. She never pulled back.

Two more months of realising that there was no version of my future that made sense without her in it. Not as a pleasant addition. As a load-bearing wall. The kind of thing you do not notice holding everything up until you imagine its absence, and then you cannot stop noticing it.

Then I asked her to marry me.

She said yes before I had finished the question.

Rhy cried. I will never tell anyone that, but he absolutely did.

Our wedding was small. The Rogers were there. Nat came back from her research placement for it and complained the entire weekend that I had given her two weeks' notice. Aunt Joan was there too, wearing a coat the colour of autumn leaves, looking not a single day older than she had on that snowy evening in the Rogers' living room.

We built our life in the Rogers' house when they were ready to hand it on. That was their gift to us. Their home.

Life, for the first time since that moonless night in Atlanta, felt safe.

I should have known, perhaps, that safe things have a way of being interrupted.

I should have known because Aunt Joan had told me, years ago in that firelit living room, that the old blood draws attention.

I should have listened more carefully to that part.