Chapter 4

The cold outside the dining hall should have calmed her.But It didn’t.

Isla stood on the stone steps with stew drying on her skirt and the night air cutting through the heat of her humiliation. Her whole body was shaking — not with weakness, not exactly, but with the effort of holding herself together. Behind the heavy wooden doors, the sound of the hall had already started up again, muffled now, the pack swallowing the scene whole and moving on as if nothing had happened.

As if she had not just been made into a spectacle.

Again.

She wrapped her arms around herself and started walking.

The path between the hall and the healer’s den curved through the center of camp, lit by low lanterns and the pale spill of moonlight over the roofs. Wolves crossed here and there in pairs and small groups, their voices low, their eyes sliding to her and then away again. Some had seen what happened. Some had only heard the tail end of it. Either way, she could feel the story moving faster than she was.

A girl who should have known better than to answer back to him.

By the time she reached the edge of the training grounds, anger had burned through most of the shame. That was better. Easier to carry. She would rather be furious than broken.

The clearing lay empty now, the practice rings silvered in moonlight, the weapon racks standing dark and still at the far end. In the daytime, the place belonged to noise and impact and watchful eyes. At night, it looked like something abandoned by war.

Lisa slowed down .She wasn’t sure why she had come here. Habit, maybe. Or something in her wanted to stand in the place where he had first looked at her like he hated her for existing. To prove to herself that the ground was still only ground. That nothing sacred had touched it just because the bond had awakened there.

“You have a bad habit of running off.”

His voice came from the shadows near the fence.

Lisa stopped dead on her tracks.

Adrian stepped into the lantern glow as if he had been pulled from the dark itself. He had changed nothing since the dining hall — same black shirt, same hard expression, same impossible control in the set of his body. Only his eyes were different. Brighter now. More dangerous.

She should have kept walking.

Instead she said, “You have a bad habit of following me.”

A humorless smile touched his mouth. “Trust me. If I wanted to follow you, you’d know.”

The words were quiet.

Intimate in a way that made her skin prickle with anger.

Lisa lifted her chin. “What do you want?”

Adrian came a little closer, boots whispering over the dirt. “To know what game you’re playing.”

She stared at him. “Game?”

“In the hall.” His gaze dropped briefly to the stain on her skirt, then rose again. “You wanted a scene.”

Disbelief almost made her laugh. “You bump into me.”

“And you provoked me.”

“So now I’m responsible for your behaviour?”

His jaw tightened. “You knew what you were doing.”

“No,” Lisa said, voice sharpening. “I knew what you were doing. There’s a difference.”

For a second neither moved.

The bond flickered again, subtle but alive, and Isla hated herself for feeling the exact moment he stepped fully into its range. It wasn’t warmth this time. It was awareness. Too much of it. His breath, his nearness, the faint scent of pine and smoke clinging to him — all of it pressed at her senses as though her own body had betrayed her and switched sides.

Adrian seemed to feel it too. His shoulders want stiff.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said.

Lisa blinked. “Like what?”

“Like you know something.”

A bitter laugh escaped her. “I do know something.”

His expression hardened at once. “Then forget it.”

She stared at him, and some last thread of patience snapped.

“No.”

The word landed between them.

Adrian’s face went very still.

“You don’t get to do this,” Lisa said. “You don’t get to treat me like dirt in front of everyone and then corner me out here and act like I’m the problem.”

His voice dropped lower. “You are the problem.”

That should have hurt.

Instead it made her furious.

She stepped toward him before she could think better of it. “Because I’m your mate?”

The word cracked through the clearing like a branch breaking.

Adrian moved so fast she barely saw it. One second he was in front of her, the next his hand was around her wrist and he had pulled her behind the nearest rack, out of sight of the path.

Lisa hit the wooden post with a startled breath.

His other hand braced beside her head, not quite touching, but close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him.

“Don’t say that here,” he hissed.

For one stunned second, all she could do was look at him.

He was furious.

Not cold. Not mocking. Furious in a raw, stripped-down way she had not seen before. It lived in every line of him, in the pulse beating hard in his throat, in the grip on her wrist that was too tight and yet still somehow controlled, as if he were using all his strength not to tighten it further.

Then the bond surged.

The contact — real skin, real heat — sent a violent rush through her chest, so sudden her breath caught. Adrian felt it too. She saw it happen. His eyes flared, and for one dangerous instant the anger in them tangled with something far worse.

Something hungry.

He let go of her wrist at once, like he’d touched fire.

Both of them breathed hard in the silence that followed.

Lisa pressed back against the post, more shaken by that single flash than by his anger.

“You felt that,” she said softly.

It was not a question.

Adrian dragged a hand through his hair, looking suddenly less composed than she had ever seen him. “Don’t.”

“You did.”

“I said don’t.”

He turned away from her, then turned back just as fast, as if even distance wasn’t helping. “You think this means something?”

Her disbelief came back sharp and instant. “It is something.”

“No.” His voice was clipped now, brutal in its certainty. “It’s a mistake.”

The words struck deeper than she expected.

Maybe because some part of her had hoped — not for kindness, not from him, but for honesty.

She laughed once, breathless and hurt and angry all at once. “You really are a coward.”

His eyes flashed. “Careful.”

“Why? You’ll humiliate me in public again?”

His mouth tightened.

“That’s your solution, isn’t it?” she pressed. “Pretend you hate me enough and maybe the bond will disappear.”

“It should.”

“But it won’t.”

The truth of that settled heavily between them.

Adrian looked away first.

It was only for a second, but Isla caught it — the fracture in the arrogance, the crack in the mask. He wasn’t untouched by this. He wasn’t in control of it, not completely. And for someone like Kael, she realized, that might be the worst thing in the world.

When he spoke again, his voice was lower. Rougher.

“You don’t understand what this would do.”

Lisa folded her arms tightly across herself. “Then explain it.”

He laughed without humor. “To who? The pack? My father? You want me to stand up in front of Black Moon and tell them the future Alpha is tied to a girl who has no background ?”

That landed.

She felt it like a slap, though his tone had gone almost flat by then, more bitter than cruel.

No one even sees.

He regretted the words the moment they left him — she saw that too — but he didn’t take them back.

Of course he didn’t.

Lisa swallowed against the sudden ache in her throat. “At least that was honest.”

Adrian looked at her as if he wanted to say something else.

Something better, maybe. Or worse.

In the end he said only, “Stay away from me.”

She stared at him.

Then, slowly, she pushed herself off the post and stepped around him.

“You should try staying away from me first,” she said.

And she walked out from behind the rack before her legs could betray how badly they were shaking.

She made it almost to the path before he spoke again.

“Lisa”

She stopped, though she hated herself for it.

When she turned, Adrian was still standing in shadow, his face half-hidden, his voice unreadable.

“If anyone asks,” he said, “you say nothing.”

There it was again.

Not concern. Not protection.

Control.

Lisa’s exhaustion vanished under a fresh wave of anger.

“I’m not one of your pack slave,” she said.

“No,” he replied quietly. “You’re my problem.”

Something in her chest twisted hard.

She held his gaze for one long second, then said, “And you’re mine.”

After that, she left him there.

The walk back to the healer’s den felt longer than it should have. By the time Isla slipped inside through the side door, her pulse had steadied, but the rest of her hadn’t. Mia was in the back room measuring dried leaves into paper packets. She looked up at once.

“You were gone a while.”

Lisa shut the door behind her. “I ran into Adrian .”

Mia set the leaves down carefully. “And?”

Lisa thought of his hand on her wrist. His body caging her in against the post. His voice when he said it was a mistake. The bitterness in him when he spoke of the pack seeing her.

She looked at Mia and said the simplest truth first.

“He doesn’t want the bond.”

Mia’s face changed, but only slightly. “And you?”

The question caught Isla off guard.

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

What did she want?

Not him. Certainly not this version of him. Not the cruelty, the mockery, the pride that wrapped around him like armor. But the bond had made it more complicated than choice. It had turned his nearness into a danger she could feel in her blood.

At last she said, “I want him to stop hurting me for it.”

Mia’s expression softened with something like sorrow. “That,” she said quietly, “is the more difficult wish.”

Lisa looked away.