chapter 6

Calla's POV

The lock stopped turning.

And it wasn’t because Soren let go.

It was because someone caught his wrist hard enough for me to hear it, the wet crunch of bone finding its breaking point, and Soren didn’t even scream.

He just went silent in that horrible, contained way men do when pain is only a small part of what is happening to them.

“Draven.”

His voice was flat, measured when it came out.

“Let go of me.”

“Tell me what you were about to do.” My mate’s voice.

Soft and cold, the coldest I had ever heard it.

Colder than when he learned of my lie.

Colder than our wedding vows promised he would ever be while I stood within three feet of him, a door between us.

“Tell me now or by the goddess--”

“She’s dying in there!” Soren’s control snapped like brittle plastic.

“You put her in a suppression cell for a lie someone else told you, you left her there to die while you--” The next noise wasn’t a word.

It was the thud of a body hitting metal, heavy enough to vibrate the whole door where my palms were still plastered against it, and I screamed his name without knowing I had, without even wanting to.

“Soren!”

Nothing.

No reply. Only breathing.

Ragged, breathing two distinct patterns of it, and the low animalistic growl of an Alpha whose control had slipped in some vital place.

I don’t know how long I stood with my forehead pressed against that door, waiting for it to open.

Waiting for a voice to tell me anything about what was happening beyond, before the silence grew to consume everything, and two sets of footsteps disappeared down the hallway as if nothing had occurred.

Nobody returned to fetch me.

That was when the world twisted around me, just like it always does when I’ve been alone too long, and Knox found me before I could find him, just like he used to do.

Back then, about three years before the day I’d spent waiting, I wasn’t in this cell, not in this hallway even; it was on the east wing of our compound, all marble and long, unyielding shafts of moonlight pouring through enormous windows, and I remember running because…

Draven had said something in front of the pack that afternoon, something about how I'd better learn to control myself, and I'd been sixteen different kinds of humiliated, and I hadn't wanted anyone to see me cry over it.

So I ran until my lungs gave out and I ended up on the floor of that corridor with my back against the cold wall, and my knees pulled to my chest.

He'd found me there. Knox.

The third brother, quiet in a way that made people forget he was in the room until he wasn't, and he'd stood at the far end of the hall for a long moment before he came any closer, like he was deciding something.

"You're going to catch a cold," he'd said.

Not kind exactly. Just true.

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

He hadn't moved to touch me, hadn't tried to pull me up or wrap an arm around me the way Draven would have if he'd bothered to look for me at all, which he hadn't. Knox had just crouched down a few feet away, forearms on his knees, and waited.

"`You don't have to talk. I'll just sit here until you're ready to stop pretending you're fine."

And for one stupid, aching minute, I'd thought maybe here, finally, was someone in this family who saw me as something other than a problem to be managed.

Then someone had called his name from the far end of the corridor. One of the pack elders, something about a border dispute needing his signature, urgent, now, and Knox had gone still in that particular way he had, the way that told you he was doing math about which obligation cost him less.

He'd stood.

"I have to go," he'd said, and I remember I hadn't even asked him to stay, hadn't said a single word, but he'd looked at me like I had, like I'd begged, like my silence itself was the accusation.

"I'll come back," he'd said.

He hadn't. Not that night. Not the next morning, when I'd waited in that same corridor for an hour like an idiot with a bruise on my pride the size of the whole east wing.

He'd walked past me twice in the following week and looked straight through me both times, like the version of him that crouched down and said I'll just sit here had been a stranger wearing his face.

And I'd learned, the way I seemed to keep learning with this family, that kindness from a Blackthorn brother came with an expiration date stamped somewhere you couldn't see until it had already passed.

The memory dropped me back into the cell so hard I actually gasped out loud, hands scrabbling against the door, and that's when I noticed it. The metal wasn't cold anymore.

It had been cold since the moment they'd locked me in here, cold enough that I'd stopped feeling my palms against it hours ago, but now, right where my hands were pressed flat, it was warm.

Warmer than it should be. Warmer than the coals even, which didn't make any sense because the coals were the only heat source in this entire room, and they were nowhere near the door.

I pulled my hands back and stared at them in the dark. My palms were glowing.

Not bright.

Not the way the mark used to shine gold and proud on my wrist back when I still had a wolf to anchor it. This was faint, and flickering, and the color was wrong; it wasn't gold at all, it was a deep, unsettled silver, like moonlight trying to remember how to exist inside a body that had been told it didn't deserve one anymore.

I didn't have time to make sense of it before the door in front of me groaned, metal shifting against metal, a sound like something waking up after being told to stay dead.

And somewhere on the other side, a voice I didn't recognize at all whispered, close enough that it might have been standing right against the door with me.

"Oh. There you are."