Epilogue Part I

Kiran was at his desk writing to the Magnolia pack. *Trying* to write.
It was difficult with Selene kissing bruises onto his neck.
She was sitting backward on his lap, his chin resting on her shoulder to see the words he was attempting to compose.
Attempting to explain the murder of the pack’s leader was difficult when Selene was grinding her hips against his.
His pen scritched across the paper when Selene moaned his name against his skin. It rolled off the desk with a clatter but Kiran only heard his blood pounding in his ears—and felt it pulse between his legs. Hands snaking under her shirt and up her back, Selene drew back to look at him with heavy eyes, her own hands holding his face gently between them.
“How easy to distract you,” she purred with a lazy smile.
Kiran matched it with more devilishness. “Or it’s just the stress of trying to clean the mess of a murder.”
She snorted. “As if you haven’t done that before.”
“True. The point, night goddess, is I don’t need you arousing me with murder on my mind.”
Selene *tsk*ed and swung her leg over his lap so she could stand and wander to his window. He watched her go with a gaze that lingered on her ass that he wanted to either smack or bite. “I am supposed to be returning to my harem, Kiran,” she said languidly. “In the little time it will take for yours to figure out that I am still here, do you want to talk about murder…or forget about it and fuck me?”
Kiran swallowed hard, opening his mouth for a sarcastic comment, but shook his head and turned back to his desk. Picking up a new pen and fresh paper, he wrote furiously. Even when Selene’s palms slid down his shoulders and under his shirt collar, he focused on trying to tell a story that no one would truly understand but two immortal Alphas and a reincarnated Omega.
“What are you writing?” Selene asked in a whisper, but her voice had taken on a serious note.
“Don’t stare over my shoulder, nosy bitch. What do you think I’m writing? I’m trying to explain that we settled a deal on ending the Choosing forever with their now-dead Alpha, who killed his own packmates, who was killed by one of their own packmates.”
“Precise,” she commented. “Do not call me bitch or I will bite off your other ear. Write that I am included in that deal.”
“I already did.”
“And I had nothing to do with the murder.”
“And neither did I. Anything *else*?”
“Hmm, no,” she simpered. Then she kissed his stubbled cheek. “You *don’t* need to tell them that we are no longer obsessed with our past lovers.”
Kiran gripped her chin gently to turn it so their mouths could meet. It was tender until she decided to capture his lower lip between her teeth and puncture skin. Licking the blood when she pulled away with a wicked grin, he sneered at her. “You have the option not to hurt me.”
“What is the fun in that?”
His brow quirked. “Is it *boredom* that is the true enemy of sin?”
Selene straddled his lap again. “Sex isn’t boring.”
Kiran’s fingers eased through the strands of her black hair and searched the face he knew as well as his own—a face he hated, with pale skin and a too-small nose, her blue eyes that seemed to bore into his very soul. A face he…wouldn’t admit he could stare at until they were nothing but bones.
“No,” he said slowly, gaze flicking to her lips and thinking go how many places he wanted them on his body.
“Letting go,” she murmured, mischievousness fading with his, “and moving on isn’t boring.”
Kiran agreed, “No. Remembering but not forgetting is healthy.”
“Yes, of course. Our portraits would be fine beside each other in storage somewhere.”
They let Wisteria Ren keep the box of the Amaranth records with the intent to hide away Zinnia and Calla’s last belongings where they would be a kind reminder of the light shining through the blood of their pasts but no longer haunt them.
Kiran and Selene had moved on before in their own ways, but never like this. And something about it felt…good. Freeing. He had let Seff Bleize walk away with a smile on her face and didn’t feel a lick of regret.
Not even holding back his doubt that she was walking into a mistake; did she really think trying to find her runaway lover in hundreds of miles of landscape they didn’t know an inch of was independence? She wasn’t searching for freedom. She was searching for a male who would lose his to a visit from death itself.
Selene stroked his hair out of his eyes. “I feel like being nice—”
“That’s a first.”
“—shut up. We should vouch for the male. For Seff’s sake.”
Kiran considered. He would never admit his twinge of jealousy when he knew Seff had affections for another male—and one who loved her back. But now…who would have thought that he felt like doing a kindness? “We can pull our influence one last time.”
Selene pouted. “Our shrines of apples and moonflowers will diminish.”
“I doubt—” Kiran’s words were cut off when she rolled her hips again. His lip started to curl. “Can we not have a serious conversation?”
“Absolutely not. I just want to know your obsession with apples.” Her smirk was keen. She knew why. She just wanted to get past the *boredom*. She just wanted to *play*.
His hands braced her hipbones, broad hands nearly encompassing them. Gods did he like to touch her. “Don’t make me bring up her name.”
She leaned forward to kiss his lips. “Then only speak mine.”
They enacted plenty of sin after that.
-
- *Five weeks later* -
-
Kiran was disappointed when the Magnolia pack appointed Seff’s eldest brother, Sloe, to be the next Alpha. He and his twin, Fern, treated his sister like shit for years and now he is named leader? The only redeeming benefit was the restoration, unbeknownst to Sloe himself, of an Amaranth to the “throne” of the pack as a founding family. It remained to be seen if Hyacinth Furze’s last will was an act written in good conscience.
Hawthorn Henbane, found seeking shelter with his family in the Winter pack, was pardoned, albeit extremely reluctantly, of his crime. Seff’s confidence in her recount of events would have convinced even Kiran of Henbane’s innocence.
Kiran and Selene’s also carried weight. Some hopeful Magnolias still fawned over them in hopes to join their harems, but it was made explicitly clear that they would no longer take consorts.
Apart from the tenseness of the trial and transition, there was a small celebration of life—at least for Kiran. Cedar Clematis did become pregnant with his pups, but he had no desire to be remotely close to the fanatical Omega. Selene aided in the form of baring her teeth at her whenever she was spotted in the crowd of Magnolias.
When the bombardment had died down after arriving at the Manor, Seff found them, hand-in-hand with a pregnant Allium Ren. Her pups were alive and presumably healthy, but it remained to be seen how the birth went if they were deformed. Kiran promised to be present.
He begrudgingly admitted he was glad to visit Magnolia Manor one last time. It was a tying of loose ends. Although it wasn’t Zinnia’s birthplace, it was nonetheless a symbolic goodbye.
“I was not aware you had the humility to look pensive,” Selene remarked as they danced in the ballroom of where she had not long ago threatened Hyacinth.
“Are you talking to distract yourself from all the staring?” he murmured back, gaze meeting the open-mouthed gaping—*why were the two immortal rivals* dancing *with each other?* the sweet, jealous Omegas thought.
She stepped on his foot hard enough to actually hurt. “You are implying that I have the ability to become embarrassed.”
Kiran’s hand on her waist slipped down to cup her ass—and proceeded to smack it, the sound a sharp disruption of the small philharmonic across the room. “They’re *jealous* of us both, night goddess,” he purred, now rubbing the hurt with a smug smirk that only scandalized Magnolias could see. *She’s mine*, it said.
A growl rumbled in her throat. “They are going to think we stopped taking concubines because we fell in love with each other.”
More than half the crowd was listening in, and the Alphas’ roaming eyes were driving the message into their pretty little heads. Kiran imagined the look in hers was, *He’s incredibly handsome and if you even look at him I will kill you*.
“Did we not?”
Selene hummed in consideration and Kiran heard the mischief in it. “That remains to be seen. Wasn’t it you who said love is a useless notion?”
“Plenty useless,” he told Selene before kissing her.
-
They left Magnolia Manor the next morning, Seff seeing them off with the mist of the dawn not yet burned away by the sun.
Kiran kissed Seff on her cheek, smirking in Hawthorn’s direction as he stood just behind her. “What are you two young ones going to do now?”
They exchanged small smiles. “Get the hell out of here.”
Selene kissed Seff’s forehead. “You will find hell wherever you go.”
“We’ll manage,” she said with a shrug. “But I’ll write to you both.”
Kiran accepted the offer, and with his own offering of his last charming quip, he took Selene’s hand and did not look back. There was only the future ahead. And for once, Kiran did not see it stained with blood.