Handle cost.

SLOANE

I leave the patrol crisis in Kieran’s hands, which tells you something about how much I trust him, and how little patience I have left over for anything that isn’t figuring out exactly what Roan’s sickness is worth to me. Corvin wanted me to stay and run the search myself. I told him Kieran could find three missing wolves without me standing over his shoulder, and that I had somewhere else I needed to be first.

Nora’s house looks the same as it did two years ago, right down to the pine trees blocking it from the road, and some stubborn part of me still expects to feel like a frightened girl the moment I step inside instead of an Alpha who could level the place if she wanted to.

She doesn’t seem surprised to see me. Nora is rarely surprised by anything, which used to comfort me and now, for reasons I can’t quite name, makes me uneasy in a way I don’t examine too closely.

“You found something,” she says, not a question, already moving toward the kitchen table like she knew I’d be coming before I did.

“I found a lot of something. I need to know what to do with it.”

She listens while I lay it out — the location of the damage, how long it’s been building, the way it worsens under stress and worsens specifically around his wife. Nora’s face doesn’t change through most of it, though her hands go still on the table when I mention Selene, just for a second, in a way I file away without comment.

“It’s exactly what I’d expect,” she says finally. “A bond doesn’t disappear when it’s rejected. It goes looking for somewhere to root instead, and if the one who rejected it never lets it root anywhere honest, it roots in the body instead. Slowly. Painfully. Until it either kills him or someone undoes what he did.”

“Can I undo it?”

“You already know you can. You’re only asking because you’re not sure you want to.”

I don’t have an answer for that, so I let it sit.

“There’s something else,” I say instead. “It gets worse around Selene specifically. Worse than it should if this were only about me.”

Nora goes quiet for a moment, the particular kind of quiet she gets when she’s deciding how much of something to say out loud.

“A forced bond doesn’t just fail to replace the true one,” she says carefully. “It can aggravate it. The body knows the difference between what it was given and what it was denied, and it resents being lied to almost as much as a person does.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have right now that’s actually true.” She meets my eyes, steady, unreadable in the same way I’ve spent two years learning to be. “I’ll need to look at what you found more closely before I tell you anything more specific. Sit. Let me see.”

I sit. Her hands are careful when they take mine, turning them over like she’s checking for something only she’d recognize. It’s a clinical thing, nothing more, and I make myself hold onto that fact deliberately, the way I hold onto most facts these days that are more useful than the alternative.

“You’re stronger than you were a year ago,” she says, almost to herself. “Considerably.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Depends entirely on what you do with it.” She sets my hands down gently and looks at me for a long moment before she speaks again. “Sloane. Whatever you decide about him, the alliance, the bond, all of it, you should know that the deeper you go into undoing what was done to you both, the more it’s going to cost you. Not just him. You too.”

“I can handle cost. I’ve built an entire pack out of handling cost.”

“I know you can.” Something moves behind her eyes, old and careful. “That’s what worries me.”

Knowing exactly how to end him is not the same thing as wanting to save him, and I remind myself of that distinction now, deliberately, the way I remind myself of most things that are true and inconvenient. Whatever I decide to do with what I’ve learned today is a calculation, not a mercy. I need him alive and indebted more than I need him dead and useless to me.. That’s all it needs to be.

I want to ask her what she means by that. I want to ask her a dozen things I’ve never let myself ask in two years of careful, grateful distance, where she really came from, why she took me in without a second thought that first terrible night, why she’s never once asked me for anything in return for everything she’s taught me.

I don’t ask. Some instinct, old and quiet, tells me the answer would change everything I think I understand about the last two years of my life, and I’m not ready for that today, on top of everything else.

“I’ll come back once I know more about what you found,” Nora says, standing, the moment closing over as smoothly as it opened. “In the meantime. Be careful with him, Sloane. Not for his sake.”

“For whose, then?”

“Yours,” she says. “You’ve built something out of the wreckage he left you. Don’t let going back into that fire cost you the person you became to survive it.”

I’m nearly at the door when I remember the other thing, the smaller thing that felt urgent an hour ago and has been crowded out ever since.

“One more thing. Three of my eastern patrol went dark this afternoon. No bodies, no blood, no sign of a fight. They were just gone.”

Nora goes very still.

“Describe exactly where,” she says, and her voice has lost every trace of the calm it had a moment ago.

I tell her. She doesn’t answer right away, and when she finally does, she won’t look at me while she says it.

“Go home, Sloane. Double your watch tonight. Don’t ask me why yet.”