Chapter Thirteen

Kia

Morning came the way bad things always did at the mountain estate. Quietly without warning, and with absolute certainty that it wasn't going to be kind.

I had not slept properly. I had drifted in and out of something shallow and restless, my body too aware of every sound in the house, every footstep in the corridor, every shift of wind against the high windows. By the time pale grey light set, I had already given up on sleep entirely and was sitting on the bed, fully dressed and waiting.

The knock came at half past seven.

Not Dorla's knock, Not Liam's. Harder and more deliberate, like knuckles against wood was just another way of giving an order.

"I'm awake," I said before it could come again.

The door opened.

Ryder stepped in alone.

That surprised me. I had expected the three of them together, a unified front, the way they always operated when they wanted to make something feel inevitable. But it was just him. Dressed in dark grey and hair pushed back with a tight jaw. He looked like he hadn't slept either, though he would never admit to it.

His eyes moved to me immediately. Whatever he saw made something in his expression shift almost imperceptibly.

"You didn't eat this morning," he said, nodding toward the untouched tray Dorla had left an hour earlier.

"I wasn't hungry," I replied.

"You need to eat."

"Is that a concern?" I asked. "Because it doesn't suit you."

His jaw tightened. He stepped further into the room, and I stood up without thinking, my body responding to the shift in proximity before my mind caught up.

"We're not doing this today," I said.

"Kia"

"I said no." My voice came out clear and hard, harder than I expected it to. "Whatever the elders decided, whatever schedule Anastasia signed off on, whatever ritual you've all decided I'm going to participate in, the answer is NO. It was no last night and it's no this morning and it will be no tomorrow."

Ryder stopped moving. He looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that I couldn't quite name.

"You understand what happens if the bloodline isn't stabilised," he said. His voice was lower now. "You've seen what the curse does."

"Yes," I said. "I've been cleaning up after it for six years."

"Then you know we don't have a choice."

"You have a choice," I snapped. "You've always had a choice. You just don't like the options that don't involve using me."

He crossed the room in three strides and I held my ground, every instinct in my body screaming at me to step back, to make myself smaller, to do what I had been trained to do in this house since I was thirteen years old.

I didn't move.

He stopped directly in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head to hold his gaze. This close, I could see the grey creeping into the edges of his eyes again. The curse, already working at the seams of his control even at this hour.

"Don't test me today," he said quietly.

"Or what?" I asked.

Then the whole room changed. I felt it before I understood what was going on. A heavy suffocating pressure that pressed down on my shoulders and chest like something physical. The Alpha command, not spoken yet but coiled and ready saturating the atmosphere.

My knees wanted to buckle. My spine wanted to curve. Six years of conditioning tried to take over all at once, every instinct I had developed for survival pulling me downward.

I planted my feet.

My hands shook at my sides, but I planted my feet and stayed upright and looked him directly in the eye.

"Do it," I said, my voice trembling but audible. "Use the command and force me. And then spend the rest of your life knowing that's what you are. That's the kind of Alpha you became."

Something cracked across his face. Fast and devastating and completely unguarded.

The pressure in the room spiked.

And then Ryder broke.

Not the way he usually broke, controlled and redirected into cruelty. This was different. This was the fault line giving way all at once.

He made a sound I had never heard from him, low and fractured and almost animal, and his hand shot out and grabbed the wooden bedpost beside me. The wood groaned under his grip. His other hand flew to his own chest, fingers pressing hard against his sternum like he was trying to hold something inside.

His eyes went fully black.

Not grey. Not amber. Black.

"Ryder," I said, and my voice came out entirely differently now. Not defiant. Something closer to alarm.

He was shaking. I could see it in his shoulders, in the tendons of his forearm, in the way his breathing had gone ragged and uneven. The bedpost cracked under his hand, a spider web fracture running up the wood.

I had seen the curse take hold before. I had seen all three of them at their worst. But I had never seen Ryder lose the thread completely. He had always maintained that cold, furious control, even when Liam and Kratavak were falling apart around him. Ryder was the wall. Ryder was the thing that held.

And right now, he was not holding.

"Hey," I said, moving before I'd decided to.

I stepped into him. Not away. Into him.

My hand pressed flat against his chest, right over where his own hand had been, and the effect was immediate and total and completely disproportionate to anything I had experienced before.

He went still.

Not gradually, not reluctantly. All at once, like something had been switched off. His breathing stuttered, then slowed. The black in his eyes receded, pulled back in a visible, rolling wave, replaced by amber and then something quieter beneath that.

The pressure in the room collapsed entirely.

We stood there, his hand still death-gripping the fractured bedpost, my palm flat against his chest, his heartbeat slamming hard and then slowly, reluctantly, beginning to settle beneath my fingers.

I could feel it happening. The cold pull up my arm, the familiar drain of it, the sensation of taking something dark and absorbing it somewhere deep in my own body where I would carry it silently for hours. That was the price. That was always the price.

But this time it was different.

Usually the transfer was slow, reluctant, like pulling a current against the tide. This time it moved through me like something that had been waiting. Eager, almost. Like my body understood this man's darkness with a precision it had never managed before.

Like something had changed.

Ryder exhaled slowly, the last of the trembling leaving his shoulders. He looked down at my hand on his chest, then up at my face, and for a moment he looked completely undone in a way that had nothing to do with the curse.

"What did you do?" he said, barely above a whisper.

"What I always do," I replied quietly.

He looked at my hand again. His grip on the bedpost released, the cracked wood settling with a soft groan. He didn't step back. I didn't either.

"You need to stop telling yourself this is simple," I said, looking up at him. "Because it isn't. And whatever is happening between my touch and your blood, it isn't something you get to just schedule on an elder's calendar."

His jaw worked. His eyes stayed on mine.

"The bonding night," I said carefully, "is not happening. Not today."

A long silence.

"The elders," he started.

"Are not in this room," I cut in. "You are. And somewhere underneath all of this, you are still capable of making a decision."

His expression was unreadable. It stayed that way for a long moment.

Then he stepped back. Just one step. But he stepped back.

He turned toward the door without another word, without a command, without the usual parting cruelty. He paused with his hand on the frame, his back to me.

"Don't mistake this for mercy," he said, his voice low.

"I don't," I replied.

He left.

I stood in the centre of the room for a long time after, my hand still raised slightly from where it had been pressed against his chest. My arm was cold to the elbow. My head felt faintly light.

But underneath all of it, quieter and more unsettling than anything else, was the thing I couldn't explain. The way the transfer had felt. The way his darkness had moved into me not like a burden this time, but like something returning home.

I pressed my hand against my own chest, over my heartbeat.

Something had changed. I just didn't know what yet.