Ella: Let’s talk about where your head is when WOLF REDEEMED opens. You’re in Archai custody, Maddox is dead, Anigma’s control over you is broken…but you’re not free. What’s your mental state?

Baer: […] You really want that answer?

Ella: Yes. The real one.

Baer: Savagely angry. Barely leashed. That work?

Ella [not unsympathetically]: Would you elaborate?

Baer [gruffly]: Do I have to?

Ella [knowing I’m the one who put him there in the first place, tentatively]: Please?

Baer: I was with Maddox through a lot of years. A lot of blood. I’ve been a weapon for a very long time. When the story opens, that’s still all I know how to be. I’m locked in a cell with my brother. The chains are off, but the leash is still there—just…floating. No hand on it. No orders coming. After a while, that’s almost worse.

Ella: Worse how?

Baer: When someone’s forcing you, you can tell yourself you have no choice. Maddox said, “Go,” so I went. He said, “Turn them.” I did. I told myself it was for my sister. For Beckan. For survival.

Once you strip that excuse away, you’re left with…what you did. You look back and there’s this wasteland behind you. Souls you helped break. People who thought they wanted what you gave them, but didn’t really know what they were getting into. And there’s no more I had to. Just…I did.

Ella: Maddox had been controlling you for decades, with your sister as leverage. How much of what you became traces back to that?

Baer [voice gruff]: You’re asking me to think a little too much about my past.

[Ella stays silent]

Baer: The Anigma held Mila from the beginning, before Beckan and I were fully grown by our standards. Young enough to believe sacrifice fixed everything.

You tell yourself it’ll be just a few missions, you’ll find a way out. You never do. Centuries go by. One day you realize you’ve become exactly what you hate…and your excuses are dust.

Ella: You and your brothers never thought about refusing? Letting Maddox kill you instead?

Baer: We thought about killing Maddox every day. Dying with him if we had to. But not at the cost of her. That was the line we wouldn’t cross.

You can carve a lot of pieces off yourself in the name of family. The thing nobody tells you is…once you’ve cut that deep, you don’t grow those pieces back. You’re left…sharper. Meaner. Less. And you have to figure out how to live like that.

[That was far more than I ever hoped to get out of him.]

Baer: I figured the Archai would lock us up and lose the key. I’d have done the same. You don’t just let Maddox’s pet wolves wander your halls.

But the worst judgment was my own. Beckan’s the one who still believed there was something worth saving in me. I didn’t. Not then.

[pause]

Baer: He’s arguing with me about that. Says I’m “editing the truth” to make myself sound more irredeemable than I was. He can deal with your next interview when you give him a book. I’m telling it my way.

Ella: Speaking of Beckan—let’s talk about the telepathic bond between you two. For readers, it’s a lifeline. What is it for you?

Baer: It’s oxygen. With the loss of our brothers and sister, we ended up a pack of two.

The bond’s not just words in your head. It’s presence. Emotional bleed. I know the second Beckan’s mood shifts; he knows when mine does. We can argue without speaking, coordinate in a fight without looking. When Maddox was using us, that bond was the only thing that felt like it was actually ours.

Maddox tried to use it against us, but the thing about trying to use a bond like that—you might twist it, but you also strengthen it. Every time they leaned on it, we pulled tighter together.

That’s why we’re still standing. Two points holding the same line.

Ella: When the Archai first “take you in,” what shifts for that pack of two?

Baer: “Take us in” is generous. They imprisoned us. Which, again, we deserved.

At first it was still just us. Four walls, a ceiling, Beckan’s voice in my head, my wolf pacing circles under my skin. We didn’t trust the Archai; they didn’t trust us. Simple. Familiar. We’re good at enemies.

Then Grim walked in.

Ella: Grim, the Archai healer.

Baer: You say “healer” like it’s a soft thing. It’s not.

Grim came with healing and questions and this…annoying patience. He looked at us like we were wounded, not rabid. First one who treated us like something other than ticking bombs. Still didn’t trust us, but he gave us…care. That was new.

It cracked the door.

Ella: Let’s jump to the moment everything shifts: Raine. First time you saw her. Set the scene.

Baer: Human world. Coffee shop. I was on guard duty—armed babysitter in a hoodie. My orders were simple: keep my head down and keep her safe. Blend.

Ella: And then?

Baer: And then she walks out from behind the espresso machine. [A soft smile lights up his face.]

She was…bright. That’s the first thing. Not just physically—though yeah, she caught my eye. Her energy. Her laugh. The way she talked to people like she actually gave a damn. That kind of open light…

In my world, that’s wrong. You see that, you think: easy target. Leverage. Something Maddox would’ve used. My first instinct was to mark the exits, figure who’d go for her first in a fight, plan how to keep her breathing if things went sideways.

Ella: You weren’t in a good headspace. How did that clash with seeing her?

Baer: I was a mess. Still caged on the inside even if I was technically “out.”
I walked in carrying centuries of blood and a head full of nightmares. I wasn’t there to fall in love with the target.

But all it took was a smile.

[pause, rough exhale]

Baer: Humans smile all the time. Polite. Distant. Raine’s wasn’t. She looked right at me, and something in her eyes said she saw more than the surface. Not everything, thank the fates, but enough to tilt my world.

Ella: When did you realize what she was to you?

Baer: One second I’m just a grumpy customer in line, trying not to look too dangerous. Next second, my wolf is slamming against my skin, howling one word: Mate. It wasn’t romantic. It was…fierce. Overwhelming. Every instinct I had locked onto her. Protect. Claim. Get her away from the crowd. Make sure no one ever touches her wrong.

I rejected it. Immediately.

Ella: Rejected it?

[Baer rubs the vee between his eyebrows]

Baer: Do we have to talk about this?

Ella [suggestively]: We don’t have to.

Baer: But you want me to. [Heavy sigh.] All right.

One minute you’re trying to decide if you even deserve to keep breathing. Then you walk into a coffee shop—knowing you don’t even like coffee—and the biggest gift ever given to one of our kind is standing in front of you. It’s not exactly like I felt I deserved it.

Ella: Wait, you don’t like coffee?

Baer [mouth twisting]: Tastes like caffeinated piss.

Ella [laughing]: You drank coffee constantly when you visited Raine!

Baer [sheepishly]: What else was I supposed to do? She’s proud of her coffee.

Ella: That’s true love.

[Baer smiles down at the table between us.]

Ella: And she didn’t know what you were. That had to be hell with the attraction between you.

Baer [snorts]: “Attraction” is polite.

From the second the bond clicked, I wanted her in every way a man can want a woman. Her scent, her laugh, the way her mind works. I wanted to wrap myself around all of it and never let go.

But wanting and taking are different. I’ve spent too long on the wrong side of that line to blur it with her.

Ella: And then came the moment when you had to convert her.

Baer [nodding]: It was terrifying, what Kane had done… But that moment was also—and I don’t use this word lightly—holy. My mate, waking to her true self.

My first instinct was to shield her physically. Step between her and anyone who might see her as a threat. But under that was something else—recognizing what she was becoming. Something rare. Necessary.

Watching your mate step into who she really is? You want to bow and cheer and tear the world apart so nothing can dim that light.

It changed how I saw my whole life.

Ella: How?

Baer: Before Raine, redemption was…distant. You can’t undo what you’ve done, you can only stop adding to the pile. I figured if I took enough hits for the Archai, maybe eventually I’d die on the right side of the line. Best-case scenario.
Then Raine woke up. Suddenly it wasn’t just about dying better. It was about living better. Being the kind of man who could stand at her side without staining everything she touched.

Redemption started to look less like a single heroic sacrifice and more like a series of choices. A daily grind. Every day I woke up and asked: What can I do, here, now, to make her life safer? Brighter? What can I do to make sure the past stops with me and never reaches her?

Raine gave me a reason to live. Not just vengeance against the Anigma. Not just loyalty to my brother or grim gratitude to the Archai. Loving her made me want more than survival or revenge. It made me want a future.

[smiles grimly]

You don’t get a future unless you earn it. I’m still working on that part.

Ella [softly]: Do you believe you deserve her?

Baer: Never. But every day, I tell myself: When you look at her and think, ‘Not me. Not with my past,’ remember this—if fate thought you were beyond saving, it wouldn’t have put her in your path.

You don’t deserve her. You never will. That’s not the point. The point is proving you’re worthy of standing beside her, every damn day you get.

[Ella surreptitiously wipes away tears. Baer looks away.]

Ella: Last question. [clears her throat] If you could speak directly to the readers who are meeting you for the first time in Wolf Redeemed, what would you want them to know?

Baer [snorts lightly]: Beckan says to tell you he’s the funny one. He’s wrong. I’m hilarious. Just very selective about my audience.

What I really want you to know is this: When you first read about me, you’re going to wonder why anyone would give a monster like me a second chance. You’re not wrong to ask that.

You’re also going to see Raine—this stubborn, brave, infuriating woman who refuses to let fate or anyone else make her choices for her. But she looks at me and sees more than a weapon. She’s not naive. She’s not blinded by the bond. She just refuses to let my worst moments erase everything else.

If you stick with us, you’ll see a lot of darkness. Mine. The world’s. Maybe some of your own reflected back. But you’ll also see what it looks like when someone chooses you at your lowest and says, “I’m not letting go.”

If there’s anything worth reading in our story, it’s that. Not the claws or the fights or even the heat—though you’ll get all of that. It’s the fact that even an old, bloodstained wolf like me can find a home in someone’s arms…and decide, finally, to stay.

Ella: Thank you, Baer.

Baer: Don’t thank me. [pause] Thank Raine. She’s the reason I answered at all.

the happy ever after you are longing for

ella@ellasheridanauthor.com

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