Howl of Forever
The travel from Bellagio mausoleum, underground crypt to Blackwood pack ancestral grove, Santa Monica Mountains consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The question hung in the air, heavier than the scent of blood and pine. Iris looked down at Killian—kneeling in the dirt, his shirt torn, a dark bruise blooming along his ribs from the Whitmore enforcers they’d barely escaped an hour ago. His amber eyes were raw, stripped of any pretense of alpha pride. He was simply a man, asking for a future.
She should have laughed. She should have told him to get up, to clean the grime from his knuckles, to think about what he was saying. Instead, she felt Oliver’s small hand slip into hers, and her son’s voice cut through the chaos with terrifying clarity.
“Say yes, Mom.”
Iris knelt to meet her son’s eyes. “You want this?”
Oliver nodded, his six-year-old face serious. “He stayed. He came back. And he can’t do the wolf thing yet, but he said he’ll teach me when I’m old enough. That’s a promise.”
She turned back to Killian, whose breath had gone still. The moonlight caught the silver thread of an old scar across his cheek. He didn’t move, didn’t blink. He just waited, his whole world balanced on her next word.
“Yes,” she said. “Get up, you idiot. We have a wedding to plan.”
—
Four months later, the Santa Monica Mountains held the last of the autumn warmth. The ancestral grove of the Blackwood pack sat in a natural bowl of ancient oaks and sycamores, their branches laced with white string lights that glowed softly against the twilight. A simple arch of twisted manzanita stood at the center, draped in cream silk that fluttered in the coastal breeze.
Iris stood at the edge of the grove, her dress brushing the fallen leaves—ivory lace, nothing extravagant, because she refused to let this become a spectacle. Selene fussed with the hem, then stepped back with a satisfied nod.
“You look like you belong here,” Selene said, and her voice cracked just slightly. “In a good way. Like the mountains decided to claim you.”
Iris took a slow breath, counting the seconds the way she did when panic threatened. *One, two, three.* The pine and sage scented the air. She could hear the low murmur of pack members gathered beyond the tree line—maybe forty of them, she’d been told, the core of the Blackwood family who had chosen loyalty over Flynn Whitmore’s old regime. Flynn himself was gone, stripped of his holding company after the SEC investigation Beckett had quietly fed evidence to. Owen Whitmore had vanished into a private rehab in Switzerland, his inheritance frozen.
The threat was not gone. It was buried. And Killian had made sure the grave was deep.
“You ready?” Selene asked.
Iris shook her head. “I’ll never be ready for any of this. But that’s not the point, is it?”
Selene squeezed her arm and stepped away to take her seat in the front row—a wooden bench beside Beckett, who wore a dark suit that somehow made him look even more like a security consultant on vacation. He gave Iris a curt nod, the closest thing to approval she’d ever get from him.
Then Oliver appeared. He walked down the short aisle of fallen oak leaves, holding a velvet pillow with two rings that were slightly too large for his small hands. He wore a tiny gray vest over a white shirt, his hair combed back in a way that made him look eerily like a miniature Killian. His brown eyes were fixed on the arch, on the man waiting there.
Killian had insisted on a traditional suit—charcoal, no tie, the top button of his shirt open. He looked like he was going to a funeral, except for the way he watched Iris. His hands were clasped in front of him, but his fingers kept flexing, counting something. The fight he’d put into this. The steps he’d taken. The mornings he’d sat at their kitchen table, letting Oliver climb onto his lap and demand stories about the pack’s history.
Iris walked.
The leaves crunched under her bare feet—she’d kicked off her shoes at the edge of the grove, because the earth felt right. Each step brought her closer to the man who had once been a stranger, then a monster in her nightmares, then a protector who bled for her son. The ceremony was not long. The pack elder, a woman named Clara with silver braids and eyes the color of honey, spoke the old words and the new ones.
“Killian Blackwood, do you vow to protect this woman and her child—your child—with every full moon and every sunrise, with your life and your legacy?”
Killian’s throat worked. He didn’t look at Clara. He looked at Iris. “I vow it. I will never leave them again. Not to protect them from myself, not to punish myself for the past. I will stay, and I will fight, and I will be the father Oliver deserves—every hour of every day, wolf and man alike.”
The words landed like stones in still water. Iris felt the weight behind them, the promise he’d already begun to keep. She saw it in the way he’d stopped flinching at her touch. In the way he held Oliver’s hand during thunderstorms. In the way he’d sat beside her in the hospital three weeks ago when she’d had a panic attack over a car backfiring, and he hadn’t tried to fix it—just stayed.
“Iris Harrington, do you accept this vow, and do you give your own?”
She looked at Oliver, who had finally reached the arch. He held up the pillow with both hands, grinning. She took the ring for Killian—a simple band of brushed silver—and slid it onto his finger. His hand was warm, calloused, steady.
“I accept,” she said. “And I vow to build a home with you that doesn’t need walls. I vow to let you teach Oliver what it means to be a wolf, but I also vow to teach him what it means to be human. And I vow to never run from the moon.”
Clara smiled. “Then by the right of the ancestors and the will of the pack, I declare you bound. You may seal the vow.”
Killian leaned in, his forehead pressing against hers first, a gesture so intimate it made the gathered pack fall silent. Then his lips met hers, soft and certain. Iris felt the vibration of a low growl in his chest—not a threat, but a sound of pure belonging.
Oliver tugged at Killian’s sleeve. “Is it done? Can we do the howl now?”
Laughter rippled through the grove. Selene wiped her eyes. Beckett’s mouth crooked into something that might have been a smile.
Clara raised her hands. “The moon is rising. Let the pack welcome its new family.”
The last of the sun bled out behind the mountains, and the full moon crested the ridge, silver and enormous. The pack began to howl—a chorus that started low and built, a wave of sound that rolled through the trees and echoed across the canyons. Beckett joined, his voice rough but steady. Selene covered her ears but grinned.
Iris felt the call in her bones, a resonance she didn’t understand but didn’t need to. She tilted her head back and let out a sound that was not quite a howl, not quite a cry—a release. Killian wrapped an arm around her waist, drawing her close, and threw his own howl into the night, a note of pure joy that cut through the chorus.
And then Oliver stepped forward.
His small chest rose. His eyes caught the moonlight, and for a moment, they flickered—gold. Not the full shift, not yet, just a whisper of the wolf that would one day live in his blood. He opened his mouth and howled, a high, thin note that somehow harmonized with his father’s.
Iris felt the tears then, hot and silent. She pulled Oliver into her arms, and Killian folded both of them into his embrace, his chin resting on her shoulder, his breath warm against her neck.
They stood there, the three of them, in the center of the grove, while the pack’s howl rose and fell like the tide. The string lights swayed. The moon held still. And for the first time in her life, Iris believed that monsters could become men, that sons could inherit more than pain, that love could be a vow written in moonlight and blood and the scent of pine.
Killian pressed a kiss to her temple. “Forever,” he murmured.
Iris turned her head, meeting his gaze. “Forever.”
Oliver pulled back, his eyes still catching the gold light. “Can we do that again tomorrow?”
Killian laughed, the sound breaking open something old and healed. “Every full moon, little wolf. And every sunrise in between.”
Under the moonlight, the Blackwood family howled together—not in grief, but in triumph.