Honored Vow

ordered, still so
    angry for Russ not wanting to be a panther, so hurt, the feeling of betrayal
    making his temper flare momentarily.
    “Logan said,” Koren chimed in gently, “that any of us may speak to
    him by e-mail or phone or whatever else, webcam, you name it, but we are
    all forbidden from visiting him. If he wants to see us, he comes here.”
    “Yes,” Peter agreed, taking a deep breath, calming, walking over to
    me, and putting his hands on my shoulders. “Thank you for going, Jin, and
    protecting my son.”
    It had been a trip I didn’t have to make, but I accepted the thanks
    from a man who felt like his sons were all alien creatures to him. I patted
    his hand, and he squeezed gently. My arrival had changed everything,
    altered Logan’s path as well as Koren’s, because if the semel-re was gay,
    then his brother could be as well. And even though I had nothing to do
    with Russ’s choices, I was still the catalyst for everything else. That he

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    Mary Calmes

    could still like me at all was a testament to the tolerance in the man. He
    didn’t understand Logan and me, what Koren and Domin had begun and
    ended, but he loved us all regardless. It was more grace than a lot of
    people were granted in their families.
    Because he knew Logan needed help, Peter helped Yuri master his
    beast and offered Mikhail the resources of his personal library to help him
    study. Mikhail himself was all for drowning himself in the old texts,
    committing chunks to memory, but both Danny and Peter cautioned
    against that. It was better, they said, and I agreed, to have a working
    understanding of the text as a whole, to be able to interpret it and explain it
    back to someone else, teach it to another. So they took turns sitting with
    Mikhail, quizzing him during the day, reading to him at night, and even
    listening to him during meals, always just talking about one law or
    another. The three men had endless conversations, and Danny, who my
    father had been training as he had me to be a sylvan, showed him citations,
    Peter showed him illustrations that would spark his memory, and both men
    corrected Logan’s sylvan gently and patiently.
    We were two weeks from leaving for the sepat when I came
    downstairs because I couldn’t sleep. It was getting harder and harder for
    me, Logan’s absence weighing heavily on me. I stopped before walking
    into the great room, though, because I saw them in front of the fire.
    Mikhail had obviously dozed off, and I watched Danny, his hands
    fluttering close but not touching, leaning close to the man’s lips, inhaling
    his scent, finally, after weeks of just looking, reaching out to lift a strand
    of dark mahogany hair from his eyes.
    “That’s quite the crush you’re nursing,” I said as I stepped around
    the corner, making my presence known.
    “Oh I—I just—”
    “It’s okay.” I smiled at him. “I get it, Mikhail’s a good man.”
    “He’s beautiful,” Danny breathed out, his bottom lip quivering.
    “Have you looked into his eyes? There’s so dark and deep and blue
    and—”
    “I’ve looked at him,” I assured him.
    “He’s amazing, Jin.”
    “Agreed, but what do you want from him?”
    His eyes hit mine. “Everything.”

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    121

    It was not my place to tell him what Mikhail was or was not. I felt
    that Mikhail was straight, like Crane was, and Taj, and Artem, but how did
    I know? The one man I could speak for implicitly was my best friend. For
    him, for Crane Adams, only a woman would ever be his mate. For the
    others… I would wait and see.
    “Jin?”
    “You should talk to him when this is all over,” I soothed Danny,
    “but not now.”
    “No.” He nodded. “He would not appreciate me thinking about
    anything but Logan.”
    “No, he wouldn’t.”
    He reached a hand toward me. “May I?”
    I gave him a slight smile, and he put his hand on my shoulder.
    “I’ve always wanted to touch you.”
    It was part and parcel of the whole reah gig.
    “Your father must have loved you so much, Jin.”
    Strange start to a conversation. “What makes you say that?”
    “Because he hates you so much now.” He took a shaky breath. “I
    mean, I never told him I was gay, I was too scared of what he would do to
    me, and that was before what he let happen to Crane.”
    And I had known, of course I had, that my father could have saved
    Crane but had not.
    I took a breath, squeezed his hand tight on my bicep, and smiled at
    him. “My father is not