Chapter 3 The Part Where He Explains Himself (Poorly, Then Better)

He explains himself on a Saturday, which I will note was not my invitation — it was a fire escape situation.

I go out on the fire escape sometimes in the evenings when the apartment feels too small for everything I'm thinking. It is not the most dignified coping strategy, but the view of the river is genuinely good and the city sounds are the right kind of noise — present enough to fill the silence, distant enough not to demand anything.

I hadn't known that Casen's apartment was in the building next door until I came out on a Saturday evening and found him already on his own fire escape, facing the river, not expecting me.

We both saw each other at the same moment.

Neither of us moved.

"I didn't know," he said, after a moment. "About the fire escapes."

"Neither did I."

Another long pause. The city hummed below us.

"I'll go inside," he said.

And I don't know what came over me — my wolf, maybe, or the particular quality of the evening air, or three weeks of carrying something heavy without any outlet — but I said: "You can stay."

He stayed.

We didn't talk immediately. We were both looking at the river. That helped.

After about ten minutes he said: "At the Convergence two years ago — the inter-pack gathering — I met someone."

"I know about Neva Strand."

He looked at me.

"Ozzie," I said. "He has sources."

"Ozzie has always hated me."

"Ozzie is protective. It presents similarly." I kept my eyes on the river. "Tell me anyway. The version I don't know."

He told me.

The pull he'd felt toward Neva — electric, unexpected, the kind of thing the old stories describe as unmistakable. His father's voice in his head: you'll know it when it happens, it'll feel like lightning, don't mistake comfort for destiny. The two years of trying to ignore it. The decision, finally, that completing the bonding ceremony with me while carrying that pull would be the worst thing he could do.

"You could have told me," I said.

"Yes."

"You could have talked to me. Asked me. Included me in the decision about my own life."

"Yes." His voice was quiet — flayed-quiet, the kind that comes from having had this argument with yourself many times before the other person says it out loud. "I thought I was protecting you. Choosing the lesser injury over the greater one."

"You chose for me," I said. "That's the part you keep leaving out. You decided what I could handle without asking me."

Silence.

"Yes," he said. "That's the part I keep leaving out."

"What happened with Neva?"

He breathed out slowly. "She ended it. About six weeks after the ceremony. She said—" A pause. "She said the pull was real but it wasn't the mate bond. She'd felt the difference by then. She said I'd made a catastrophic decision based on a misidentification and that I needed to go find out what I'd done."

"She sounds sensible."

"She's remarkably sensible. She was also, I think, kinder about it than I deserved."

I looked at him for the first time since we'd started talking. He was looking at the river, and the evening light was catching the side of his face, and he looked — not ruined, exactly. But deeply, quietly humbled in a way I'd never seen him before. Casen Wolfe had always carried his assurance like a second skin.

"Why did you abdicate?" I asked.

"Because the pack needs an Alpha who is fully there. And I couldn't be fully there anymore."

"Because of me."

"Because of the fracture." He finally looked at me. His eyes had gone amber at the edges — his wolf, surfacing. "Zoya. Can you feel it?"

My wolf pushed against my sternum. I pressed my hand there, involuntarily.

"The rejection didn't fully take," I said.

"No. The bond was real. It doesn't break cleanly when it's real. It fractures."

I knew this. I'd been attributing the grey-edge feeling, the low hum of something unresolved, to grief. I'd been calling it heartbreak and moving past it and I'd been right to — but not for the reasons I thought.

"What does that mean for us?" I asked.

"It means you have a choice," he said. "Not because the bond demands it. Because you deserve to make it with full information, which is what I should have given you from the beginning."

I stood up from the railing.

"I'm going inside," I said. "I need to think."

"Of course."

"I'm not forgiving you yet."

"I know."

"But I heard you."

I went inside. My wolf settled — just slightly, just the edges of her — for the first time since the rejection.