Chapter Three: What the Bond Doesn't Tell You

Sterling territory smelled nothing like Hartwell.

Where my old pack's halls had always carried an undertone of competition expensive perfume, sharp cologne, the particular tension of people constantly measuring themselves against each other Rhys's pack house smelled like cedar and rain. Quiet. Unhurried.

He set me up in a guest room with a window overlooking the training yard and didn't ask a single question that night. He just left a plate of food outside my door and a note that said, simply: Rest. We'll talk when you're ready.

I cried for the first time in three weeks.

Not from the rejection. From the relief of someone giving me space instead of demanding I perform gratitude for it.

By the second day, I'd stopped flinching at every knock. By the third, I'd started noticing things the way the Sterling pack didn't have the rigid hierarchy Hartwell prided itself on, the way warriors and kitchen staff ate at the same tables, the way nobody looked at my body like it was a problem to be solved.

It was on the fourth day that Rhys found me in the training yard, watching two young wolves spar.

"You're not eating enough," he said, dropping onto the bench beside me. Not accusatory, just observant, the way he seemed to notice everything without making it a confrontation.

"Force of habit." I kept my eyes on the sparring match. "Hard to have an appetite when you've spent your whole life being told you have too much of one."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Your sister used to say that? Or your pack?"

"Both. Constantly." I hadn't meant to say it that plainly, but something about Rhys made honesty easy dangerously easy. "Bianca used to 'joke' that I ate her share too. My mother laughed along. It's just what we did."

"That's not a joke," Rhys said. "That's cruelty wearing a joke's clothes."

I looked at him then, really looked, and something in his grey eyes made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the mate bond humming quietly in the background of everything, unresolved and patient.

"Why did you really come to Hartwell territory?" I asked. "Be honest. You didn't relocate an entire pack on a whim."

Something shifted in his expression quick, careful, gone almost before I caught it. "I had my reasons."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

Before I could push further, one of the sparring wolves yelped, and Rhys was on his feet checking the injury, the conversation swallowed by the ordinary business of running a pack. I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself a lot of things that week.

That night, I woke to the bond pulling at me like a physical hand, dragging me out of sleep and toward the window. I didn't understand it not until I saw him.

Kaelan.

Standing at the tree line at the edge of Sterling territory, not moving, not approaching, just watching the house. Even from this distance, in the moonlight, I could see he looked wrong. Thinner. Greyer, somehow, like something essential had been siphoned out of him.

I should have looked away. I should have called for Rhys.

Instead I stood frozen at the window for nearly ten minutes, watching the Alpha Prince who'd humiliated me in front of two hundred wolves stand alone in the dark like a man keeping vigil at a grave.

He left before dawn.

The next morning, I found out why he'd looked so wrong.

Rhys called me into his study, expression grave in a way I hadn't seen from him before, and slid a letter across the desk. Ashford Kingdom seal. Official council correspondence, intercepted by one of his scouts.

I read it twice before the words made sense.

By order of the King, the unresolved mate bond between Alpha Prince Kaelan Ashford and Ivy Hart of Hartwell Pack is to be formally and permanently severed within thirty days, through ritual means if necessary, given the demonstrable degradation of the Prince's power.

Below it, smaller, worse:

The girl is to be handed over to royal custody to ensure compliance.

My hands went cold.

"They want to sever it by force," I whispered. "And they want me in a cell to make sure it happens."

Rhys's jaw was tight, his eyes hard in a way that made him look, for the first time, every bit the Alpha he was supposed to be.

"They'll have to go through me first," he said.

The door slammed open behind us.

"They'll have to go through both of us," Kaelan said, standing in the doorway, guards nowhere in sight, alone, looking like he'd run the entire way. "Because I'm not letting them touch her either."