by Eden Beck
“Thank you,” she says as she starts to hand me the tiny girl she holds. “You kept my babies safe.”
“I didn’t actually do anything at all,” I say. “I haven’t even turned yet.”
“Oh, but you did,” she smiles. “You do everything for them just by existing.”
Rory, Marlowe, Kaleb, and I hold our pups together as we stand pressed up against each other in a snug circle with the pups between us. The babies gurgle and coo as if nothing was ever amiss, and we kiss them all and laugh as they smile and look around.
We stayed together, and now we were reunited with our children.
This is the happy ending that I only dared dream of.
At last, one dream come true.
And yet still, the itch beneath my skin turns into an aching in my bones.
“It’s time,” I say, looking up. “We should get back to the house.”
When we get back and the pups are tucked safely in their snug sleeping spots, Lydia and Romulus sit down for a drink by the fire. The boys and I get ready to sit with them, but Romulus puts up his hand to stop us before we sit down.
“Sabrina,” he says. “No need to pretend. I know you feel the urge more strongly than any of us do yet.”
Lydia giggles and I know it’s because she has picked up on my thoughts. Romulus looks at Rory and the boys and nods his head toward the door.
I bounce anxiously on the balls of my feet as Kaleb steps to the window, one hand drawing the curtain back a sliver.
“It’s still a full moon outside,” he says. “We’ll all be transforming soon.”
“Not me,” Lydia says, glancing over towards my sleeping pups.
Romulus gets to his feet. “I’ll make the tea. I’ll stay here, with Lydia and the babies.” He glances over at the four of us remaining—me, Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb. “This is your night. You should do this alone. Soon, you’ll be running the pack on your own. It might as well start with this.”
His gaze lingers a moment longer on Rory, and he nods.
Now that the threat of death is well and truly over, the restless feeling has started to overtake me. The fact that I haven’t completed my first shift yet seems to tug at every inside part of my body. I still, after all this time of wanting and waiting, don’t know what it feels like to be fully a wolf.
But I’m about to find out.
Lydia smiles at me and practically waves us out the door.
“I’ll watch over the pups,” she says. “Stay out as long as you like. We will all be here safe and sound when you get back.”
Romulus gets up and gives me a giant bear hug, the kind that fathers give their daughters. The kind I’ve always longed for.
“Do you have any advice?” I ask him before we leave.
Romulus grins at me with a look of sheer enjoyment on his face.
“Run like hell.”
So I do.
The boys jump down off the patio deck and I follow them as Marlowe catches me before my feet touch the ground.
“Ready?” Rory says as the boys all start to take off their shirts and toss them aside on the grass.
The other shifters around us are unruly. We’re instantly lost in the midst of their celebrations as more and more humans turn to wolves all around us.
“Should I take off my clothes too?” I ask, raising my voice to be heard above the commotion.
“Only if you like them,” Kaleb calls back with a chuckle.
I follow what they are doing and in a couple of minutes the four of us are standing nakedly under the moonlight. My skin tingles with excitement, the hairs on my body standing on end as an energy overtakes me.
But it still doesn’t happen right away.
I am bathed in moonlight.
“Just feel the wolf nature inside of you,” Marlowe says, taking my hand. “It’ll come.”
“Here,” Kaleb adds, with a mischievous smile. “We’ll help you a little.”
Their eyes suddenly begin to glow in that warn golden color that looks like melted gold and the three of them stand around me with their chests and other body parts pressed against me.
I can feel them, and our bond; and as they start to transform, I can feel the primal and urgent nature of their shift. I feel it call to me and I feel my body want to join them, which it does.
It’s not at all painful.
The transformation feels like a big stretch that has been long overdue or a yawn that has been held in for much too long. It feels as if my body is finally allowed to just simply be.
I shake my head and instead of feeling my hair fall around my neck, I feel the rippling fur that is covering my body move against the air. I smell the air through a new keen nose, and I feel four legs and paws touching four points on the ground beneath me.
I look at the boys, who now look back at me with their glowing canine eyes and I can see my reflection in those eyes. Mine are glowing too. They circle around me and I rub my muzzle against each of their sides and noses, leaning into each new feeling and being surrounded by the presence of our deepening bond.
Then, after we have had a moment of closeness in our wolf shifted forms, Rory lifts his head toward the sky and howls. At his cue, the Kaleb and Marlowe do the same. And then, with a glint in his eye, Rory takes off running. The other two wait for a second to make sure I know what to do, but this is what I have been ready for the whole time. I push off my feet, and I run like hell.
The feeling of the wind in my face and the scurrying padding of my fast paws that seem to fly across the ground are everything that I had hoped them to be. I look to my sides and see the boys running alongside me and I think and feel everything that I can soak up from this experience of my very first shift.
I am in love with being a wolf and I am in love with the three of them.
Tonight we will run and run until we can’t possibly run anymore, and then we will collapse together and make love until the moon ducks below the trees.
I know that this won’t be the end of the pack’s struggles. I know that there will be more challenges ahead. But there is a peace now that hasn’t been there before. A peace that we all fought hard for and will have to fight hard to keep.
But I have a family now, a real one.
I know deep inside of me that I won’t be able to have any more pups after this, I can sense it as much as I can sense my own breaths. But that’s okay. My body fought to keep my babies and for that I couldn’t be more grateful.
I already have everything that I have ever needed or wanted, and I already have three pups which is more than enough to fill my heart with happiness. Not only did our pups defeat all odds of survival, but they also look eerily like Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb, which means that our bond is more fulfilled than any of us could have hoped.
And tomorrow, when we wake curled up in each other’s arms and hold our pups to our faces; they will all get names.
Because the danger is passed.
And maybe this chapter of my life will have ended, but it only means a new one is truly beginning.
Epilogue
Sabrina
There are no longer only three hundred people in North Port, Washington.
Not if they’re going to count the number of shifters coming in droves to live by the banks of the same winding river that once nearly claimed my life.
With Remus gone, a new peace has settled over the alliance of shifters. And with it has come a new sense of permanence.
For the packs, and also for myself.
When I first came here with my mother all those years ago—determined to leave the past behind and keep anyone else from getting too close to me—I never imagined once that this is where it would lead me.
But who could?
In the span of a year and a half, everything in my life was turned upside down.
First by the shifters Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb.
And then, maybe even more, by three others.
Aurora.
Ian.
Rem
us.
The first, my daughter, was named for her father. It wasn’t long before Rory’s features were apparent in her, softened and girlish against the strikingly dark color of her hair.
Ian was named for my dearest friend, though she still hasn’t forgiven me for not just naming my son Vivian instead in what she calls a ‘proper tribute’.
And Remus.
Remus, named for the uncle he’ll never meet. Named in the hope that his uncle’s spirit will have another chance at redemption.
I, meanwhile, just hope he doesn’t choose to follow too closely in his great-uncle’s footsteps.
The loss of his brother has left Romulus in a fractured state, a shattered version of himself. Time has slowly pieced him back together, but there are some things that even time can’t heal completely.
And then there are other things that time can.
Enough time has finally passed that my old life, the one that existed before I came to North Port, feels like nothing more than a shadow. Nothing more than someone else’s burry memory.
Soon, in a century or two, it might not exist in my memory at all.
And that’s exactly how I like it.
Leave the past behind me. No more ghosts. No more shadows. Thanks to my shifters, my family—to Rory, Marlowe, and Kaleb—it’s the future I have to look forward to now.
And it is very, very bright.
A Note From The Author
Thank you for reading Wolf Bargain, the third (and final) book in the Wolfish series. It’s always bittersweet writing the last words, but I hope you enjoyed reading Sabrina’s story as much as I enjoyed creating it.
If you enjoyed Wolf Bargain, please consider leaving a review on Amazon!
Xoxo,
Eden
Also by Eden Beck
Wolfish
Wolf Bonded
Wolf Broken
Wolf Bargain
Hawthorne Holy Trinity
Dirty Liars
Dirty Fraud
Dirty Revenge
