Thirty-One Seconds

KAEL'S POV 

I open it before I let myself think too hard about why my hands are shaking.

Her face fills the screen, and for a second nothing else exists. Not the medical house, not Dr. Kim's quiet movements across the room, not the ache sitting constant in my chest. Just her, alive, breathing, close enough that I could almost believe the screen was a window instead of a recording.

I have to grip the phone with both hands to keep it steady.

She's alive. Whatever else this message turns out to be, that single fact lands first and hardest, relief so sharp it nearly doubles me over in the chair. Days of nothing but a pull with no direction, and here she is, her voice about to fill the silence that's been eating me alive since the den.

Then I actually hear what she says.

"I need you to stop looking for me. This was a mistake, all of it, since the night at the gate. I don't want this bond. I never wanted it. Please, just let me go, and let yourself live."

The relief curdles into something I don't have a name for.

I don't reach for anger. I don't reach for disbelief either, not yet. What I reach for, helpless and immediate, is doubt about myself. She's alive. She's talking. And she's telling me, in her own voice, that I should stop.

Did I misread everything?

Did I take something she never actually wanted to give?

We've known each other a handful of days. The bond felt like certainty to me, undeniable, but I never once stopped to ask whether certainty on my end meant the same thing on hers. I claimed her in front of my own pack. I bled for a rite neither of us fully understood. None of that gives me the right to assume she wanted any of it as much as I did.

I almost type a reply.

My thumb hovers over the keyboard, words forming and dissolving before I can commit to them. Tell me what he's done to you. Tell me what the bond is doing to me, every hour, slower than either of us wants to admit.

I want her to know what this is costing me. I want that to matter to her.

I delete it before I send anything.

If I tell her I'm dying, and she comes back because of that, I'll never actually know if she came back for me or for guilt. I don't want her carrying my death like a debt she has to pay off. Whatever she decides, I want it to be hers to decide, not something I forced her into with the weight of my own ending.

I watch the message again instead.

The second time through, something catches what the relief buried the first time. A pause, small, right before she says my name. Her voice staying almost too level through most of it, like she's reciting something memorized rather than feeling it in real time. None of it proves anything. I have no evidence, nothing concrete enough to stand on. Just a small wrongness, the kind I can't quite put a name to and can't quite let go of either.

The room tilts before I can chase the thought any further.

I grip the edge of the desk, my vision blurring at the corners the same way it did at the den, my body reminding me, patient and merciless, exactly how little time I actually have to sit here second-guessing a thirty-one-second video.

"Kael." Mara's hand finds my shoulder, steadying. "What is it?"

I look at the phone in my hand. For a moment, I don't want to let her see it. Lyra's words are still sitting heavily in my chest, and somehow, letting someone else hear them makes them feel more real. 

But I hand her the phone without explaining. She watches it in silence, her expression unreadable until it finishes.

"She wants you to stop," she says quietly.

"I heard it."

"Then maybe you should listen to her." Mara sets the phone down gently, like it's something fragile. "I know how that sounds, coming from me, after everything today. But she said it herself, Kael. In her own voice. If she's telling you to let her go, maybe the kindest thing you can do is respect that, instead of chasing someone who's already made her choice."

"I don't know that she was free to choose."

"You don't know that for certain. You're assuming it because the alternative is unbearable." Her voice softens. "I'm not saying you should stop caring about her, Kael. I'm asking whether you've considered that she might mean what she said."

I sit with that a moment, turning it over, weighing it honestly instead of dismissing it just because it's hard to hear.

"Maybe," I say finally. "But asking me to stop isn't proof that she's safe. I don't know if she wants me. I don't know if she's being honest. I only know I can't make that decision for her without knowing she's free to make it herself."

Darin appears in the doorway before Mara can answer, phone still in his hand.

"Teams are organizing," he says. "Where do you want them."

I look down at the screen one more time, her face frozen mid-sentence on the thumbnail, and I let myself feel the full weight of what I'm choosing, clear-eyed, without pretending it's simpler than it is.

I could accept that she didn't want me. What I couldn't do was pretend I knew she was safe just because she'd asked me to stop looking.

"Everywhere," I tell him. "Keep going."