She asked him.
This was the thing she had not anticipated when she imagined how the marking would occur, if it occurred. She had imagined it as his decision, his offering, his timing. The entire architecture of how these things happened in the world she had grown up in placed the marking as something done to Luna by the Alpha, a conferring of completion, his when he chose and his how.
She was not that version of herself anymore.
It was three weeks after the naming, on a quiet evening when the citadel had settled into its late hours and the snow was coming down again outside and the bond was warm and steady between them in a way that had been building for weeks toward something she could feel but had not yet named aloud.
She found him in the strategy room where he sometimes worked late,
