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“Yes,” I say into him. “You keep doing impossible things.”
His hand drifts into my hair, fingers weak but present. “You showed up in my life as a skull-faced forest guardian with a lantern. You don’t get to complain about impossible.”
I laugh softly and lift my head. “Aestrata chose well.”
His expression changes, tender and wry. “She said that too.”
“She did?”
“Yeah.” His thumb brushes the edge of my jaw again. “She said she chose well for you. Her only Cervari child left.”
The grief of that moves through me slowly. My brother dead by my hand. My kind gone. The old loneliness ending not because the past hurts less, but because Lucas returned changed and living in my arms. I look around the hollow, at the roots, the stone, the place no human foot has touched before him, and understand that Aestrata did not only give him back to me. She made a new law where the old one had ended.
My mate breathes.
My mate chooses.
My mate will guard beside me.
I lower my mouth to his hair, then to his brow, then to the corner of his eye. “Thank you,” I whisper, not to Aestrata now.
Lucas closes his eyes briefly. “For what?”
“For choosing me when peace was offered.”
He is quiet for a moment, and when he opens his eyes again, the green is wet and steady.
“Peace sounded nice,” he admits, because Lucas is too honest to make love prettier than truth. “I was tired—I’m still tired. But peace without you felt like walkin’ out of the forest before sunrise and never lookin’ back. I couldn’t do it.”
The bond warms until it hurts. “I love you,” I say aloud.
His breath catches, and his face softens enough to make every wound in me irrelevant. “Yeah,” he whispers. “I love you too, Wildheart.”
I hold him there while the hollow breathes around us. His life grows stronger by slow degrees, each heartbeat steadier, each breath deeper. He is still wounded, still weak, still newly remade in ways neither of us understands, and I know there will be fear after this. Anger too, perhaps. Questions, changes, grief for the ordinary human life that ended in the mine even though Lucas did not.
We will return to his family, his station, his town full of missing persons walls and explanations no one will believe. We will face all of it because he chose life, and life is never one miracle alone.
It is aftermath. It is duty. It is coffee and bloodstains and arguments about doors. It is learning how not to hold too tight. It is letting him breathe while staying near enough that he knows I am there.
Lucas shifts in my arms and winces. Every thought in me snaps to him. “Pain?”
“Some,” he says, and then, because he is himself, he adds, “Dyin’ and getting forest-rebooted isn’t as restful as advertised.”
“I will complain to Aestrata.”
He gives me a weak, crooked smile. “She ignores complaints, remember?”
“Not yours.”
That makes him laugh, though the sound hurts him and makes me growl in worry until he pats my chest.
“I’m okay,” he says, then seems to consider honesty and sighs. “No, that’s a lie. I’m not okay, but I’m here.”
“Here,” I repeat, because the word is sacred now.
He looks past me toward the path out of the deepwood. The hollow’s green-white light touches his face, catching on freckles, blood, and the faint new markings beginning to branch from the bite at his throat. His gaze turns tired in a way that does not frighten me now because the bond holds steady beneath it.
“Onyx,” he says quietly.
