Wrong Bond

CHAPTER 4

No one called it a marriage after that.They called it an incident.Lydia heard the word twice before they got her out of the hall. Once from the priest, his voice thin with panic as he ordered the guards to move. Once from one of the guards himself, low and furious, as if naming it anything more precise would make it real.

She barely remembered leaving.

The world had narrowed to sensation. Her palm still burned where the blade had cut it, but the sharper pain was inside her now, somewhere under her ribs, where something hot and foreign had taken hold and refused to let go. Every breath pulled at it. Every step jarred it. And beneath it all, impossible and constant, there was Logan.

Not beside her.

Inside the bond.

A pressure. A temper. A raw, violent restraint that kept hitting her in flashes she could not stop. One moment she was walking; the next she felt the echo of his anger hard enough to make her stomach clench. Then it was gone, replaced by the strain of control so brutal it made her own hands shake.

She had never been inside another person’s emotions before.

She hated it instantly.

“This way,” someone said, though Lydia couldn’t tell who.

A hand hovered near her elbow but never touched her. No one touched her. Not the priest. Not the guards. Not even the maid who appeared with clean linen and a basin of water that went sloshing over the edge because she was trembling too badly to hold it steady.

Lydia stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked up.

The maid froze.

"Why is everyone acting like I survived a fire?” Lydia asked.

The girl’s throat worked once. “My lady"

“Don’t call me that if you won’t answer.”

The maid went pale and lowered her gaze so fast it looked painful.

One of the guards stepped in. “You need to keep moving.”

Lydia turned on him. “Then explain what happened.”

His jaw tightened. “I can’t.”

Hhat was an answer in itself.

She looked from him to the priest, who had followed them only as far as the doorway and now stood several paces back, as though distance might protect him from whatever had been sealed in that hall.

"You expected something,” Lydia said. “Not this. But something.”

No one spoke.

Of course they didn’t.

The hot, ugly fear she’d been fighting since the ceremony sharpened into anger. She clutched the bloodstained cloth wrapped around her palm and started walking again before any of them could order her to.If they wanted her contained, they could keep up.

They led her through the same dark wing she had entered before, but now the silence felt different. Not expectant. Alarmed. Doors were already being shut. Lamps extinguished in side rooms. A servant carrying folded sheets saw Lydia coming and turned so fast she nearly collided with the wall trying to get out of the way.

Lydia noticed the guards’ pace quicken.

She noticed something else too.

They stopped well before the last set of doors.

The same black doors from earlier. The same two posted guards. But this time, when Lydia reached them, the men on either side looked not at her face but at the cloth around her hand, then toward the room beyond.

Neither moved to open the door.

“Are you serious?” Lydia said.

One of them swallowed. “Orders.”

“To do what? Leave me out here?”

A pause.

Then the older one answered carefully, “To put you inside and secure the wing.”

Secure.

Not settle. Not escort. Secure.

Lydia laughed once, short and disbelieving. “So I am being locked in.”

No one denied it. That should have terrified her more than it did. Instead it fed the anger already burning under her skin. She had been rejected, traded, marched into a ritual no one explained, and bound to something the entire palace clearly feared. At this point, one more insult barely registered.

The door opened.

Warmth from the fire inside brushed her face. The guard gestured toward the room and took a full step back the moment she moved.

Lydia crossed the threshold.

The door shut hard behind her.

The lock turned at once.

She stood very still.

The room looked unchanged from earlier. The low fire. The desk. The shelves. The chair near the hearth. Nothing dramatic, nothing visibly threatening.

But the air in it felt wrong.

Not tense. Tighter than that. Like the room itself was braced around something trying not to break.

She felt him before she saw him.

A violent strain hit the bond and tore straight through her chest. Lydia gasped and caught herself on the nearest chair, fingers digging into the carved wood. The feeling wasn’t pain exactly. It was effort. Control pushed to the point of damage. Fury shoved down so hard it had become its own kind of agony.Then Logan stepped out from the shadowed archway at the far side of the room. He had removed his coat. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms, revealing tense muscle and a vein standing out sharply near his wrist. His hair looked as if he had dragged a hand through it more than once. His face, though—his face was worse.

Not because it had changed.

Because it hadn’t.

He was still too composed. Too controlled. But now Lydia knew what it cost him.

His gaze landed on her and held.

The bond tightened instantly.

Lydia went rigid.

For one terrible second she felt his awareness sweep through her again, not gentle, not curious. Measuring. Almost disbelieving.

"You’re still alive,” he said.

She stared at him. “That’s your opening line?”

His expression didn’t change. “It is the most relevant fact in the room.”

The answer hit with enough coldness that she straightened despite the dizziness still washing through her. “I almost died in that hall.”

“So did I.”

The words came hard and flat. Not dramatic. Not exaggerated.

That made them worse. Lydia looked at him properly then. At the rigid set of his shoulders. At the distance he was keeping, not by accident but by force of will. At the way his hands flexed once at his sides before going still again.

“You knew something would happen,” she said.

He did not answer.

Her temper snapped.

"You told me to run.”

His gaze sharpened. “And you stayed.”

"I was brought in under guard with half the palace acting like saying your name twice would summon a storm. Don’t stand there and pretend I had a choice.”

Something dark moved through the bond at that—anger, yes, but aimed somewhere other than her. It flashed across her so sharply she had to brace herself against it.

Logan saw that.

Of course he did.

His jaw tightened. “You should sit down.”

The order in his voice made Lydia lift her chin. “No.”

“You’re shaking.”

"And whose fault is that?”

For the first time, actual heat cracked through his composure. “Do you think I wanted this?”

Lydia stepped toward him before common sense could stop her. “I think everyone in this palace knows more than they are saying, and you are no exception.”

He took a step back at once.

The movement was so immediate, so deliberate, that Lydia stopped dead.

Not rejection.

Avoidance.

Not because he disliked her.

Because he did not trust what closeness would do.

The realization sent a different kind of tension through her, one that had nothing to do with fear and far too much to do with being suddenly, painfully aware of the space between them. Logan noticed that too. She saw it in the way his eyes narrowed, as if the bond was feeding him more of her than she intended to show.

“I knew the ritual was wrong,” he said at last. “I did not know it would do that.”

“That,” Lydia repeated. “You’ll have to be more specific. There were several horrors to choose from.”

His gaze dropped briefly to the cloth around her palm. “You should not have felt me.”

The bluntness of it took the air from her.

“What does that mean?”

He looked away.

The bond shivered with fresh strain. She felt the answer in the refusal before he spoke it.

“It means,” he said carefully, “that whatever happened in that hall was not a mate bond.”

Lydia’s mouth went dry. She had already known that, somewhere beneath the panic, but hearing it aloud made the room seem smaller.

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

She almost believed him.

Almost.

A knock rattled the door before she could push further.

Logan’s entire body went still.

Not relaxed stillness. Dangerous stillness.

“Who?” he said.

A voice answered from the other side, high and uncertain. “Food, my lord.”

Logan did not move.

For a moment Lydia thought he might send them away. Then, with visible effort, he said, “Leave it and go.” The door opened only a crack. A young servant slipped in sideways carrying a tray, eyes fixed firmly on the floor. Bread, broth, a pitcher of water. Her hands were shaking badly enough that the spoon rattled against the bowl.

Lydia almost told her to breathe.

Then the girl finally glanced up.

Straight at Logan.

It happened instantly.

The tray tipped.

Porcelain struck stone and shattered.

And through the bond, something ripped wide open.

Logan’s control slipped.

Not all the way. Not enough to explode. But enough.

The room changed.

The fire leapt high in the hearth. The windows trembled in their frames. The servant made a small, strangled sound and stumbled backward, going white as linen.

Lydia didn’t think.

She moved.

“Logan.”

His name came out sharper than she intended. Not loud. Precise.

He turned toward her.

His eyes had darkened again, that wrong depth opening inside the gold.

Every instinct she possessed screamed at her not to get closer.

She ignored all of them.

Lydia crossed the space between them and caught his wrist.

The contact hit like fire.

Rage slammed through her first, then hunger, then that brutal crushing effort of control. It almost dropped her to her knees. But underneath all of it, tangled so deep she nearly missed it, was something else.

Panic.

Not for himself.

For her.

“Look at me,” she said.

He was already looking.

“No,” she said, forcing the words out through the heat racing up her arm. “At me.”

Something in the room held.

Then shifted.

The violence in the bond recoiled as if it had struck a wall. Logan sucked in a breath so harsh it sounded painful. The windows stopped shaking. The fire dropped. The pressure broke apart in jagged pieces and began, impossibly, to settle. Lydia didn’t let go until his pulse stopped hammering against her palm. Behind her, the servant dropped to her knees, scrambling backward through spilled broth and broken porcelain. One of the guards yanked the door open from outside, saw the scene, and then stopped dead on the threshold.

No one spoke.

The whole room had gone silent again.

But this silence was different.

Not fear of Logan.

Fear of what they had all just seen.

Lydia released his wrist slowly.

Her own hand was shaking now.

Logan looked at the place where she had touched him, then at

her face. Whatever he saw there made something unreadable pass through his expression—shock, anger, disbelief, all of it held down too fast for her to name.

The servant fled.

The guard shut the door at once.

And in the silence that followed, Logan said, low and unsettled, “You should not be able to do that.”