Chapter 5

[Sera]

The word "accept" hangs in the air between us like smoke from a dying fire.

I feel it the second it leaves my mouth—the bond snapping. Not cleanly, not kindly, but like someone ripping a bandage off a wound that hasn't healed. The pain is white-hot and absolute, radiating from the mark on my neck through every nerve ending I possess.

My knees hit the floor.

I don't remember falling. One second I'm standing, the next I'm on cold marble with my palms pressed flat against the ground, trying to remember how to breathe. The world tilts sideways. Eva is saying something—I can hear her voice like it's coming through water—but I can't make out the words.

All I can feel is absence. A hollow space in my chest where something used to live. Something that felt like warmth and belonging and finally, finally, someone wants me.

Gone now. Ripped out by the roots.

Killian is already turning away. Already walking toward the door like this—like I—am nothing more than an unpleasant task he's crossed off his to-do list.

And I know I should let him go. I know I promised myself I wouldn't beg, wouldn't crawl, wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me break.

But my mouth opens anyway.

"Why?"

The word comes out raw, scraped bloody from somewhere deep inside me. Killian stops. His hand is on the door handle, his back still turned, and for one excruciating moment, I think he's going to walk out without answering.

"Why do you hate me so much?" My voice cracks on the last word. I hate it. Hate how weak I sound. "What did I ever do to you?"

He turns. Just his head at first, giving me a view of his profile—that perfect profile I've drawn a thousand times, memorized like a prayer. His jaw is tight. His eyes are still that cold, empty gray.

"You did nothing," he says flatly. "That's the point."

"I don't understand—"

"You don't need to understand." He faces me fully now, and there's something almost like pity in his expression. It's worse than the hatred. "I don't need useless relationships, Miss Winters. I don't need connections that make me weak. I don't need—" He gestures vaguely at me, at the crumpled heap I've become on his expensive floor. "This."

This. Like I'm a mess he needs to clean up. A stain on his pristine life.

"Your wolf—"

"Is an animal." The words are sharp enough to cut. "I am not my wolf. I will never be my wolf. And whatever instinct made him mark you was a malfunction, not fate."

A malfunction. That's what I am to him. A glitch in his perfect system.

"Now if you'll excuse me." He pulls the door open. "I have actual business to attend to."

He walks out. The door clicks shut behind him with soft finality.

And I shatter.

---

I don't remember how I get home.

There's a car, I think. Someone drives me. Maybe Liam, maybe someone else—faces blur together when you're crying so hard you can't see straight.

My apartment is dark when I finally stumble through the door. It smells like stale coffee and cheaper dreams. I make it three steps inside before my legs give out and I slide down the wall, curling into myself on the floor.

The sobs come then. Real ones. The kind that tear through your chest and leave you gasping, that make sounds you didn't know a human body could produce. I cry until my throat is raw, until my eyes are swollen shut, until there's nothing left inside me but hollow, echoing emptiness.

And I remember.

Three years ago. Twenty years old. Standing in a grocery store checkout line, exhausted from my second job, wondering how I was going to pay rent and eat in the same month. I'd picked up a magazine without thinking—Fortune Wolves, the glossy kind I could never afford to buy—and there he was.

Killian Voss. Cover story. Looking at the camera like he could see through it, through me, through every defensive wall I'd ever built.

Something clicked that day. My wolf—dormant, useless, the part of me that made me wrong—stirred for the first and only time in my life. And I thought, stupidly, naively, there you are.

He became my reason to keep going. When I was scrubbing toilets at 2 AM, I'd think about his interviews where he talked about building something from nothing. When I was eating ramen for the fifth day in a row, I'd sketch his face in my cheap notebooks and pretend someone that beautiful could exist in the same world as me.

It was pathetic. It was delusional.

But it was mine.

And now it's over.

I drag myself up eventually. My body moves on autopilot as I gather the evidence of my obsession. The magazine clippings. The printed interview transcripts. The folder on my phone with six hundred screenshots.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

The sketchbooks I keep. I can't throw away my own work, even if every page is a love letter to a man who thinks I'm a malfunction. But everything else goes in a trash bag that I carry down to the dumpster at 3 AM, still wearing yesterday's clothes and tear tracks on my face.

When I come back up, the apartment feels emptier. Cleaner, somehow. Like I've exorcised a ghost.

Goodbye, Killian Voss, I think. Goodbye, stupid girl who thought fate gave a damn about her.

---

The next week passes in a fog.

I go to work. I make lattes. I deliver pizzas. I scrub toilets. My body performs the motions while my mind floats somewhere above, disconnected and numb.

Riley notices. Of course she does.

"You look like death warmed over," she says on Tuesday, then immediately winces. "Sorry. That was—you look tired, Sera."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You've burned three drinks today and you never burn drinks."

"I'm fine."

I'm not fine. But what am I supposed to say? My billionaire mate rejected me in a formal ceremony and now there's a hole in my chest where my heart used to be?

Yeah. That would go over well.

By the following week, I've stopped eating regular meals. Stopped sleeping more than a few hours. My notebooks sit untouched on my desk—I can't bring myself to draw anything. Every time I pick up a pencil, I see his face, and the hollow ache in my chest threatens to swallow me whole.

On the night of the full moon, Riley takes one look at me and sends me home.

"Night shift's covered," she says firmly. "Go. Sleep. Eat something that isn't caffeine."

I don't argue. I don't have the energy.

My apartment building is quiet when I climb the stairs. Mrs. Chen's TV murmurs through the walls. Someone's cooking something that smells like garlic and regret.

I reach my door.

And stop.

The lock is broken. Not obviously—you'd have to look closely to see where the metal has been forced—but I know my own door. I know it wasn't like this when I left.

My heart pounds as I push the door open slowly, one hand reaching for the kitchen knife I keep by the entrance. The apartment is dark. Silent except for the sound of my own breathing.

I step inside, knife raised, every sense on high alert.

A shadow moves by the window.

I spin toward it, ready to scream, to fight, to—

Moonlight spills across the figure standing in my living room. Illuminates dark hair. Broad shoulders. A face I know better than my own.

But the eyes aren't gray.

They're gold.

Pure, molten gold, glowing in the darkness like twin flames.

Killian Voss takes a step toward me, and when he speaks, his voice is nothing like the cold, dismissive tone from the rejection ceremony.

It's a growl. Raw. Desperate. Hungry.

"Found you."