Our room had changed since I'd first slept in it. My things were mixed in with the space now. A jacket on the back of a chair. Books on the nightstand, half of them about pack law, half of them novels Rowan kept lending me. A pair of my shoes by the door, scuffed and Brooklyn-worn, next to Silas's boots.

We got ready for bed the way people do when they've learned each other's rhythms. He brushed his teeth while I changed. I washed my face while he checked the security log on his phone. Small, ordinary choreography that would have seemed impossible two months ago, when every night had been a crisis and every morning had been a countdown.

I climbed into bed. He followed. The sheets were warm and the room was dark except for the silver glow of the marks, steady and quiet in the November night.

"The tribunal records were published today," he said. "Full public access. Every Darrow file, every council authorization, every name."

"I saw."

"Colton complained about the server costs."

"Colton complains about everything. That's his function."

He was lying on his back, and I curled against his side with my head on his chest, the way we'd settled into sleeping. His arm came around me and his fingers traced slow lines on my shoulder. The bond hummed between us, low and constant, the frequency that had started as a shockwave and become a heartbeat.

"Three months ago," I said, "I was a bartender who bit a stranger during a one-night stand."

"I remember."

"Now I'm the Luna of a territorial government, a Darrow bloodline carrier, and the first person in four hundred years to heal a ritual wound through a Lunar Bond. And I still work at Clancy's on Tuesdays."

"Is that a complaint?"

"It's an observation. Everything changed. And the parts of me that matter most didn't change at all."

His hand stilled on my shoulder. Through the bond I felt what he felt: not the amplified desire or the combat instincts or the shared healing. Just warmth. The specific, ordinary warmth of a man lying in the dark with the person he loved, grateful for the quiet.

I shifted and kissed him. Slowly, the way I liked to when there was no crisis and no countdown and no one trying to kill us. His hand moved from my shoulder to my waist, and I rolled on top of him and felt the marks brighten in response, silver light pooling between us like moonlight through water.

We moved together in the dark. Unhurried. No desperation, no fury, no power surge. Just two people choosing each other in the simplest way available, with their bodies and their breath and the bond humming steady underneath like a song they'd both memorized.

Afterward, I lay with my cheek against the mark on his throat and listened to his heartbeat and mine, synced by a bond I hadn't asked for and a love I had chosen.

The world outside was full of things that needed fixing. Twelve Darrow descendants who might or might not answer when I called. A council that was rebuilding itself slowly, grudgingly, one housing proposal at a time. A pack system that had operated on fear for centuries and was learning, painfully, to operate on something better.

I'd deal with all of it. Tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

But right now, in the dark, in the quiet, in the compound that had become home the same way Brooklyn was home and the bar was home, I was exactly where I'd chosen to be.

Not because fate put me here.

Because I walked in, looked around, and decided to stay.