Borrowed time

LYRA'S POV

He looks at me like he’s trying to see all the way through to whatever’s underneath.

I don’t know if I can let him.

This isn’t what I planned. I wanted distance, enough that Roman Ashford couldn’t find my scent on the wind if he tried. Instead I’m standing between the man who wants to sell me and the man who caught me running from him, and I no longer know which direction is safe.

When we walk through the gates of North Ridge, every stare finds me and then slides away. I don’t belong here. That isn’t what keeps me awake.

It’s Kael.

The way he stood in front of his own pack for me. Lied for me. Put his name on the line for a woman he met a day ago. Why? What does he actually want?

I know how wolves like him can be. I watched one my whole life.

My father loved my mother, or said he did, right up until the day it cost him nothing to prove otherwise. Years before I was born, his pack owed Thornfield a debt—a marriage that never happened. Ashford’s family never forgot. They just waited. When my father needed something from them later, the price was finishing what he’d started. A daughter this time. He said yes before he told my mother.

She found out the same week I did. I watched something leave her face that never came back. She didn’t die of a broken heart. She died of realizing her whole marriage had been borrowed time, and the bill had come due. I was the payment.

So when Kael looks at me the way he doe, warm, certain, like none of this costs him anything, I can’t just believe it. I’ve seen exactly what that kind of certainty is worth when someone finally needs something in return.

He takes me to his room and sets water in front of me. I stare at it. Drinking feels like agreeing to something I’m not ready for.

Then he kneels and takes my ankle in his hands. His thumb runs once over the healing skin.

Something moves through me I don’t have a name for. Heat. Or the terrifying thing under the heat, the part that wants to stop being careful.

But it’s a full moon tonight. I’ve heard the stories my whole life. How it makes wolves reckless. How it pulls them toward anyone close enough to answer it, mate or not. What if that’s all this is? What if tomorrow, under an ordinary sky, none of this fire is left, and we’re both just holding a bond that was never real?

He looks up. Into my eyes, and stays there.

“Lyra. Can you just trust me?”

It feels like something catching fire behind my ribs. I want to say yes so badly it scares me more than anything his pack could do to me tonight.

But I think of my mother.

“Will you?” I ask. “None of us know our fate tonight. If they find out there’s no bond… what am I supposed to do then?”

“I’ll handle it,” he says. “Just trust me.”

I want to. I don’t know how anymore.

And underneath that, a smaller, colder thought I hate myself for having: what if this was never about me at all? What if there’s a version of tonight where Kael and Ashford want the exact same thing, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know it yet?

A knock cuts through everything.

Mara stands in the doorway with two others behind her. I felt this from her back at the ravine—not just dislike. Something sharper. Like I’m a threat to something she’s kept hidden a long time.

She tells Kael we can’t stay together. Something about scents answering each other too soon, muddying the proof. It sounds like law. It sounds true.

Kael argues. He doesn’t want me alone. Offers to give up his own room.

Then Mara looks at him.

It lasts only a second, but it’s long enough. Whatever she’s hiding, it isn’t about pack law.

“Let her stay with me,” she says.

Her voice is steady.

Something in it isn’t.