Dan Blackwood had been the Beta of his pack for six years, and he still could not pick a gift for Lily without sweating through his shirt. He stood at the edge of the tree line with empty hands and a problem. His other pack brothers were better at almost everything that mattered in a fight. He had one job in this mating, and it was to keep Lily smiling. Today he had nothing to give her, and she would be back from the council table within the hour. He had tried before. Last month he brought her a carved pendant, and she thanked him in that flat voice that meant he had missed. The month before, a silver comb. Same voice. The other mates were intense with her, all teeth and oaths and serious eyes, and Lily took that seriously back. Dan was the one who made her laugh. If he kept guessing wrong, she would start to think he was not paying attention. That was worse than failing a hunt. So he stopped guessing and started watching. For three days he watched where her feet went when no one needed her. They went past the manor garden, past the rose bench under the trellis, past the stone goddess statue the witches had set up near the path. None of those made her slow down. Her feet went to a small shed with a mossy roof and a round window. She went inside alone. She came out with dirt on her hands and a face that was almost soft. He waited until she was gone for the council, then he opened the shed door. Inside were clay pots, a low stool, and rows of cut stems drying on a string. Wildflowers. Blue ones, purple ones, the kind that grew thick along the creek behind the manor. She was not collecting roses from the tended beds. She was walking out to the wild edge of the woods and bringing back the small messy things nobody else noticed. Dan went to the creek. He spent the whole afternoon on his knees in the wet grass. He picked only the blue and the purple, the way she did. He tied the stems with a bit of brown twine from the shed and waited on the path she always took home. Lily came up the path with her white hair pulled back and her cold council face still on. She saw the bundle in his hands and stopped walking. Her eyes went to the flowers, then to him, then back to the flowers. She took them carefully, like they might come apart. "You watched me," she said. He nodded. She did not smile, but her shoulders dropped an inch, and she held the bundle against her chest the whole walk back. Dan let out the breath he had been holding for three days. He had bought himself a little ground with her. Now he had to figure out how to keep it.

The flowers had bought Dan a little ground with Lily, and the bond at the council had given him more than he had asked for. Two mates now. Lily on one side and Darius on the other, both of them tied to him by something he could feel in his teeth. He wanted to mark them. He wanted it done before the week was out. But marking was not a thing you did in a borrowed room at a five-faction manor, and it was not a thing you rushed. He picked the tree first. A wide oak past the creek, far enough from the manor that no courier would wander through. He spent two days building. He laid platforms in layers around the trunk and linked them with rope bridges. He wove the railings from pale birch branches because Lily liked things that grew wild. He hung a ladder from the lowest deck and tested every knot with his own weight. By the second night the treehouse stood quiet above the moss, and Dan sat on the top platform and let his hands shake where no one could see them. He brought Darius up first, in the morning. Darius climbed the ladder in his long coat and looked around at the birch railings and the rope rings. "You built this," Darius said. "I built this." "For us." "For us." Darius did not smile, but his shoulders came down the way Lily's had on the path. He sat on the platform and waited. Dan went back down for Lily. She came up the ladder without asking what it was. She stepped onto the platform and saw Darius already there and did not flinch. Dan pulled a cord from his pocket. On it hung a pendant of three linked rings, two gold and one silver, balanced so no ring sat above the others. He had paid a witch to forge it in one night. He held it out flat on his palm. "I want to mark you both," he said. "Tonight. If you want it." Lily looked at the pendant. She looked at Darius. "Yes," she said. Darius said, "Yes," a half-beat after her, shorter and more final. Dan marked Darius first because his hands were steadier then. He marked Lily second because he wanted to remember her face last. When it was done the three of them sat on the platform with the cord passed between them, and Lily laughed once, low, at something Dan said about the knots in the railing. He had not heard her laugh before. He understood then that he had been working for that sound without knowing its shape. In the morning Dan walked down to the clearing below the oak and set a three-sided stone there, carved with three linked rings. He pressed moss into the base with his thumb. Then he went back up the ladder, because a courier was already on the path, and the next problem was waiting.