Emma's POV
Getting my wolf back.
I turn the words over all evening. Through dinner, through the quiet hour after when Ethan works at his desk and I sit with a book I'm not reading. The words won't settle. They keep surfacing, bright and urgent, cutting through everything else.
She's still there. Behind a wall, but there.
That changes everything.
I'd been telling myself the room-sharing was temporary. A security calculation, nothing more. Something I'd undo the moment the numbers shifted. But this—this is a different number entirely. This is the part of me I thought Lucian had buried for good. The part I'd stopped letting myself grieve because grief meant admitting it might be permanent.
And Ethan felt her. Theron felt her.
So when the candle burns low and he sets down his papers and
