MARRIED TO THE HIDDEN LYCAN KING

Chapter 7 — What I Am

(Kaeryn)

She didn't scream. She didn't run. She stood in the wreck of the roses with her hands shaking at her sides and looked at seven feet of fur and claw and too-many teeth like she was still deciding whether to be afraid of it, and something in my chest — the wolf's chest, in that moment, not entirely mine to command — went very still with something that wasn't relief. It was worse than relief. It was recognition.

I shifted back slower than I meant to. It always costs more, coming back, when there's someone watching who isn't supposed to survive the sight of it.

"You're still here," I said, when I had a human throat again to say it with.

"So are you." Her voice wavered, but she didn't step back. "Is that — was that the only shape? Or is there worse?"

"There's no worse shape. Just a bigger one, on the nights the moon asks for it." I kept my hands loose at my sides, non-threatening, though I doubted anything about tonight would ever feel non-threatening to her again. "Are you all right?"

"I don't know yet." She wrapped her arms around herself, and I saw, for the first time, the fine tremor running through her that she'd been holding back through sheer will. "Ask me tomorrow."

I should have given her space. I knew that. Every instinct that had kept this House alive for three hundred years told me to let her walk back inside alone and process this in whatever way humans process the impossible.

I crossed the garden instead.

"Kaeryn—" she started, and I don't know which of us was more surprised when I reached for her hand, gently, giving her every chance to pull away.

She didn't.

"I know this isn't what you agreed to when you signed that contract," I said, low. "You agreed to a stranger. You didn't agree to this."

"No." Her fingers curled slightly around mine, an answer her voice hadn't caught up to yet. "But my grandmother spent her whole life terrified of something she never let herself name out loud. And I just watched you turn into it and not hurt me." Her eyes came up to mine, hazel and steady despite the tremor still running through her. "That has to count for something."

"It counts for everything," I said, and meant it more than I'd meant anything in years.

We stood like that too long — her hand in mine, the ruined roses around us, the last warmth of the day bleeding out of the air — until Mrs. Renner's voice cut through the garden gate, careful and urgent in a way that told me the moment was already over before she said a word.

"Sir. There's a call from the border patrol."

I felt Wren's hand tighten in mine.

"Kaeryn." Renner's voice dropped lower, meant only for me, though the wind carried it to Wren anyway — I watched her hear it, watched her go pale. "They found tracking equipment near the eastern fence line. Silver Vow make. It's been there for days."