I Chose

I Chose
Ayla
The hall was loud.
Music carried over conversations and the scrape of chairs. Someone near the food tables shouted something that made half the wolves around him laugh, and three pups ran between adults who moved aside without interrupting their conversations. Plates clattered. Glasses knocked together. Nobody lowered their voice because an Alpha had entered the room.
I stood inside the archway with both twins against my chest and listened.
Nothing was wrong.
That still took me a moment sometimes.
Tessa slept through the noise with one fist caught in my dress. Tarrick was awake, although I doubted he could see much beyond light and movement yet. His pale eyes wandered toward the ceiling while he made one of the tiny noises I was learning meant he was interested rather than hungry.
They were so small that I still occasionally looked at them and wondered how Mikhail had handed them to me beneath a mountain only days ago.
Tarrick turned his face into me.
I adjusted my arm beneath him and moved farther into the room.
The Knight estate had changed since the first time I came here. Rugs covered stretches of stone that had once made every footstep echo. Lamps and firelight warmed rooms I remembered as enormous and formal. Someone had already left a wooden toy beneath one of the tables even though neither twin would be able to use it for months.
A home accumulated things.
Apparently it accumulated a great deal of noise too.
Someone dropped a tray.
Metal struck stone hard enough that several wolves looked over.
My body reacted before my mind did.
For an instant I was somewhere else.
A lock hitting metal.
Bare feet on concrete.
Antiseptic strong enough to sting my nose.
I shifted Tarrick closer before I realized I had done it.
Nobody came toward me.
The wolf who dropped the tray swore; another bent to help him gather everything, and within seconds the room had swallowed the noise.
I rubbed my thumb along Tessa's back.
There had been a time when a room full of wolves would have required constant calculation. Where the doors were. Who stood closest. Whether anyone had noticed me. Whether lowering my eyes would keep attention away or bring more of it.
I knew what drugged heat felt like before I ever knew what a natural one did.
I remembered lying on a damp mattress with my teeth chattering while my skin burned. I remembered hearing males outside the room discussing me as though I wasn't close enough to understand them. I remembered learning that pain could go on for so long it stopped feeling temporary.
What frightened me most back then was never knowing when anything would end.
Tarrick made another noise.
I looked down.
His mouth had puckered into a tiny frown.
“You're fine,” I whispered.
His frown deepened.
“Your father makes that face.”
Aramana stirred with quiet amusement.
I smiled and kept walking.
Amani spotted me from across the room and immediately started toward us. Cyrus was near the food table arguing with Rhonda while Raven watched with the patience of someone deciding whether either of them deserved intervention.
“I am telling you,” Cyrus said, “you cannot put that much seasoning on meat and still claim you respect it.”
Rhonda pointed a serving fork at him. “You ate a heart raw.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“Context.”
Amani reached me before I heard Rhonda's answer.
“There you are.”
“I've been here approximately thirty seconds.”
“I know. I was waiting.”
“For what?”
She looked at the twins.
I moved them slightly farther from her.
“No.”
Her mouth fell open. “I didn't even ask.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to offer to take one so you could eat.”
“That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”
“Thank you.”
“You still can't have both.”
“I'll negotiate later.”
She touched Tessa's foot instead and went back toward the others before I could accuse her of planning something.
Mikhail stood a little apart from them.
My father.
I still occasionally had to stop on that thought.
He looked considerably less comfortable at a celebration than he did with blood on his hands in a medical emergency. He held a glass he had barely touched and kept watching everyone around him as though there might still be someone requiring treatment.
Then he saw me.
His attention dropped immediately to the twins.
I knew what would happen next.
He came over.
“How long have you been standing?”
“Hello to you too.”
“Ayla.”
“Not long.”
“Are you tired?”
“I gave birth. I have been tired since.”
His mouth tightened.
I smiled. “I'm fine, Dad.”
He still went quiet when I called him that sometimes.
Not as badly as the first time.
But enough that I noticed.
His fingers brushed Tarrick's white hair.
“He ate recently?”
“Yes.”
“And Tessa?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
I stared at him.
He waited.
“I ate.”
“What?”
“Food.”
“Ayla.”
I laughed. “I'll find something.”
“Now.”
Apparently, recovering my father meant acquiring another male who believed I could be ordered toward food.
“Thane is rubbing off on you.”
“I was like this before Thane existed.”
That was probably true.
He touched my shoulder once and moved away after extracting a promise that I would actually eat.
I watched him join Amani near the table.
There had been a time when I knew almost nothing about him. I had grown up with an absence where my father should have been and then learned, much later, that the absence had not meant he chose to leave me.
He had been in a cage too.
The first time I understood that, I hadn't known what to do with it.
I still didn't some days.
Now he came to our house every morning and found reasons to stay. He held his grandchildren. He irritated me about eating. He argued medicine with Thane and pretended Rhonda's crew did not amuse him.
I preferred that to wondering what a father might have been like.
A pup ran past me laughing.
I stepped aside automatically and realized afterward that I hadn't flinched when he came close.
That stopped me.
Years ago, standing still while someone approached had been impossible. Being noticed had usually meant I was about to lose something: privacy, clothing, control over my own body, whatever small amount of peace I had managed to find.
There was one hallway I still remembered too clearly.
My wrist in someone's hand.
My feet slipping.
The smell of bleach over old blood.
I had begged before we reached the room.
I couldn't remember exactly what I said anymore.
I remembered knowing it wouldn't matter.
There had been nights when I wanted to die.
That truth did not frighten me the way it once had. It was simply true.
I had wanted the next door not to open. The next drug not to come. The next heat not to be forced into a body that already hurt.
I stayed alive anyway.
At the time there had been nothing noble about it.
Sometimes I was too frightened to die. Sometimes I was angry. Sometimes I thought of my mother. Sometimes another girl needed me awake. Sometimes I simply made it through one hour and found myself in the next one.
Eventually those hours became years.
Then Thane opened a kennel.
I remembered his hand around my ankle.
Of all the things that happened that night, that remained absurdly clear.
His grip had been firm because I was trying to get away from him. I had expected pain when he caught me.
It didn't come.
I remembered staring at him and not understanding why.
He had looked furious enough to kill someone.
Later I learned he was.
Just not me.
Freedom hadn't felt good immediately.
Nobody warned me about that.
The cage was gone, but everything that had happened inside it came with me. I slept somewhere safe and still woke expecting locks. I had choices and sometimes hated being asked to make them. Thane could leave a door open, and I would stare at it because being allowed to walk through was different from knowing how.
He stayed through all of that.
Sometimes too close.
Sometimes not close enough.
Sometimes I wanted him and couldn't stand being touched five minutes later. Sometimes I yelled at him for things he had not done because I finally had someone I trusted enough to be angry near.
He learned me.
I learned him.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of myself as the thing he had rescued.
My power helped.
It frightened me first.
The first blue light had come with the sick realization that there had always been something inside me those wolves never understood. They had spent years treating me as weak while suppressing the wolf and power that might have torn their world apart.
Then I was taken again.
That time I knew what captivity was.
I also knew it could end.
There was a difference.
I had fought Nikolai. Stevens. Eric.
I had lost people anyway.
My attention found the side of the room where Monica's parents were talking with another couple.
The ache came immediately.
Monica should have been here.
She would have complained about the food, stolen one of my babies before Thane could stop her, and brought me some book she claimed was educational when it absolutely was not.
She had been the first friend I made after getting out.
Not someone assigned to protect me. Not someone responsible for my recovery.
A friend.
She gave me chocolate cake because she wanted me to have cake. She talked to me about stupid things when everyone else was worried about saying the wrong thing. She taught me to drive badly and somehow blamed the vehicle.
Eric killed her.
Nothing about what happened to him afterward changed that.
I had learned that too.
Killing the wolf who hurt you did not pull the hurt back out.
It didn't bring Monica into this hall.
It didn't give me my mother or sister.
It didn't give any of us the years taken from us.
But Eric would never hurt another Monica.
That mattered.
Raven looked over from beside Cyrus and caught me watching.
She lifted her eyebrows.
I shook my head.
She accepted that and went back to listening to Cyrus explain why Rhonda was committing crimes against meat.
There were so many wolves in this room I would never have known if my life had gone the way it was supposed to.
That thought used to make me angry.
Sometimes it still did.
I wanted my mother.
I wanted my sister.
I wanted the girl I had been before somebody decided my blood made me useful.
But wanting that life did not make this one less mine.
Tessa shifted against me.
Her face wrinkled.
I looked down quickly, expecting a cry, but she settled again with her fist still twisted into my dress.
My daughter.
The words did something strange to me every time.
I had gone from being told my body belonged to anyone powerful enough to claim it to carrying two pups I had wanted inside it.
I had chosen Thane.
Chosen the mating bond.
Chosen when I wanted him close.
Chosen to have these babies.
Nobody could make those choices small simply because other choices had once been stolen from me.
The music changed.
Several wolves complained loudly about whoever had selected the next song.
I smiled.
For once, I didn't need to turn every good thing into proof that I had survived something terrible.
I could simply stand there and hear bad music.
A hand touched my arm.
I knew who it was before I turned.
Thane stood beside me.
His eyes went first to Tessa, then Tarrick, checking both with the speed of a male who believed nobody noticed him doing it anymore.
I noticed.
“You have been gone eleven minutes,” I said.
“Twelve.”
“That explains why you've come to inspect us.”
“I was not inspecting.”
“You looked at both of them before you looked at me.”
“They are smaller.”
“That is a terrible excuse.”
His gaze finally settled on my face.
“Are you all right?”
There was no ceremony in the question.
He simply wanted the answer.
I looked around the hall before giving it to him.
Mikhail was arguing with Amani about whether something on the food table qualified as dinner. Raven had finally joined Rhonda against Cyrus. Pups were still running between tables. Nobody was watching me closely enough to catch me failing.
I wasn't failing anyway.
“Yes.”
Thane studied me.
“I am.”
His expression eased.
Tessa stirred when he reached toward her.
“You're going to wake her.”
“I am not.”
“You always say that.”
“I am taking her.”
“You just arrived.”
“She misses me.”
“She has been asleep.”
“That is irrelevant.”
I let him have her.
Thane tucked Tessa against his chest with the same ridiculous care he used every time he held either pup. Her black head disappeared beneath his chin, and one enormous hand covered most of her back.
He looked down at her.
The Alpha of Alphas immediately ceased to be useful to anyone else.
I laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
His eyes narrowed because he knew that was a lie.
Then someone called his name from across the hall.
Thane looked toward the voice, then back at me.
“You have Tarrick?”
I stared at him.
“No, I misplaced him.”
His expression flattened.
I kissed Tarrick's white head.
“Go.”
Thane hesitated.
The old version of me would have noticed that hesitation for a different reason.
Was he leaving?
Would he come back?
Was I safe without him?
Those questions never arrived.
He walked toward the other side of the room with Tessa against his chest, and I watched him go because my daughter looked impossibly small in his arms.
Tarrick moved against me.
I adjusted him and finally headed toward the food before my father came back to check.
I still had nightmares.
I still hated certain smells.
There were doors I couldn't stand having locked and days when a memory could ruin an hour before I understood why.
None of that disappeared because the war was over.
I wasn't interested in pretending it had.
But I could stand in a crowded hall with my son in my arms while my mate walked away with our daughter and know, without checking the doors or counting the wolves nearest me, that I was safe.
That was new enough.
For tonight, it was enough.