Chapter 2: The Second Bond

"Still open?"

I text it before I lose my nerve, thumb hovering over the send button for three long seconds before I finally push it through.

Cole Bennett's reply comes back in under a minute. *Always. Come whenever you're ready.*

I stare at the screen until the words blur. I haven't slept. I sat on the edge of my bed all night with my packed bag by the door, changing my mind twice and changing it back three times, and now the sun is turning gray at the edges of my window and I've finally made a decision I can't take back.

Staying means facing Dean every single day for the rest of my life, watching him walk past me like last night never happened. Leaving means giving up the only home I've ever known.

I choose leaving.

I sling my bag over my shoulder and slip out before Mara wakes up. She'd try to talk me out of it, and I don't trust my resolve to survive her soft, worried face.

The morning air is sharp against my skin. I make it past the training yard, past the row of cabins where the unmated fighters sleep, and I'm almost to the tree line when a voice stops me cold.

"Running."

I turn. Jaxton Cole is leaning against a fence post like he grew there overnight, arms crossed, watching me with that same unreadable stillness from last night.

"It's not running. I have an offer from another pack."

"Same thing with a nicer name."

My jaw tightens. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you were rejected in front of two hundred people last night and you're leaving before breakfast instead of staying to face any of them again." He straightens off the post. "That's not a guess. That's what I watched happen."

Heat crawls up my neck. "Get out of my way."

He doesn't move. "We need to talk first."

"We don't need to do anything." I step around him, and he falls into step beside me anyway, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and intends to spend every second of it right here.

"Last night," he says. "You felt it too."

I keep walking. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do." His voice doesn't change, doesn't soften. He says it plain, like a fact he's reading off a page. "The bond. It's real. It happened the second Dean grabbed your arm."

My feet stop moving before my brain tells them to.

"That's not possible," I say. "I already had a bond. It broke last night. Bonds don't just happen twice."

"They're not supposed to." He watches my face carefully, like he's cataloging every twitch of it. "Doesn't change what I felt."

"You don't know what you felt."

"I know exactly what I felt." For the first time his voice sharpens, edges showing through the calm. "I've been an Alpha for six years. I know what a bond feels like when it lights up, and I know it doesn't happen by accident, and it sure as hell doesn't happen to a stranger passing through for treaty talks who has no interest in complicating his life with someone else's pack drama."

"Then why are you telling me this."

"Because pretending it didn't happen won't make it stop happening." He steps closer, not enough to crowd me, just enough that I can't pretend he's not really there. "You can walk into these woods and join Bennett's pack today if you want. That's your choice. But the bond doesn't care about your choice. It'll still be sitting in your chest tomorrow, and the day after that, whether you're standing in his territory or mine."

I want to argue. I open my mouth to argue. Nothing comes out, because some traitorous part of me already knows he's right. I felt it last night, that pull hard enough to steal my breath, warm and humming and utterly undeniable, and I've been telling myself since sunrise that I imagined it, that grief and humiliation can make a person feel all kinds of things that aren't real.

But looking at him now, standing three feet away with his jaw set and his eyes steady, I don't feel grief. I don't feel humiliation.

I feel that same pull, quiet and patient, sitting right where it was last night.

"This is insane," I whisper.

"Probably."

"I don't even know you."

"No," he agrees. "You don't."

"Yesterday I had a mate. Today I have a bag packed to leave my whole life behind and a strange Alpha telling me the universe picked someone new for me before the last rejection even finished bleeding."

Something shifts in his face, the first real crack in that careful stillness. "I'm not asking you to accept it right now. I'm asking you not to run from it before you've even looked at it straight on."

"And if I look at it and I still want to leave?"

"Then you leave." No hesitation. No manipulation dressed up as concern. "That's your right. I'm not going to be the second man in two days who decides things about your life without asking you first."

That lands harder than I expect it to. I study him, this stranger with the flat voice and the careful eyes, and I hate that some small, exhausted part of me believes him.

"Say it," I tell him. "If you're so sure. Say what you think this is."

He doesn't blink. "I think the Moon Goddess doesn't make mistakes, even when the timing feels like a cruel joke. I think you're my mate. I think you felt it the second it happened, same as I did, and I think you've been standing here for the last two minutes trying to talk yourself out of something you already know is true."

The pull in my chest tightens like a fist closing.

I take a step back before I can stop myself, putting real distance between us, and it doesn't fade one bit. If anything it gets louder, sharper, like my own body is arguing against me.

Last night's rejection carved me hollow. This feels different. This feels like something reaching into that same hollow space and refusing to let it stay empty, whether I want it to or not.

And that terrifies me more than anything Dean said to me last night ever could.