Two chaps left now. Love you all. Enjoy the latest art from LittleLoneWriterGirl. It's Lily and Nia :)

***

When Liam came back towards me, I jumped up at him until I had got a satisfactory hello. My wolf was so needy around him that even a scratch behind the ears could have her entire body wagging like some overexcited cub.

"Can she do it, do you think?" I asked him through the link. It was always a fight to make the men listen to me at Silver Lake, and I had Liam to scare them. Olivia would not. But then again, she was an Alpha's daughter, and her wolf would be a lot stronger than mine.

"Yes, she can do it," he replied. Unlike me, he could use his mouth. "Mason taught her how to run a pack the same way he taught me."

"Because he liked her?"

He shook his head. "Because he was always planning to mate her to an Alpha. And he wanted her to be able to influence him in our favour. She knows what she's doing. Believe me."

We were walking back towards Vincent. We could have dragged him back to Silver Lake with us, thrown him in a cell, and spent the next month filling out paperwork to have him properly tried and sentenced to death. But there was a much easier, much quicker way.

Liam talked to the westerners first, because their part was done and they'd very much outstayed their welcome. It only took a minute, and when they were done, the big men left Vincent with us and took their leave. They would go home now. All of them. That was the part I didn't really like. The westerners had been at Haven, too. They'd helped murder us in cold blood, and that hadn't been the first time either. And yet they would be walking away unpunished — hell, they were getting paid for what they'd done.

But what was the alternative? Attack them, kill them all, and lose a few dozen of our own men in the process? No. Not worth it. Enough people had died already — that was the entire premise of us being here. We'd taken care not to hurt the Riverside fighters unnecessarily, and we'd done the same here at Lowland, because that was the only way to break the cycle.

"Olivia doesn't have the authority to surrender to you," Vincent told us furiously, the very second the westerners were gone. I took that to mean he'd been eavesdropping through the bond. "They won't listen to her, you know."

"I think they will, actually," Liam said. "I know you were probably hoping to use the surrender to bargain with us. Sorry about that. But as it turns out, I'm willing to bargain anyway."

"Oh? You'll ... what? Promise to kill me quickly if I grovel at your feet?" Vincent snapped.

Liam didn't rise to it. "No. Better than that. I have a friend who'd like the chance to kill you herself. She's only nineteen. A little baby compared to you. And since she's so keen, I'll offer you this. Fight her, and if you win, we'll let you walk. No charges. No punishment."

He wouldn't go for any of the other Alphas. He wouldn't go for Rhys. He wouldn't go for Mam. But Nia was new, Nia was unknown, and most of all, the words 'nineteen-year-old girl' were painting a picture in his mind which was undoubtedly very inaccurate.

"Deal," Vincent said. Not even a hint of hesitation. I hadn't thought he was that stupid, but evidently, I was wrong. In his mind, it was simply not possible that a teenage girl could beat him in a fair fight. But why the hell would we make him that offer if she couldn't?

We cleared a space on the grass.

***

Nia walked onto the lawn alone and unarmed. Her scent was off, her hood was up against the drizzle, and her hands were in her pockets. If the flockies wanted to guess who she was, they'd have to work for it.

My uncle was a short distance behind her. Slower to emerge, but equally as stony-faced and single-minded. He stayed in the fringe of the trees, clear of all the flockies, because the tattoos on his arms and neck didn't leave much doubt that he was a rogue. Like her, his scent was off.

I couldn't help noticing that there was a lot of blood on both of them. It was my first warning that the fighting near the border had been a lot more vicious than we'd intended.

Vincent had been allowed to shift. His massive wolf was standing in a circle lined by fighters from all four of our allied packs. Most of them had shifted back by now, me included, but a few wolves remained amongst them.

Liam's sister had kept the children inside, so they wouldn't have to watch. I doubted that Vincent was a good parent, somehow, but he was still their dad. I'd thought she might come out by herself, but she seemed content to let her mate die alone and without a goodbye. It spoke volumes about how he must have treated her. A few of the Lowland fighters came instead — to make sure it was done fairly, and no more. None of them bothered to speak to him.

"Just because she's a Llewellyn," Zach muttered beside me, "doesn't mean she's a match for Vincent."

We hadn't told him about Nia, let alone introduced him, which meant he'd guessed it from her appearance alone. That was ... infuriating. I'd gone seventeen years without guessing it.

"She'll win," Hayden told him. He'd know, I supposed. He'd had the pleasure of fighting Nia in the past, and he'd come off worse both times.

Zach gave him a sidelong look. "She'd better. Because I'm not letting him walk, whatever you lot promised him."

I wouldn't either.

Nia stopped a dozen feet from Vincent. She stared at him for an uncomfortable length of time, and he just stood there, one lip curling, unsure of what she wanted. He didn't even know who she was, let alone why she wanted him dead. He hadn't bothered to ask us.

And then she was heading in my direction. She stripped off her jacket and left it draped across my arms. And then she was kicking off her shoes, too. Close up, I could see superficial injuries, but nothing that would slow her down.

"You sure about this?" I asked her under my breath. It was a risk, of course. It would always be a risk. The terrifying thing about fighting in wolf form was that luck was just as important as skill.

Nia's only reply was a blank look. She didn't think that question was worth answering. The man who had murdered her little sister was already dead — I'd torn his throat out myself. But it was Vincent who had been giving the orders that day.

"Okay," I murmured. "I get it. You're sure."

She gave my hand a quick squeeze, as if to tell me it would be alright. There was no smile, no quick wink to back it up, but it was hard not to believe her. And then she was turning away.

Her shift was slow and careful. Her wolf cut a striking figure. Across her back and head, there were a hundred different shades of black, grey and russet brown. It faded to near-white on her underbelly. Usually, all those colours caught the sun, but today her pelt was already dampened with blood.

Vincent could have moved to attack while she was padding steadily towards him, but he looked almost hesitant. He was fighting a girl, and none of his training had prepared him for this. He didn't want to give the impression that he was taking her seriously as an opponent. So all he did was stare at her.

Nia had no such reservations. She closed the space, step by step, until she was within snapping distance. And then she exploded into motion without so much as a growl. I couldn't see exactly what happened between them, but a few seconds of vicious engagement ended with Vincent's ear in two pieces and Nia carrying one hindleg awkwardly.

No sooner had they broken apart than they were together again. This time rolling and tumbling and almost locked at the jaws. They moved so far in the space of a few heartbeats that the fighters had to scatter to make way for them. All the while, the crowd was eerily quiet.

There was a loud yelp. It was hard to tell who had produced it, entangled as they were. I was pretty sure my heart had clawed its way up my chest and come to rest in my mouth. It was so loud. And it was almost the only sound there was. Nia and the Alpha weren't wasting their breath snarling at each other.

The next disengagement was longer. They were both panting. Vincent had blood sheeting down into his eyes, and he kept shaking his head, as if to clear it. It was hard to bite someone when you couldn't see them, and Nia knew that. She kept looping around, heading for his blind side, and he was forced to keep turning in place to keep up with her.

She wasn't unscathed, though. Her hindleg was clearly bothering her. She was holding it tucked up beneath her, and she didn't put weight on it willingly. Vincent's jaws had missed the joint by less than an inch.

It was the Lowland Alpha who snapped first this time. He seemed to have decided to press his advantage before her leg healed itself, and so he bowled into her with all of his considerable weight. Nia's hindleg buckled. And that, of course, was exactly what he'd wanted.

She was underneath him. He lunged for her throat the same way a flockie had lunged for Rhodri's, and I wanted to be sick, but Nia had known the danger. She tucked her chin down, blocking him with her own teeth. She was lucky — she caught the bottom half of his jaw. And then she locked on.

I heard the crunching sound of bone splintering from twenty paces away. Vincent let out a strangled howl through what was left of his mouth. She had a hard time throwing him off, even with such a powerful hold on him. He was a big wolf.

And when she did squirm free, she found that even a broken jaw wasn't enough to stop him. He was chock-full of adrenaline, he was fighting for his life, and he was clearly very pissed off. He managed to latch onto the loose skin above her shoulder, but he couldn't do much damage.

In the meantime, Nia's teeth had found the side of his neck. Unlike him, she had a considerable amount of force behind her jaws. She bit down hard, and she shook him like a rabbit, and it didn't take long for the Alpha to crumple.

Without letting go, she pulled him over. When he was flopped on his side, legs bent awkwardly beneath him, Nia just stood over him, waiting a few moments longer. He'd soiled himself. I could smell it from here. That was common enough when a person was close to death, but it added to my satisfaction on some deep, hateful level.

Nia let go of his neck. She left him incapacitated in the dirt with just enough blood left in his veins to let him understand that he was dying. It was seeping out of him with every desperate, fluttering beat of his heart. She remained standing over him, her head low as she stared at him. It was a haunting, unwavering stare. And it betrayed more emotion than any amount of tearing at him would have.

It took him a few minutes to stop floundering. And when he was just lying there, his entire body twitching, Nia reached out to finish him off with a single, decisive bite.

She could have made it an awful lot slower than that, if she'd wanted, but Nia didn't have a sadistic bone in her body. No amount of anger or frustration or grief or hatred could change that. And I supposed, if we were about to introduce her to the packs as a new, better kind of rogue, it would be best if they didn't see her rip someone limb from limb. The audience was silent, not spitting with rage, and that included the Lowland men. They were content that it had been a fair, civil fight, even if they were not content with the outcome.

Some of their faces were turning away from Nia, and I looked to see what had caught their eyes. Rhys had left the fringe of the trees. He shouldn't have done it. It was reckless, and he knew that, but I also didn't think he cared. He walked to where Vincent was lying, still and listless. There was a lot of muttering coming from the New Dawn men, all of a sudden. The older ones could put a name to that face. But none of them dared complain about it, not when their Alpha was watching on so calmly.

He stood over Vincent for a long moment, looking down at him, as if to make sure he was dead. When he was done with that, he spat on the ground beside him, which made the Lowland fighters shuffle in place and start muttering angrily amongst themselves at such a show of disrespect.

What they didn't know was that Vincent's actions had killed his mate, his son, two boys he'd raised from pups and his niece. All things considered, he had a stronger claim than Nia on the man's life, but I reckoned he was satisfied with the death, regardless of who had been the one to deliver it. Vincent being dead didn't undo any of the pain, it didn't bring our family back, and it didn't bring even a shred of closure, but it was a damn sight better than Vincent being alive.

The Lowland fighters would have done better to stay still and keep their mouths shut. They had only managed to catch Rhys's attention. He lifted his gaze and let it settle on the lot of them, and I felt a knot of worry in the pit of my stomach. He knew that most of them would have been at Haven.

If he decided to attack them, I had no idea what I could do. Him and Nia together would have been able to kill a fair few before anyone could have stopped them, and that would have put us in very hot water with the packs.

"We're not going to hold them accountable, are we?" he asked through the link. It was an open question — bounced between me and Liam and Nia. I wasn't sure he was actually looking for an answer, or if it was just frustration voiced aloud, but I gave him one anyway. It was laced with my own frustration.

"I doubt it."

"And Chris's pack?" my uncle asked next.

"Even less likely," I muttered.

"And not those bastards from Pembrokeshire either." This time, it wasn't even a question. He already knew the answer.

"I had to pay them and send them home with a pat on the back," Liam said. His feelings about that were strong enough to tighten my throat and curl my fingers when they came crashing across the bond.

The link went quiet for a while as we all mulled that over. Nia's wolf had swung her head around to look at Liam and me with a definite sense of disquiet. A fight to the death was usually good at working out some pent-up anger, but I had a feeling this conversation would be enough to wake hers up again. Her tail was low and still, but her ears were pricked.

"How many of the Riverside men do you think Hayden will actually prosecute, when it comes down to it?" Rhys asked next. It sounded like he already knew the answer.

"If I had to guess? Two," Liam told him flatly. "Maybe three. Depends what he can prove. And if he's willing to risk alienating their pack. They're neighbours ... so I sincerely doubt it."

"Great. Just so we're clear," Rhys said. The amount of anger rolling across the link told me that he was not going to forget about this. But he knew, like we all did, that fighting for these men to face consequences for their actions was the thing that was most likely to get us killed.

So we had a choice. On one side, there was justice and accountability and ensuring people were punished for the shitty, shitty things they'd done. There was making sure murderers didn't get to walk around freely. On the other side, there was making sure there was never another opportunity for those murderers to run rampage in one of our camps.

It was a choice, essentially, between hurting murderous assholes and protecting innocent people. And that wasn't much of a choice at all, when it came down to it.

My uncle stared at the Lowland fighters for a moment longer. And then he turned and went back towards the trees without a backwards glance, leaving the flockies to murmur amongst themselves. Nia padded after him, her blood dripping onto the grass with every step she took.

***

I offered to look at Nia's injuries, but she told me not to waste my time. She said that the fight at the border had ended up bloody and out-of-control, and that there were a dozen Lowland fighters out there and almost as many rogues who were in worse shape than she was.

So with nothing better to do, I had caught a ride with some of the Lowland medics. I knew enough to be useful. Seth was already out there, surprise surprise. He was taking turns to do chest compressions on a lifeless wolf, but one look at his face told me that he wasn't holding out much hope of it working.

It was one of his colleagues who took it upon himself to direct us. "That group over there are the hopeless cases. We're leaving them. This one is critical care. Serious but not urgent are off to the left. Take your pick. Official protocol is to treat all pack members before you touch the rogues, but you're all adults, and you can make your own judgements. Most of them are with their own people, anyway. We've been sharing resources."

The 'Hopeless' group was the biggest of all. That didn't bode well. I scarcely glanced them over before kneeling beside one of the critical care patients. It was a Lowland fighter with a chunk missing from his neck. By some miracle, it had missed the major blood vessels, but there was still a lot of blood.

"I'm not helping a rogue, and you shouldn't either," one of the Lowland medics spat. He'd been in the car with me, and he'd seemed nice enough when he'd been showing us all pictures of squirrels on his phone. A few of his colleagues were nodding along vigorously, while the rest watched on in uncomfortable silence.

"Next person who shows such blatant disregard for human life gets their medical licence revoked," I told him. I didn't bother glancing at him as I said it, because the bleeding fighter was taking up most of my focus. "No warnings. No takebacks."

The man laughed at me in a near-hysterical tone. "You have zero authority to do that, sweetheart. What are you, anyway? A nurse?"

That was a strange attitude to have towards a highly skilled and respected profession. I kept my head down, and I kept working, and it wasn't long before one of his friends came over and gave him a thump and whispered, "That's the Luna of Silver Lake, you absolute clown."

It was fun hearing the dismay creeping into his voice. He didn't try very hard to keep the volume down, almost like he wanted me to hear him. "What? No, she's not. If she was, she wouldn't be out here. She probably just looks like the Silver Lake Luna."

I lifted my gaze for the first time to give him a gut-liquefying stare. "Next person who prioritises gossiping over first-aid gets their medical licence revoked."

My tone was flat and even and mostly disinterested. But it seemed to work. The guy shut his mouth very abruptly, and while I wasn't sure he believed I was a Luna, he clearly didn't think it was a risk worth taking. I was happy enough to ignore his lingering glances and scowls.

My patient was in a bad way. I knew to start fluids. That much was easy. Pressure was also easy. They were taking the injured fighters back to the pack house all the time, but it was perhaps ten minutes before it was his turn on the stretcher. Ten minutes was a long time when you were in that much pain. I did my best to talk to him, the whole time I was kneeling there, but I got the sense that I wasn't helping much.

I might have gone with him to the pack house, if only to offer a little bit of consistency, but Seth was beckoning me over to a wolf with a torn abdomen. His face was grim, and the patient he had been working so hard to save was being carried over to join the 'Hopeless' group.

Every time we got close to stabilising someone, there was another patient brought in. And I was only now realising that it was the raiders who were finding all these wounded people, flockies and rogues alike, and carrying them here. Most of the medics didn't seem to care in the slightest that they were rogues. There were only two groups of people in their eyes — those who were helping, and those who were not.

"How did everyone go from murdering each other to ... this?" I asked Seth in an undertone.

He shrugged at me without looking up from the cannula he was placing. "When we got here, the rogues were already giving first-aid. To all the casualties. Seems like they might have saved a couple of Lowland men from bleeding out. I don't know, Eva. It's a shaky kind of truce, and I doubt it will last, but it does give me some hope."

Shaky indeed. "How many of the rogues need surgery?"

"Two that I've seen."

"Okay. Do those two here. Truce or no truce, if they start taking the rogue patients back to their pack house, I don't think we'll ever see them again."

"Got it," Seth said. "Can I give you some advice? These medics are out here without backup. Some are probably nervous. Have a few of the friendlier rogues stay here, minding their manners and helping out with the heavy lifting and so on. We could use the extra pairs of hands, and it'll probably do wonders to ease the tension."

I nodded. He was right, as always. And I conveyed that suggestion to my mother, who was amongst the raiders, trying to keep a low profile.

There were no more urgent patients, and the Lowland medics were already swarming over the serious injuries, so I walked amongst the group of the dead and the dying. It was something I'd never been able to help doing. They had all been designated as hopeless for a reason, and the vast majority would have been dead on arrival, but every now and then, there was someone who defied the odds and kept breathing longer than they were supposed to — sometimes even long enough for their healing to do its work.

And if that happened, I didn't want it to go to waste. I didn't want them to lie there, clinging onto life with all their might, and find that there was no one who cared enough to help them.

I paused a few moments by each of the wolves, checking for a pulse or the tiniest signs of a chest rising and falling. But once I had checked a full dozen without finding a single one alive, I felt my heart beginning to sink. An awful lot of them were rogues.

To suffer through the years of near-starvation... To watch your friends get tortured and executed... To survive the slaughters in our camps... To know that so many of your family members hadn't been so lucky... And to spend your entire life fighting to put a stop to it all, only to die the day before peace ... that was unimaginable.

And the worst part for me — I recognised so many of them. By scent, if not by their pelts, stained and matted by blood, and if not by faces disfigured by bite wounds. I didn't know all of their names, by any means, but they were familiar, in the sense that I had passed each of them a hundred times, talked to most of them, and been genuinely friendly with a handful.

There was a boy, maybe four years older than me, who had hunted with me for an entire summer. He had been the kind to talk non-stop, which was how I knew he had an all-consuming love of penguins, and he'd spent every spare penny he had on trips to the zoo to see them in person.

There was a lady who had taught me how to work out my bra size and then driven me to Wyst to get some that actually fitted after realising that all the women in my family were flatter than me and a little clueless. I'd almost stopped going running because of it. But she'd been patient, and she'd been kind, and she'd let me eat an entire packet of mints on the car-ride home.

There was a girl who would sit at the campfires in the evenings with a guitar on her knee and a voice like liquid gold. As far as I knew, she hadn't actually belonged to any raiding team in particular, but rather drifted between all of them, because everyone loved singing, and there was a lot of it when she was around.

And next to her ... I didn't have to check for a scent. I recognised that wolf at a glance, mostly because he had a strange notch in one of his ears from an old fighting injury. Slowly, I knelt down in the mud. Put a hand on Joel's pelt. He was still very warm. I watched for a moment, looking for the slight hitch of a chest rising. It didn't move.

His throat was torn out, like Rhodri's had been, and his hindleg and tail were mutilated, but the sheer amount of blood pooling beneath him told me that he had been alive when they'd brought him here. He must have been lying here, dying quietly, the whole time I'd been helping out.

I should have felt ... glad, maybe? Because that was it, right? Problem solved. He wouldn't bother me again. He wouldn't come sniffing around, trying to cause problems between Liam and me. Except ... this way, I couldn't hate him. He couldn't be the bad guy when he was dead. It was just a horrible ending to a frustrating story.

We hadn't got on. I didn't know why my brain was suddenly moving at about a mile an hour, sluggish and hesitant and foggy. I didn't know why I kept kneeling there, growing steadily more upset, with every passing second. No, I hadn't liked him, but he still hadn't deserved this.

And maybe, there was an element of hopelessness creeping in. He had been young and headstrong and a raider by blood, and this was how they all ended up, sooner or later.

"You okay?" Liam asked me down the bond. Quick as that. He could feel something wasn't right.

I took a few slow, careful breaths. My hands were shaking, so I stuffed them back in my pockets. Was I okay? How could I be okay? I'd never know, now, whether he'd been lying. It wouldn't have affected my decision, of course. Soulmates or not, I wanted nothing to do with him. But I had a feeling it was going to bug me anyway — the not knowing, the not having an answer, the wondering if the Goddess had really thought Joel was the kind of soulmate that I deserved.

"Not really," I replied. "I'm at the border. Joel's dead. And normally, that would be fine and whatever, because we weren't friends. But there's, um, something I didn't tell you. Something I probably should have told you."

There was a heartbeat of pause. I could sense Liam's unease rising. "Yeah?"

Oh. Well, now I'd have to tell him. I wondered why I'd opened my mouth in the first place, but it seemed likely that it was the sheer shock of the last few days starting to catch up to me. Now that Lowland had been thoroughly bulldozed and brought to heel, I was almost feeling that it was ... over? Or at least approaching a reprieve. And that gave my emotions permission to catch up with me, apparently.

"Yeah," I said eventually. "Joel was ... for a while, I mean, he was hinting that him and me were mates. I didn't believe him at first. Thought it was a game or something. But the more time that passed, the more convincing he got."

I could feel Liam's thoughts fragmenting and falling over themselves. It took him a while to piece it all together. The emotion lagged behind a little, and by the time it had begun to take shape, Liam had retreated behind those safe, solid walls of his, so it was hard for me to tell anything more than the general colour. It was murky green — confusion, mostly.

"Oh," was all he said.

***

I was close to dropping by the time I pushed open the door to our room. I hadn't done a whole lot of fighting or running, but talking civilly with important people was exhausting in an entirely different way.

"All three of them killed Jace," I was saying vehemently. "Vincent, Jaden and Chris. And all three of them attacked Haven. So why are we only killing two Alphas and letting the other one walk? I don't get it."

Liam's eyes darted towards me and away just as quickly. One of the benefits of the bond — he could feel that the anger wasn't directed at him without having to ask, so there wasn't much room for worrying about that. But anger by itself was generally enough to put him on edge, so I took a deep breath and tried to tone it down a bit.

"I don't get it either," he sighed. "I was told he's claiming that they threatened and coerced him into doing it, and I can believe that, I guess. But with no proof and so much motive to lie, I'm not sure we should believe it."

I let out a scoffing sound which was tempered by exhaustion. "Zach and Hayden clearly believe it. And Lewis. So that's us outvoted."

"Hayden knows he's full of it. He told me as much. But he also knows that Chris is the lesser of the three evils, that he's getting old and won't be in charge of his pack for much longer, and that killing him would cost all of us a few fighters and create yet another rift between the packs."

With that, Liam tossed his rucksack onto our unused, neglected bed. I was getting the sense that he was too tired for a conversation. His words were coming slowly, and he was rubbing at his face right now.

I set a good example by crumpling onto our nest of bedding and then lying there, perfectly still, without bothering to get under the covers or take off my shoes. I closed my eyes and sank back into the duvet, feeling a tiny smile creasing my lips.

It was only eight o'clock — too early for sleeping, technically — but we had to be up again before dawn. Ollie and Fion and the kids were still safe in their house near the border of the pack, but they couldn't stay there much longer without risking detection. We were going to take them across the border while it was still dark, and then they could drive to the makeshift rogue camp at Lle o Dristwch.

There was no immediate shift in the bedding to tell me that Liam had joined me. Instead, I heard soft footsteps across the room. A tiny crinkling noise. More footsteps. And then I cracked open an eye to see him settling on the blankets with a packet of biscuits in his lap. I only had to look at them twice before he shared them. Neither of us had eaten much at dinner, mostly because we'd been in a rush to go to bed.

"I know I should have told you about Joel a while back," I murmured through a mouthful of biscuit. "So ... sorry."

He'd taken it very well earlier, after the initial hesitation, but it didn't stop me feeling bad. We were supposed to be honest with each other. Liam shrugged now. "It wasn't really any of my business until a few days ago."

"Well, no. Not in theory. But Joel was very good at making it your business, wasn't he?"

He made a face and then rubbed at the back of his neck. "I get why now."

I shook my head firmly. "He only turned eighteen a few weeks back. Most of the times he was picking fights with you, he didn't know, so he was just being an asshole."

"When did he ... you know ... tell you?" Liam asked after a moment's pause.

"He didn't, really. But he first hinted at it when he was at Silver Lake."

Liam set the biscuits aside and lay back on the duvet beside me. I could sense the steady hum of his thoughts, and it was a comforting feeling, but before long, they were tinged with unease.

"I know I might have caused problems between you..." he began cautiously. "Like, the mark, and us being together in the pack. And I know you've been waiting for your mate this whole time... Is that why you're upset? Did I get in the way?"

Of course his mind would jump there. I didn't know why I hadn't predicted it. I wriggled forwards and kissed him as much as the pillow would allow. When I pulled back again, I didn't go far, leaving my forehead resting against his.

"No," I told him firmly. "No, you didn't. The Goddess could have handed him to me on a silver platter, and I'd still have picked you, Liam. I'm not upset because I wanted to sleep with the guy. I'm upset because... Um, yeah, actually, that's the problem. I don't know why I'm upset. I think I felt less guilty and conflicted when he was alive. That's all. Okay?"

"Okay."

That seemed to have done the trick. He was smiling, and it was his turn to kiss me, but we were too tired to do much more than that. I didn't remember shutting my eyes, let alone drifting off, but I did remember a feeling of true calmness stealing over me for the first time in a very long time.