Because I Love You

The argument began over a map.

Gareth had marked the north chapel, the collapsed east approach, and the road Julian’s people were using. I leaned over the table, asking how close scouts had been able to get.

Ronan answered Gareth instead of me.

“We can secure the site without Nora present.”

I straightened.

“The instructions say the threshold responds to the keeper.”

“Then we leave it closed.”

His tone was calm. That made it worse.

“For how long?”

“Until we have dealt with Mercer.”

“Who controls the estate and is trying to reach our daughter because of that threshold.”

“Exactly.”

Gareth looked between us, quietly folded his papers, and said he would return after lunch.

The door closed.

I kept my palms flat on the map.

“When did this become a decision you had already made?”

Ronan rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m trying to keep you away from a man who has hunted you for years.”

“I understand what you’re trying to do.”

“Then why are we arguing?”

“Because understanding your fear doesn’t mean I surrender every choice to it.”

He looked at me sharply.

For a moment I saw the Alpha who expected to be obeyed. My body remembered Julian’s quiet instructions, the locked doors, the hands guiding me where I had not agreed to go.

I stepped back.

Ronan saw it.

The anger left his face, replaced by something more painful.

“Nora.”

“I know you’re not him.” I said it before he could ask. “But I need you to speak to me. I need to hear the risks and help decide what happens. You cannot keep me safe by making my world small enough that I have no part in it.”

He said nothing.

I hated the silence until I realized he was actually listening.

“I’m going to the garden,” I said. “I want to finish this conversation. I need a few minutes first.”

He nodded.

Outside, the wind had turned cold. I walked past the vegetable beds to the bench near the wall. My hands shook with the leftover effort of disagreement.

Once, I would have mistaken that shaking for proof I should yield.

I sat until I could hear birds beneath the noise in my own head.

Ronan came out carrying my coat.

He stopped a few feet away. “May I sit?”

I moved over.

He handed me the coat instead of putting it around me. The care in that choice nearly broke my resolve to remain angry.

“When Gareth called from Eastmere,” he said, “I thought we had finally found you. I spent the flight making plans that now seem unbearably foolish. A room. A healer. A conversation where you would tell me your name.”

I looked at him.

“When I got there, you were gone. There was blood on a discarded sheet in the room they said had been yours. Nobody could tell me whether you had walked out or been carried.”

His voice stayed quiet. His hands did not.

“For years I imagined arriving five minutes earlier. Every search became another version of that journey. Now there’s a map on my desk, and all I can see is another place I could reach too late.”

I took his hand.

He looked down at our joined fingers.

“That fear belongs to me,” he said. “I made it sound like an order you had to live inside. I’m sorry.”

I let the apology settle before answering.

“I’m frightened, too. I don’t want to go back to that place. I want to sit on the rug and let Maisie explain why your towers are wrong.”

He gave a brief, strained smile.

“But Julian knows she exists,” I continued. “I can’t keep waiting for the next person he pays to open a door.”

“We do this together,” he said. “All the information. All the alternatives. And if either of us sees something the other has missed, we stop and listen.”

“Including when you dislike my answer?”

“Especially then.”

I leaned against his shoulder.

We sat until the cold reached my feet.

Before we went inside, he caught my hand again.

“I love you,” he said.

The words were plain. No ceremony protected them.

I looked at him and thought of the man holding a wastebasket at two in the morning. The father walking a sick child until dawn. The Alpha sitting on a garden bench, admitting he was frightened.

“I love you, too.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, there was no composure left to hide behind.

I stepped close enough to put my arms around him.

“I’m choosing you,” I said. “I want you to know that.”

“I do.”

The following days changed in ways so small I almost missed them. He asked before sending guards with me to the infirmary. I told him when training hurt rather than waiting until he noticed. We revised the map together with Gareth and Agnes, rejecting the first plan because it relied too much on Julian behaving sensibly.

At night I began staying in Ronan’s room after Maisie slept, first to talk, then because leaving felt less natural than remaining.

One evening I found a sketchbook on his bedside table.

“Boats?”

He looked faintly embarrassed. “Very bad ones.”

They were not bad. Some were practical, some elaborate, and one contained a tiny cabin labeled Maisie’s unnecessary extra kitchen.

I traced the page.

“You kept doing it.”

“Occasionally.”

“I’m glad.”

He put the book aside and kissed me.

Later, beneath the open window, we talked about the bond. Completing it meant allowing our wolves to recognize the partnership we had already chosen. It would deepen our awareness of one another, but it would not turn thought into speech or make distance impossible.

I asked every question I had once been too young to know mattered.

He answered what he knew. Where he did not know, we asked Agnes together.

We chose the next clear night.

There were no spectators. Only the old cedar at the edge of the garden, moonlight on the grass, and Ronan standing before me with none of his public authority between us.

“Nora Ellis,” he said, taking my hands, “I want the life we make when nobody is watching. I want the difficult mornings, the wrong turns, the years we haven’t met yet. Will you share them with me?”

“Yes.” My voice shook. “And I want you to let me stand beside you in them. Even when I’m afraid. Especially when I’m afraid.”

“Yes.”

We chose the marks together, small crescents at the curve where neck met shoulder. The brief sting faded beneath warmth that moved through me like the first breath after a long winter.

His wolf met mine.

There was recognition, immense and quiet. There was also Ronan’s hand cupping my cheek, his thumb catching a tear, his mouth finding mine when I pulled him close.

We went inside together.

I woke before dawn with my head on his chest. For once I did not wonder whether I should leave before someone woke and changed their mind.

His hand moved over my back.

“You’re thinking very loudly,” he murmured.

“You can’t hear my thoughts.”

“No. But you’ve been making that small frown against my shirt for five minutes.”

I lifted my head. “You’re not wearing a shirt.”

He opened one eye. “Then the situation is more serious than I realized.”

I laughed, and he kissed the sound from my mouth.

At breakfast Maisie sniffed us both with great suspicion.

“You smell together.”

Ronan nearly spilled his coffee.

“We’re mates,” I told her, because she deserved an explanation that did not make affection seem secret or shameful.

She considered this while chewing.

“Does Mama still have her room?”

“Yes.”

“Can I go in it?”

“You can knock.”

“Can I go in Daddy’s room?”

“You can knock there, too,” Ronan said.

She nodded and returned to her toast, apparently satisfied with the administrative consequences.

That evening she brought her cloth wolf into our room and placed it between the pillows.

“He needs to get used to it,” she explained.

Ronan examined the toy. “Does he snore?”

“He thinks,” she replied.

I laughed until I had to sit down.