“What?” I asked.

“Let’s get married.”

I watched him for a second, rolled my eyes. “You’re drunk on power.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, with the sexiest grin I’d ever seen. “And it feels so good. But that’s not why I asked you.”

I looked at him again, and his eyes seemed clear. “Are you serious?”

He considered that for a moment. “Yeah, I am. Marry me, Elisa.”

There were gasps and silences around the room as aunts and uncles realized their nephew, the heir to the North American Central Pack, and an Apex who’d just come into his power and beaten his first challenger, had proposed.

To a vampire.

And I didn’t really care what they thought. Because I knew who he was and who we were together. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get married.”

Connor squeezed me into a hug, and the room erupted into (mostly) cheers, and left me breathless. “I’ll spend the rest of my life,” he whispered, “proving that this is the best decision you’ve ever made.”

I leaned back, grinned at those brilliantly blue eyes. “Is that a dare?”

“It’s a promise,” he said with utter confidence.

EPILOGUE

For as long as he could remember, he’d been a survivor. Ignored by his father. Placed by his mother with the human who would raise him as one of her own, but always knowing he was something different. Something more. So he watched, listened, read.

And he waited.

Now he wore a yellow vest bright enough to singe the eyes and jeans that were worn and dirty at the knees. It was the boots that gave him away, or would have if anyone had been watching. They were new. Expensive. Unmarred by work and better suited to an urban hike than tossing dirt from the trench he stood in.

But no one looked. The vest bore the name of a Chicago construction company, a gift from a client, and the steel and plastic barriers around the hole he’d dug looked real enough. The trench was already six feet deep, and the shovel pinged when he hit something solid.

He crouched in the hole, brilliantly lit by the noon sun, and brushed dirt from the stone at his feet, then from the carvings that marked it.

He rose, dusted his hands, then flipped the shovel upside down, lifted his arms, and muttered in a language not spoken in a thousand years. With all the strength he could muster, supernatural and otherwise, he slammed metal against stone, sending chips into the air. Another murmur of sacred words, another strike.

“Third time’s the charm,” he said, sweat now dotting his brow, and made his final incantation.

The shovel’s blunt end became a metaphorical spear, making a jagged crack through the center of the rock. It broke apart with a deep and seemingly devastated thrum that sent a shockwave through the earth as magic was released, dissipated. He could feel the ward burning away, like old wicks consumed by fire.

What had been a Cornerstone was now rubble. And it was fucking exhilarating.