And she felt, for the very first time, like she was truly free of the pain in her past.
Like she was truly walking forward, being the woman she was meant to be, and not the one who had been created by loss and abandonment. And that was how she knew that no matter what, loving Wolf was worth it.
Because he was wrong about love. At the end of everything, the thunder, the lightning, the fight, it endured.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WOLFRODEHARD. He rode until he reached the top of the mountain overlooking the darkening valley below.
And he could see his cabin.
Could see the damned Christmas lights stretched around the roofline. And he wanted to forget her. He wanted to get away from this. He wanted to get back to who he’d been. All these years. This man who protected the wound in his core with deep, fierce intensity.
He couldn’t get away from her. And that was... That was the worst damn thing about all of this. There had been a time when he’d been able to pull away. When he’d been able to be alone with people around, but he couldn’t do that. Not with her. And he couldn’t even be alone when he went away.
She had done something to him. She had changed him in a way that nothing else had.
And he wanted... He just wanted.
He was staring down the possibility of a future without this woman. And it made him mean. It made him hurt. It made him wonder what the hell the point of anything was.
What the point of safety was.
And here he was, out on this land, his family land, his family legacy. His family curse.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy for his brother. He was.
He was just so damned jealous. The realization knocked the wind out of him. Made it hard for him to breathe. He was jealous. Because he wanted that. He’d always wanted it. It was why he had gotten himself in deep at sixteen. Because he had hoped that he could find some way to have a life in spite of the fact that his family was supposed to be cursed. And he had decided he wanted it. And it hadn’t worked out. He lost it. And Sawyer got it, anyway.
And it was why when Violet had said she was pregnant it was so easy to say he wanted to marry her. It was so easy. But it was the love part that was hard. It was the love part that made it feel like an impossibility. Like something he couldn’t do.
He’d run far from it, and he’d run hard from it, but this was what he wanted.
And he wanted, more than anything, to be loved.
And that beast inside him howled. Because that was it. He wasn’t grieving the loss of the woman he loved, loved so much he could never love anyone else. That wasn’t it. It had never been it. He just wanted to stay hurt. Just enough. Just enough that he would never have to try again. Just enough that he would never get in so deep that he couldn’t come back out. But he’d done it. He’d done it with Violet. And now he’d... He’d pushed her away.
And he’d...
He had it wrong.
Love wasn’t weak. Love wasn’t insufficient.
He’d loved his mother with his whole heart. And even though she’d left...she had loved him. Even though the words weren’t in his memory, she’d been soft and kind. And it had left its mark on him. Enough to know he did want a family. To know he did want to fall in love. She had gone, but the impression of the love remained. For better and worse. Because it hurt. Because loving her and having her leave had caused a hell of a lot of pain. And he had loved Breanna. And yes, they’d been too young. Foolish in many ways, and in the end... Not the kind that would have lasted, he didn’t think. But the experience of loving her had changed him, and it remained, too.
Bad, ugly and good all at once.
Because he had been a teenage boy who had been all in, even without having the maturity to understand that in the future things might change. He’d been intense, because he’d been honest about his feelings. That love might have been immature, but it had been real. It left an impression on your soul. And that was the other thing Violet was right about.
There was no good time to run.
Because in the end, it was too late. It was too late.
I love you.
And the silence was his.
This time he was the one who had run. He’d been running from the beginning. And she had been there. And he let his fear call her a liar. And she deserved a hell of a lot more than that. Violet had been brave. Violet had gone after what she wanted. Violet was fighting for them.