The Pull Begins

**POV: Aria**

She did not sleep.

She lay in her small bed in her father's cottage and stared at the ceiling while the moon moved across the sky outside her window and the bond sat in her chest like a living thing, warm and restless and completely unbothered by the fact that she needed it to stop.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw grey ones looking back at her.

She pressed her pillow over her face and groaned into it.

This was not supposed to happen to her. Girls like her did not get chosen by the Moon Goddess for something like this. Girls like her survived. They kept their heads down and their expectations low and they found quiet corners of the world where nobody could reach them. They did not get fated to the most powerful boy in the pack. They did not spend the night after the most shocking ceremony in Silvermoon Pack history lying awake feeling a bond pulling at their ribcage like it had somewhere it desperately needed to go.

She heard her father moving in the kitchen before sunrise.

She got up.

Dorian Voss was standing at the small stove, his back to her, his shoulders carrying that familiar gentle curve that had always made Aria feel like the world was softer than it actually was. He turned when he heard her and the expression on his face told her everything. He had heard. Of course, he had heard. News like this moved through a pack faster than fire.

"Aria," he said softly.

"I am okay, Papa."

He crossed the small kitchen in three steps and pulled her into his arms and she let him, pressing her face against his shoulder the way she had done since she was small. He smelled like pine and early morning and everything safe she had ever known.

"You do not have to be okay yet," he murmured into her hair.

She held on a little tighter and did not argue.

They sat together at the kitchen table as the sun came up and Dorian made tea and neither of them said very much. That was the thing about her father. He had always understood that some mornings required silence more than words. He asked her nothing about Caden. He asked her nothing about what came next. He just sat across from her with his warm hands wrapped around his cup and let her exist in the quiet without demanding anything from it.

She loved him so much it physically hurt sometimes.

She was halfway through her tea when the bond pulled.

It was different from the night before. Less like lightning and more like a hand pressed flat against her sternum, steady and insistent, pointing in a direction she did not want to go. She set her cup down and pressed her fingers against her chest and breathed through it.

Dorian watched her. "It is already pulling at you."

"It started last night," she admitted.

He was quiet for a moment. "Your mother used to describe the bond as a compass," he said slowly. "She said it always knew where it needed to go even when she was not ready to follow." He looked at his hands. "She was not ready for me either. Not at first."

Aria looked at him. He so rarely spoke about her mother.

He smiled at her, small and a little sad. "Give it time, my love. Give yourself time."

She nodded and finished her tea and tried very hard not to think about grey eyes.

She failed.

She was crossing the pack territory later that morning, heading toward Mara's house, when she heard him before she saw him. Not his voice. The bond. It flared in her chest like someone had turned up a flame, sudden and consuming, and she stopped walking in the middle of the path because her body simply refused to keep moving.

Caden came around the bend in the trail ahead of her.

He stopped too.

They stood ten feet apart on a dirt path in the middle of Silvermoon Pack territory in the pale morning light and looked at each other and neither of them said anything for a moment that stretched far longer than it should have.

He looked like he had not slept either.

Good, some small unreasonable part of her thought. At least she was not suffering alone.

"You live this side of the territory," he said finally. It was not a question.

"The cottage near the eastern border," she said. "Yes."

He nodded once. His jaw was tight. His hands were in his pockets and he was looking at her with that same expression from the ceremony, like she was a problem he was working through, like she was something unexpected that required recalculation.

She straightened her spine.

"You do not have to look at me like that," she said quietly.

Something shifted in his expression. "Like what?"

"Like I planned this." She met his eyes steadily. "I did not ask for this any more than you did. I am aware that I am not what you wanted. I am aware of what I am and what you are and I am not going to pretend otherwise." She paused. "But I also did not do anything wrong. So you can stop looking at me like I did."

The silence that followed was so complete she could hear the wind in the trees above them.

Caden looked at her for a long moment. Something moved through his grey eyes, there and gone before she could catch it.

"I do not think you planned it," he said finally. His voice was low and even.

She nodded once and moved to step around him on the path.

"Aria."

She stopped. Her name in his mouth did something to the bond she was not prepared for. She turned back carefully.

He was looking at her with an expression she had absolutely no framework for. "Are you alright," he said.

It was such a simple question. Such an ordinary question. And it hit her somewhere completely unguarded because in all the years she had walked through Crestmoon Academy and all the days she had survived and all the moments she had held herself together, not one person outside of Mara and her father had ever asked her that.

She opened her mouth.

And before she could answer, footsteps came up the path behind Caden and Zane appeared, stopping short when he saw Aria, his eyes moving between them with an expression he quickly made neutral.

"Alpha Ryker is asking for you," Zane said to Caden. "Now."

Caden held Aria's gaze for one more second.

Then he turned and walked away without another word.

And Aria stood alone on the path with her heart beating too fast and the bond pulling her after him and the unanswered question sitting between her ribs like a stone she did not know how to put down.