Chapter 3 :The Price I Never Told Her

Torin.

I smelled her before I saw her, and for one full second I forgot how to breathe.

Eight years had passed since I had last touched that scent. It hit me the same way it had the first time, warm and familiar, like something my body remembered even when my mind had spent a decade trying to forget it. 

Then I turned the corner and there she was, Sloane Hargrove, standing in my hallway with a camera hanging from her shoulder as if she belonged there.

She did not belong here. She belonged somewhere far away from me, somewhere I could not hurt her again.

"Sloane." Her name came out rougher than I meant it to.

"Torin." Her voice was steady, professional, the voice of a stranger who had built a whole life without me in it. "I am covering the season for the network."

I heard myself say something about being told a photographer was coming, but the words felt far away, because all I could think about was the last time I had stood this close to her and torn her heart out with six words.

I had told myself for eight years that I did the right thing. I had told myself so many times that I almost believed it. Standing in front of her now, watching her chin lift the same defiant way it always had, I felt every one of those years crack open at once.

I remembered the night clearly, clearer than I wanted to.

Elder Ashgrove had come to me three days after I marked her as my mate in front of half the pack, and he had not bothered with any kindness before he said what he came to say.

"Her pack is already weak," he told me, standing in my father's old study as he owned it. "One more scandal and the council will finish what internal fighting started. A rejected Alpha bond broadcast to every pack watching this league would hand them the excuse."

"That is not my problem," I had said, even though my hands were shaking.

"It becomes your problem the moment you bond with her." He had smiled then, the kind of smile that made my skin crawl. 

"The league needs the Vale name clean right now, Torin. One more shifter scandal this year and human eyes turn toward all of us. Choose her, and I will make certain her pack takes the blame for it. Reject her, and none of this touches her family at all."

I had not believed him at first. Then I had watched, over the following weeks, small signs of exactly how much power he actually held over pack politics I barely understood at twenty-three. 

I was young, terrified, and convinced I was protecting her, and so I had done the one thing I swore I would never do to anyone I loved.

I had rejected my own fated mate to keep her safe from a threat she never even knew existed.

She never knew, and that was the part that haunted me longest. She thought I chose hockey over her. 

She thought I was weak or cruel or both. I let her believe it because the alternative meant explaining a threat I could not prove and a council I could not fight, not back then, not with the little standing I had.

"This is going to be a problem," I said now, because it was easier than saying anything true.

"It does not have to be," she answered, lifting her camera slightly. "I have a job to do. You have a championship to win. We do not need to be friends for either of those things to happen."

"I never said we needed to be friends."

I watched something flicker across her face, hurt, quickly hidden, and I hated myself for putting it there twice in one lifetime. I opened my mouth to say something else, anything else, when a new scent reached me underneath the ones I already knew.

I went still.

It was faint, but unmistakable once I found it, layered under her perfume and the coffee she must have had that morning. Cedar and…an Alpha's mark, the scent signature that could only belong to another wolf who had been close enough to leave it behind.

Emrys Kade.

Every instinct I had spent eight years training myself to control rose at once, sharp and ugly and far more possessive than I had any right to feel. I reached out before I decided to move and closed my hand around her wrist, not hard, just enough to keep her from stepping away while I leaned in and breathed her in again to be sure.

I was very sure.

"Why," I said, low, a growl scraping under the word before I could stop it, "do you smell like Kade?”

Her eyes went wide, then narrow, anger replacing whatever had been there a second before. "That is none of your business."

"Everything about this league is my business." My grip tightened slightly, and I forced it to loosen, hating how much of me wanted to pull her closer instead of letting go. "Kade is not just some man you should meet, Sloane. He is the only thing standing between my team and a championship, and if you are anywhere near him, I need to know why."

"You don't get to demand anything from me." Her voice shook with something that was not quite fear. "Not after what you did."

I released her wrist as it burned me, because she was right and we both knew it. I had given up any claim to questions like that the night I rejected her. I opened my mouth to say something, an apology maybe; eight years was too late, when she turned and walked away from me down the hallway without looking back.

I stood there long after she disappeared around the corner, my chest tight with a mix of guilt and rage I had not let myself feel in years, wondering if Ashgrove's old threat had somehow followed her here too, wondering if Kade knew exactly what he was doing by putting his scent on the one woman I had never stopped loving.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out expecting a text from Bastian about practice, and instead found a message from a number I did not recognize. Attached was a photo, grainy but clear enough, Sloane stepping out of a hotel doorway that morning, Emrys Kade's hand still resting on the frame behind her.

Under the image, a text waited for me, and my blood went cold reading it.

“Choose better this time, Alpha. Or I finish what we started.”