Severed bond

ROAN

The drive back from Ashborn takes longer than it should. Roth doesn't speak the entire way, arms crossed, jaw set, radiating the particular offense of a man who was made to wait in a courtyard like a stranger on his own alliance business. The other elder, Ilsa, keeps glancing at me in the mirror like she's waiting for me to explain myself, and I don't have anything worth giving her.

I watch the trees blur past instead, and I let myself feel, for the length of the drive, exactly how badly that conversation went.

I want you safe.” I actually said it. Out loud, in that same bare room, two years of careful silence undone in under a minute because some reckless, exhausted part of me decided honesty was worth the cost of her fury. It was. I still think it was. That doesn't make the drive home any easier.

"She threw us out," Roth says finally, once we're far enough from Ashborn's border that he apparently feels safe saying it. "An hour of waiting, and she threw us out like dogs."

"She's within her rights."

"She's a child playing at being an Alpha."

"She built an entire pack out of nothing in two years, Roth. Watch your mouth around me if you want to keep it."

He goes quiet after that, and I don't feel any particular satisfaction in the silence. I'm too busy replaying the look on her face when I said Callum's name, the flash of grief under the fury, the way her voice cracked exactly once before she buried it again. I know that crack. I used to be the only person who ever heard it.

I don't deserve to still recognize the sound of it. I do anyway.

Duskmoor looks smaller when I get back, the way it always does after I've been somewhere that isn't slowly falling apart around me. The granary. The thinned patrols. The particular quiet of a pack that knows, even if nobody says it out loud, that its Alpha might not survive the year.

Vera finds me before I've made it halfway across the yard.

"You look like hell," she says, falling into step beside me, and there's real concern under the bluntness of it, the kind I've learned not to fully trust and can't quite bring myself to reject either.

"Long day."

"That's not an answer."

I say nothing.

She studies me for a moment, and something in her expression shifts, softens, then sharpens, like she's deciding which version of herself this conversation calls for.

"You saw her," Vera says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"And?"

"And it went about as well as you'd expect, given everything."

"Meaning she humiliated you."

"Meaning I deserved whatever she gave me, and worse besides."

Vera's mouth tightens at that, some old frustration surfacing that she doesn't quite manage to hide in time. "You keep saying things like that. Like you've already decided you owe her endless penance for one bad night."

"It wasn't one bad night, Vera. It was two years of her building a life out of the wreckage of what I did to her, and I still haven't found a way to make that right, and I'm not sure one exists."

"Maybe it doesn't need to be made right." Her voice goes quieter, careful now, the way it gets when she's decided to say something she's rehearsed more than once. "Maybe you've paid enough already. Maybe at some point continuing to bleed for her stops being honorable and just becomes — "

"Becomes what?"

"Becomes something you're choosing, Roan. Not something you owe."

I don't have an answer for that, and the silence between us stretches long enough that Vera looks away first, out toward the training yard, jaw tight.

"I brought you something," she says finally, changing course, pulling a small folded cloth from her coat. Inside it, a poultice, herb, dark and sharp-smelling, the kind she's made for me a dozen times over the past two years whenever the sickness flares badly enough to show on my face. "For the chest. It won't fix anything. It'll help you sleep, at least."

"Thank you."

"You always say thank you." Something flickers behind her eyes, there and gone too fast to read properly. "You never say anything else."

She presses the poultice into my hand, her fingers lingering half a second longer than the exchange requires, and I let her, because pulling away feels like one more small cruelty I don't have room left to commit tonight.

"Get some rest, Roan." She says my name softly, like it costs her something to keep saying it plainly instead of the way she clearly wants to. "Whatever's coming for this pack, it isn't going to wait for you to heal first."

She's right about that much. I watch her walk away across the yard, watch the careful, contained way she holds herself, and I think, not for the first time, that I have spent two years being cruel to the one person who never once demanded anything from me, simply by never being honest enough to tell her there was nothing here for her to wait for.

I don't fix that tonight either.

I go inside instead, and lie down with her poultice pressed to my chest, and think about a cracked voice and a name I don't have the right to say twice in one day.

I fall asleep before I can decide whether that's forgivable.

I don't stay asleep.

It happens sometime past midnight, not the usual ache, not the slow, grinding pull I've learned to live around for two years. This is sudden and Sharp. A cold spike straight through the center of my chest, gone as fast as it comes, and I'm sitting upright in the dark before I've even finished waking, heart slamming, sweat cold on my skin.

I know that feeling. I haven't felt it in two years, and I still know exactly what it is.

It's her. Something's wrong with her.

I'm on my feet before I've decided to be, already pulling the door open, and I don't care anymore whether it's real or whether two years of guilt have simply found a new way to torture me. I can't sit in this room and wait to find out which.

Vera catches me in the hall, still half-dressed from sleep herself. "Roan. What's wrong with you?"

"Something's happened to her."

"You can't know that. The bond is severed. You told me yourself it doesn't work that way anymore."

"I don't care what it's supposed to do." I'm already moving past her toward the yard. "I felt it, Vera. I'm not staying here to argue about whether I'm allowed to trust it."

"You can barely stand upright most mornings, and you want to run half the night to a pack that threw you out on sight?" Her voice cracks, real fear in it now, not just frustration. "It'll kill you. You know it'll kill you."

"Then it kills me." I don't look back at her when I say it, because I don't have it in me to watch her face while I do. "I'm going."

Marcus is already at the gate by the time I get there, dressed, jaw set, like some part of him knew before I did that tonight wasn't going to end quietly.

"You're not doing this without backup," he says, already moving.

"I'm not asking permission."

"I know." He's already pulling his shirt over his head. "That's why I'm coming with you instead of trying to stop you."

I don't have the breath left to thank him properly. I shift instead, the change tearing through a body that's already fighting me on every front, pain lighting up behind my ribs bright enough to blur my vision for one long second, and then it's done, and I'm running, and Marcus's paws hit the ground half a stride behind mine.

Behind us, I hear Vera call my name once into the dark. Neither of us stops.

The road to Ashborn has never felt this long. I don't know what's waiting for me at the end of it. I only know that for the first time in two years, staying still was worse than whatever this costs me.