AMARIS
I go to Ryker that night.
Not because I have to. Not because the bond is pulling, or the moon is doing something astrological at me, or any force outside my own skin has issued instructions. I have spent most of my life doing things for reasons that lived outside myself. My father's treaties. My brothers' comfort. A pack's opinion of what a wolfless girl owed the world. Tonight is not one of those things. Tonight I stand in front of my own mirror, brush out my hair, look the woman in the glass dead in the eye, and go because I want to, with both hands and both eyes open.
The corridor is quiet. My knuckles find his door.
He opens it, and his eyes do a thing I catch because I have made a study of this man's eyes. They land on my face first. Then they drop, just for a breath, to where my hand is resting flat against the front of my hoodie, low, without my having noticed putting it there. Then they come back up to my face.
