Ronan Bane

Ten years ago Ronan Bane stood in the ring and spoke the words of rejection over you in front of every wolf who mattered, then watched you walk out of the territory. He told himself it was strategy, because a rival pack had marked you as the way to gut him. It was that. It was also cowardice, and he has known the difference every day since.

The bond never severed the way the rites promised. It went underground and rotted him slowly, a decade of a wolf grieving a woman it could still feel.

Now the threat that made him do it is dead, his pack is thinner for the choice, and he is on the step of the ordinary human life you built ten years away, rain in his hair, down on one knee before you can shut the door. You owe him nothing. He knows exactly that, and he has come anyway, to earn back an inch at a time on your terms what he threw away on his.