I have time..

Chapter 4

SLOANE

Marcus doesn’t come inside.

He stands in the drive a long moment, looking at the house like he’s deciding something, and then he raises both hands, slow, the universal gesture for I’m not here to start anything.

Nora doesn’t lower whatever she’s holding under the counter.

“Marcus Thorne,” she calls through the closed door, before he’s said a word. “I know exactly who you run errands for. You can turn around and drive back the way you came.”

“I’m not here on the Alpha’s orders.”

“That’s not the reassurance you think it is.”

“There was an accident on the county road.” His voice carries clearly through the thin walls. “A car in the ditch, no driver at the scene. I’m following that up. That’s all tonight is, unless you want to give me a reason to think otherwise.”

Nora looks at me. I look back at her, and something passes between us that I don’t have a name for yet, a decision neither of us says out loud.

“Let him in,” I say. “If he wanted to hurt anyone he wouldn’t have announced himself from the driveway.”

Nora doesn’t look happy about it, but she opens the door.

Marcus steps inside slowly, hands still loose and visible at his sides, and his eyes go straight to the table before they go to me. Whatever he sees there makes his jaw tighten.

“Gods,” he says, quiet. “Is he going to make it?”

“That depends on the next ten minutes,” Nora says, without looking up from her work. “And on you not crowding my table.”

He steps back immediately, giving her room, and something in that small, immediate obedience makes me trust him half a degree more than I want to.

“You’re the one who told Roan I was here,” I say. It isn’t really a question.

“I told him a car went off the road and a Bishop was involved. That’s all I told him.” Marcus’s eyes hold mine, steady. “I didn’t tell him where. I’m not going to, either, unless you want me to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want you to?”

He doesn’t answer that directly, and the silence says more than words would have.

The old man’s breathing changes then, a wet, rattling shift that pulls all three of our attention back to the table at once. Nora’s hands go still over him, just for a second, and I watch something settle in her face that I recognize even though I’ve never seen it before tonight.

The particular stillness of someone who already knows how this ends and is only delaying it out of respect for the person dying, not out of any real hope left.

“Sir.” My voice cracks on the word. I move back to his side, take the hand that isn’t pinned under Nora’s careful pressure. “Stay with me. You were going to tell me something.”

His eyes find mine. Clearer than they have any right to be, this close to the end.

“Your mother,” he says, “was one of us. Before she left. Before she buried what she was and raised you to never ask.”

“One of who?”

“Nora—” His eyes cut, briefly, to the healer beside him, something like an apology in them. “Nora knows the rest. I only knew her. Knew what she gave up when she chose your father instead of the old bloodline.”

“What bloodline? What was she?”

His grip tightens on my hand, one last effort.

“Unbound,” he says. “Like you’re going to be. The bond didn’t break you tonight, girl. It woke something that was always going to wake eventually. Your mother spent twenty years hoping it never would.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Because she loved you,” he says, “and the Unbound don’t get to keep the things they love. Not easily. Not without a cost that—”

He doesn’t finish it.

His hand goes slack in mine, all at once, the way a held breath finally lets go, and Nora’s shoulders drop half an inch in a gesture I understand immediately, without needing her to say the word out loud.

The room goes very quiet.

“No.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “No, he wasn’t finished—”

“He was dying before you ever got him through that door,” Nora says, gentle now, gentler than I’ve heard her be all night. “Whatever kept him talking this long wasn’t medicine. It was will. And it ran out.”

I sit there holding a dead man’s hand in a stranger’s kitchen, and the heat under my ribs that started in the car flares up sharp and sudden, like it’s reacting to the loss the same way I am, grieving right alongside me for a man whose name I never even learned.

“Who was he?” I ask, when I can trust my voice again.

Nora is quiet a long moment, cleaning her hands on a cloth, not meeting my eyes.

“His name was Callum,” she says finally. “He was Unbound too. Older than me by a long way. He’s spent decades looking for others like him — like your mother was, like you’re about to become. I imagine he heard about the rejection the same way half the county did, and he came because he recognized what it meant faster than anyone else could have.”

“What does it mean?”

Nora sets the cloth down and finally looks at me directly, and there’s something in her face that might be sympathy, or might be the particular caution of someone about to hand over something dangerous.

“It means the thing living under your ribs right now isn’t going to go back to sleep,” she says. “And it means you have a choice to make about what it turns you into.”

Behind me, Marcus has gone very still, watching all of this with an expression I can’t read.

“I should go,” he says quietly. “Before anyone comes looking for me the way I came looking for this.”

“Marcus.” I don’t know why I stop him. Maybe because he’s the only person in the room tonight who has any connection left to the world I used to belong to. “What are you going to tell Roan?”

He’s quiet a moment.

“I’m going to tell him there was an accident,” he says. “And that whoever was involved is somewhere safe now. That’s all that’s true, and that’s all he needs.”

He leaves before I can decide whether to thank him for it.

Nora and I are left alone with a dead man on her kitchen table and a name, Unbound, that I don’t understand yet, but that already feels like it’s going to define the rest of my life.

“Where do we start?” I ask her.

“With the body,” she says. “And then, if you’re serious, with everything else. It’s going to take longer than one night, Sloane. It might take longer than you have patience for.”

I think about a hall full of people who watched me bleed and called it honesty.

“I have time,” I say. “I have nothing but time now.”