Chapter Four

KIERAN'S POV 

Cole was in my kitchen when I got home.

He has a key for emergencies, which he interprets broadly. Tonight the emergency was apparently that he had brought food and needed somewhere to eat it, which is something I've stopped arguing with because Cole's version of checking on me always looks like something else.

He took one look at my face and said nothing, which is another thing I've always valued about him.

I sat down. He put food in front of me. I ate some of it.

Then: "How was it."

"Fine."

"Fine like actually fine, or fine like you're going to be staring at the ceiling at two in the morning."

I looked at him. He raised both hands slightly.

"She tells me things," he said, meaning my mother. "Not everything. Just — she was nervous about tonight."

"She didn't seem nervous."

"She's better at it than you are." He sat back. "Eli?"

I said nothing.

"I looked him up properly," Cole said. "Not just the case file. His record. He's been practicing for five years and he hasn't lost a case that mattered. Three of the last four major Omega rights rulings in this region have his name in the brief somewhere. He's—"

"I know what he is."

Cole was quiet.

"He asked me why I came," I said.

A pause. "What did you say?"

"Nothing. Our parents came back."

Cole turned his coffee cup in his hands — a habit he has when he's deciding how much to say. I've learned to wait it out.

"Kieran," he said finally. "The medical situation—"

"Not tonight."

"It's not going to improve by—"

"Cole." I looked at him. "Not tonight."

He stopped. He nodded once. He let it go in the way he lets things go — filing it, not dropping it, which means it will come back at a time of his choosing. That is his version of loyalty and I have learned to receive it as such.

Then, after a moment: "Did he look at you?"

I picked up my fork. Put it down again. "What kind of question is that."

"A straightforward one."

"We shook hands. We sat at the same table. We passed the bread."

"That's not what I asked."

I didn't answer. Cole read the silence the way he always does — accurately and without mercy — and looked down at his own food.

"He looked at you," he said quietly. Not a question this time.

"Everyone looks at each other at a dinner table, Cole. That's how dinners work."

"There's looking," he said, "and there's looking." He picked up his coffee. "I'm just asking because it matters. For the medical situation. Whether there's anything left on his side to work with."

"Don't," I said.

"Kieran—"

"I said don't." I stood, carried my plate to the counter, stood there with my back to him for a moment. "You don't get to make it clinical. Not tonight."

Cole was quiet behind me. When I turned around, he was watching me with an expression he almost never shows — not the practical Cole, not the managing Cole, but the one who has been standing next to me since we were teenagers and understands, better than anyone, exactly what tonight cost.

"Okay," he said simply. "Not tonight."

Ingrid told me that the Severance Sickness doesn't announce itself. That's what makes it dangerous. It presents as ordinary exhaustion at first — the kind any high-functioning Alpha could rationalize away as workload, stress, the accumulated weight of running a territory for six years. I rationalized it for eight months before Ingrid made me sit still long enough to be examined properly.

By then it was advanced.

The bond doesn't just sever when you reject it. That's what most wolves believe — that the rejection is clean, that it ends the connection and both parties move forward as separate people. That's true for the rejected mate. For the one who does the rejecting, the bond stays. It stays and it folds, like a letter that was never sent, like something trying to complete itself with nowhere to go.

Eventually it starts consuming the tissue it was meant to protect.

I had been consuming myself for ten years and calling it discipline.

********************

I didn't sleep until nearly three.

Not because of the ceiling — Cole was wrong about that, or half-wrong. I wasn't staring at the ceiling. I was sitting at my desk with Eli's case file open in front of me, reading the treaty he'd built.

It was meticulous. Three years of precedent, layered arguments, protections for unbonded Omegas that would fundamentally restructure how pack territories could govern designation-based employment. Every clause addressed something real. Every protection closed a gap that I was, if I was being honest, aware existed.

I read the whole thing.

At the bottom of the last page, in the margin where the lead attorney had scrawled a notation in red ink, there was a single line that wasn't legal language. It said: *because it's right.*

Not a legal argument. Not strategy. Just — because it's right.

I sat with that for a long time. I sat with the fact that he had built something true. That somewhere in the nine years since I last saw him, the boy I rejected had become someone who wrote *because it's right* in the margins of a legal document and meant it enough to leave it there. No performance. No audience. Just a man alone at a desk who still believed that was a sufficient reason to do something.

I didn't know what to do with that except feel it, which I wasn't particularly practiced at.

Then my phone lit up. Unknown number. I let it ring.

It rang again immediately after. Unknown.

I answered.

"Mr. Voss." The voice was smooth, unhurried, the voice of someone who has never once needed to raise it to be heard. "My name is Cael Draven. I believe we have some mutual interests worth discussing."

I went very still.

"It's three in the morning," I said.

"Yes," he said. "I find people are more honest at three in the morning. Don't you?" A pause. "I know about your health situation, Kieran. I know about the treaty. And I know about the attorney who filed it."

Every word he said landed in the exact order he intended it to.

"What do you want," I said.

"Only what's best for the territory," he said pleasantly. "I think we should talk about the treaty before it goes any further. I think you should reconsider your position. And I think you already know why."