The conversation wound down slowly, the way important conversations did—not with a clean ending but with a gradual softening as exhaustion asserted itself over urgency. Alex had eaten twice more, drunk most of the first barrel of crystal honey syrup under System's watchful monitoring, and nursed all four cubs through another round before they were collectively persuaded to sleep.
Leo had not moved far from the cubs since they'd arrived.
He was aware of it—aware of how strange it must look, the warrior who had always kept himself at a certain remove from attachment now apparently unable to create more than two feet of distance between himself and four small sleeping lions. But awareness didn't produce the ability to change it. Every time he tried to sit somewhere else, something pulled him back. Not the bond—or not only the bond. Something older. Something that had existed in him long before Alex, long before the exile, long before everything.
The third cub was awake.
