CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

RILEY

I asked him in the morning.

Not the morning after the warehouse — that morning I was still in the processing stage, still working out which feeling went where, still reconstructing the ordinary around the extraordinary. The morning after that morning. When the twins were at Mara's for a few hours and the apartment was quiet and I'd been sitting with my coffee for long enough to know what I actually wanted to say.

"Explain the bond to me," I said. "What it actually is. What it does. What it costs."

He was at the other end of the counter. He looked at me for a moment, checking the register of the question — was this confrontational, was this clinical, was this something else — and whatever he found made him set down the coffee mug and sit properly.

"From the beginning?" he asked.

"From the beginning."

He told me.

The bond is — he said it's like a frequency. Something that runs between two people who are mated at a level below consciousness, below language, something the wolf recognizes before the human does. When it's healthy and active, it's warmth. It's the knowledge that someone is in the world and located and okay. It's the way you know when someone you love is in the next room without hearing them.

When he rejected me, he said, the frequency went to silence. Not dead — he'd thought it was dead, but it wasn't dead, it was just severed at his end while continuing to run at mine. Five years of silence on his side. Five years of carrying the live end on mine.

The feral episodes. He told me about those — the months where his wolf had essentially gone rogue inside him, refusing to accept that the bond was broken because it wasn't broken, refusing to let him function normally as an Alpha because the mate bond runs through every Alpha function and his was still running. The drinking hadn't been self-destruction, not exactly. It had been anesthesia. Trying to quiet something that wouldn't be quieted.

"I could feel you," he said. "Sometimes. If I was very still. If the wolf was running quiet." He looked at the counter. "Grief, mostly. The first year. Then something more tired. Then — around four in the morning, sometimes, there was something that felt like warmth. Like you were okay. Like something was—" He stopped.

"What?"

"Like someone was being fed."

I looked at him.

"The twins," I said.

"Yeah." He was quiet for a moment. "I didn't know what it was at the time. I just — I held onto it. It was the only warm thing in five years."

I took a breath.

"I felt it too," I said. "Not often. Just — sometimes when I was very tired, something that wasn't quite loneliness. Just weight. The mark would warm up when I was scared. I thought it was phantom pain. I spent a lot of time and energy telling myself it was phantom pain."

"It wasn't."

"No." I looked at him. "It wasn't. I know that now."

He didn't say anything. He just looked at me with those silver eyes and waited, the way he'd been waiting for three weeks — not pressuring, not angling, just genuinely waiting, like he'd decided patience was the only honest posture available to him and had committed to it completely.

"It was never broken," he said.

"I know." A beat. "I think I've known for a while."

The apartment was quiet.

Outside, traffic. A dog barking somewhere in the building. The ordinary sounds of an ordinary city going about its ordinary business while I sat at my kitchen counter and looked at the man who'd broken me at nineteen and come back at twenty-four and spent three weeks proving that he was also the only one who knew how to put it back together.

I kissed him.

Once. Brief. Soft. The most deliberate thing I'd done in five years — nothing impulsive about it, nothing accidental, just a decision made with full knowledge of what it meant and what it was going to cost me and what I wanted anyway.

Then I got up and walked to the bedroom.

I heard him behind me. Very still. The bond hummed between us like something powering back up from a long sleep, warm and present and very much alive.

I didn't look back.

But I left the door open.