FIVE

ADRIAN

Dead. That’s what they told me. Six years ago, standing in the ash and the ruin of my mother’s house, the pack’s best trackers confirmed what the fire had already said. Nobody, no remains. Nothing that could be identified as anything, just ash and the smell of accelerant and the end of everything.

I had stood there and felt the mate bond go cold inside my chest and I had not moved for a very long time.

I keep coming back to that night. The way the smoke smelled. The way Cassian had to physically pull me back from the doorway because I was trying to walk into a building that had already collapsed in on itself, like there was still something to save, like six hours hadn’t already passed.

She used to laugh at me for things like that. For not knowing when to stop.

I’d known her since we were children. Eleven years old, both of us, and I remembered the exact day, the training yard, her standing at the edge of it in boots two sizes too big because nobody had bothered to get her properly fitted, an omega nobody particularly cared about.

I used to sit with her by the lake behind the training grounds and tell her things I never told anyone else. She made me feel better, and I loved her for it. When the mate bond came, it was no surprise.

I think some part of me had known for years. The way my chest settled whenever she walked into a room. The way nothing felt entirely real until she’d seen it too.

Only for me to lose her the day I marked her.

I drank for three months after the fire. Not the social kind. Not the kind where you pour a glass at the end of the day and call it unwinding.

The kind where you wake up on the floor of your own office and the sun is wrong and you don’t remember the day before and for one single merciful second before consciousness fully arrives, you don’t remember her either. Those seconds were the only rest I got.

Cassian was the one that pulled me out of it. In his words, she’ll not have wanted this. So I stopped drinking and I started working and I became the kind of man my father had always wanted me to be, cold and focused and immovable.

Only for her to be alive. Six years and she has been alive the whole time.

She hadn’t died in that fire.

She’d set that fire.

She’d stood outside my mother’s house and watched it burn and walked away from me and built herself a human name and a human life and let me grieve for her for six years.

Why? That was the question underneath all the fury. Just that. One word. Why?

Did she not love me? Was any of it real? I’d marked her. I’d held her and marked her and told her she was mine and she had looked at me like I was everything and then she had burned the house down and disappeared.

A knock at the door disrupted my thoughts.

“Come in.”

Cassian stepped inside with a small, wide man who smelled of fear the minute he entered. He looked like he didn’t want to be here but that was the last thing on my mind.

“The woman,” I said. “Aria. Tell me everything.”

“There’s no Aria here, alpha king.”

I scoffed as I remembered the stupid name she gave. She even changed her name. My chest tightened. Did she hate me that much?

“Maya Hatt.” I spat out coldly.

The man swallowed, as he started, stuttering here and there. “She’s just a waitress. She’s been working here about eighteen months, she’s reliable, she doesn’t say a lot. But… but she has a son. She has a son.”

His last words dropped a pang in my chest.

A son?

“She has a son?” I repeated.

He bowed, “yes… four or five… She doesn’t say much but she only mentions him because he’s sick and she takes lots of break to meet him at the hospital.”

It felt like cold water being poured on my skin. A son. Four years. She’d left me six years ago. Did she leave because of a man? Left me to give birth to a sick baby that she can’t even afford to take care of?

Why?

Why?

Anger tore through my skin, my wolf purring with undiluted rage, “Where is she now?”

“She left.” He shifted in his seat. “Right after the— after whatever happened in the private room. Grabbed her bag and went. I tried to stop her but she said she had to go.”

Hurt spread through my chest, a dark chuckle escaping my lips. She was running away again. Disappearing again like she did six years ago.

I was stupid that time. But I wasn’t anymore.I looked at Cassian immediately and he nodded.

He stepped out, phone already in his ear, and I turned back to the window and stood there with my hands clasped behind my back and tried to breathe through the thing happening in my chest.

Cassian came back twenty minutes later, one look at his face and I straightened.

“Talk,” I said.

“We found her trail. She called someone after she left here, a friend she’s been living with.” He paused. “Adrian. Someone took her.”

I went very still.

“The friend’s boyfriend. He was there when she called, apparently he’s been—” Cassian chose his next word carefully, “—interested in her for a while. He used the friend to get her into a car. They were heading for the airport and then they weren’t.” He met my eyes. “She was trying to leave the city. She had her son with her.”

The fury shifted into something else. Something colder and more focused and considerably more dangerous.

“Where?”

Cassian gave me the location and I was already moving.

The building was on the edge of the city, the kind of street that emptied out after dark and asked no questions.

I sent four men to circle the perimeter and I went in through the side, following her scent through the dark the way I’d followed it everywhere once, automatically, without thinking, my wolf knowing her before my head did.

I heard her before I saw her.

A sound, low and sharp, and then a man’s voice saying something I didn’t catch, and then her voice cutting through it, hard and clear, fighting.

She was still fighting when I burst through the door.

The man had her against the far wall, one hand at her collar, the other trying to pin her wrist, and she had her knee up and her teeth bared and she was still fighting even though he outweighed her by a hundred pounds. I didn’t think.

My hand found the back of his collar and I pulled and he came off her like something weightless and then my fist connected with his face and the sound it made was very satisfying. He went down, I didn’t let him stay down.

I hauled him up and hit him again. And again. Each one landing with everything behind it, six years of grief and fury and the sight of him with his hands on her, the specific and unforgivable sight of someone else’s hands on what was mine.

Mine.

She was mine. I was furious at her. I had six years of questions and a list of things I needed to say to her that were not gentle, not even close to gentle. But she was mine and this man had touched her and my vision had gone the particular white-hot colour that meant I was past the point of measured responses.

He stopped moving after a while, I didn’t stop.

“Adrian.”

She called out and everything in me stilled.

For six years I’d wondered how it would feel to hear that sound.

To hear her call my name again. Be it angrily, be it annoyingly. To blame me for leaving her alone and letting her burn.

But this… this whisper… it was far more haunting.

She was standing two feet away, her uniform torn at the collar, her hair half down. She was looking at me with tears running down her face. My wolf purred, howling and raging to be near her. And my heart, my stupid heart, did something it had no right to do.

It aches for her. Even after six years, even after discovering she lied. My heart still wanted her traitorous heart.

“You’re going to kill him,” she whispered, breaking me out of my trance.