I heard about it from Celeste first.
She texted me on a Wednesday morning while I was at the barre, a single message: *Something's happening with Silvercrest. It's all over pack channels.*
I set my phone face-down on the bench and kept working. Tendu. Dégagé. The familiar rhythm of it. I had learned, slowly and with great effort, not to reach for news about Maddox the way a tongue reaches for a sore tooth. Whatever was happening in that pack house was no longer my problem.
But the news found me anyway, the way it always does.
By evening, Roland had called Ambrose. I was in the kitchen feeding Buster when Ambrose stepped out onto the balcony to take the call, his voice dropping to that particular quiet register that meant something serious. I didn't listen. I scratched behind Buster's ears and told myself it didn't matter.
Ambrose came back inside after twenty minutes. He sat across from me at the kitchen table and looked at me with that steady, open expression — the one that never hid anything from me.
"Maddox broke the engagement," he said. "Tonight. In front of the full pack assembly."
The words landed in my chest and sat there. I waited to feel something dramatic. Triumph, maybe. Or grief. Instead, I just felt very tired.
"Gloria?" I asked.
"Gone from the estate. Her father's people collected her within the hour." He paused. "There's more. He found the payment records. The rogue attack on you — she ordered it."
I went very still.
Buster pressed his head against my knee. I put my hand on him without thinking, grounding myself in his warmth.
She had tried to have me killed. Not humiliated. Not blacklisted. *Killed.* And Maddox had stood in that pack house for months, sleeping under the same roof as the woman who'd hired the wolves that put me in the hospital, and he hadn't known. Or hadn't looked hard enough to find out.
I didn't know which was worse.
"Are you all right?" Ambrose asked.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly.
He nodded. He didn't push. He just reached across the table and set his hand near mine — not touching, just close. Available. The way he always was.
I looked at his hand for a moment. Then I covered it with mine.
---
Three days later, Ambrose came to my studio after the evening rehearsal.
Everyone else had gone. The janitor had already swept the hallway. The building was quiet in the way old buildings get at night — settling into itself, all creaks and distant hum. The overhead lights were off and I'd left only the work lights on, which turned everything amber and soft.
I was cooling down at the barre when he came in. He didn't sit in his usual back row. He walked to the center of the room and stopped a few feet away from me, and something in the way he held himself told me this wasn't an ordinary visit.
"I want to ask you something," he said. "And I need you to know there is only one right answer, and it's whatever you actually want."
I turned to face him fully. My heart had started doing something irregular.
"A Mate Ceremony," he said. "With me. On your terms. At whatever pace you need. I'm not asking for a date or a timeline or a promise you're not ready to make." His voice was very steady. "I'm asking if you want this. With me."
The studio was silent around us. Dust motes drifted in the amber light.
Deep inside me, something stirred. Not the sharp electric shock I remembered from eighteen — nothing like that. This was slower. Warmer. Like something that had been curled tight for a very long time slowly beginning to uncurl. A vibration in my chest that I hadn't felt in months. A warmth that moved through me like the first real breath after a long time underwater.
My wolf. Not a voice yet. Not words. But a presence. An inclination, leaning toward him like a plant toward light.
I pressed my hand flat against my sternum — that old habit — and felt it. Felt her.
"I'm not ready to set a date," I said.
"I know."
"I'm still — there are things I'm still working through. The trust. The fear of —" I stopped. Tried again. "I don't want to give you something halfway. You deserve more than halfway."
"Marlowe." He said my name the way he always did — like it mattered. "I have waited years. I will wait as long as you need. That is not a burden. That is just the truth."
I looked at him. Really looked. At the patience in his face and the certainty underneath it, and the years of silent grief he'd carried without complaint.
"I want to try," I said quietly. "I'm certain of that much. I want to try. With you."
Something shifted in his expression. Not triumph. Just — relief. Deep and private, like a man setting down something very heavy.
"Then we try," he said simply.
And somewhere in the quiet of that amber-lit studio, my wolf stirred again — small and tentative and fragile, but unmistakably, undeniably *there.*
It was the first time she'd moved in months.
I didn't tell him. Not yet. But I pressed my hand against my chest and felt her warmth, and I thought: *we're going to be okay.*
In the shadows of rogue territory, money was already moving through channels that Roland had flagged but not yet fully traced. The outline of something dangerous, taking shape.
