Her brow furrowed.
I stopped breathing.
Then she settled again, turning her face a little more toward me, one lone lock of hair sliding across her cheek.
My heart nearly cracked open.
The gates finished opening and I drove through.
Behind us, they closed with the same careful silence.
‘Good boys,’ Oliver said, proud of the respect our warriors already had for our mate.
He was right.
Wisteria spread ahead of us, dark and familiar and alive beneath the night. The packhouse sat at the end of the long drive, large and old, built in pale stone threaded with ivy and framed by the trees that gave our land its name. In spring, the wisteria climbed over the balconies and spilled down the walls in purple waves, soft and fragrant and almost too pretty for a house that had seen generations of
