Chapter Six – Damien

Three weeks after the ceremony, the ache under my ribs had stopped behaving like something that would eventually fade and started behaving like something with an opinion about how I ran my life.

It picked meetings to flare in. It picked the worst possible moments to remind me it existed; halfway through a trade negotiation with Draven's Beta, in the middle of reviewing security reports, once, humiliatingly, during a condolence call to a family who'd lost someone on the east ridge. I'd learned to breathe through it without my face showing anything, the same discipline that had gotten me through my father's funeral at seventeen without letting three hundred wolves watch me fall apart. It was a discipline built for grief, not for this. I was starting to suspect that was exactly the problem. That whatever this was, my body had decided to file it under the same category as loss, and wasn't interested in my objections.

“You look terrible,” Marcus said, with the particular bluntness only a Beta who'd known you since you were both pups could get away with. “Worse than after the funeral, and I didn't think that was possible.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're an Alpha telling his Beta he's fine while gripping a pen hard enough to crack it. I've seen fine. This isn't it.”

I set the pen down. It had, in fact, cracked. “What do you want me to say, Marcus? That rejecting her was a mistake? I know that. I knew it within the hour. Knowing it doesn't undo it.”

“I didn't ask you to undo it.” He studied me with the kind of patience he usually reserved for pack disputes, not for me. “I asked if you're fine. You're not. And whatever's happening to you isn't just heartbreak, or you'd have gotten drunk and moved on by now like every other Alpha who's made this particular mistake. This is something else.”

He wasn't wrong, and I hated that he wasn't wrong. “Mate-bond sickness doesn't happen this severely. Not from a single meeting.”

“Then maybe it wasn't a single meeting,” Marcus said. “Maybe whatever you two are to each other doesn't care that you only stood in the same field for ninety seconds.”

I hadn't let myself consider that. I'd spent three weeks treating this like an injury I needed to recover from, a problem with a timeline, and it hadn't once occurred to me that the timeline might simply not exist; that this wasn't going to fade no matter how many weeks I gave it, because fading had never been on the table to begin with.

I'd gone back to the archive room twice more since that first night, and found nothing to add to the one water-damaged passage about bloodlines the moon kept for itself. But I'd started noticing other things instead; gaps where there shouldn't have been gaps. An entire shelf of pre-treaty history that jumped, cleanly, from one century to the next with almost nothing in between. A ledger of Council decisions with a page cut out, not torn, cut, with the kind of precision that meant someone had wanted it gone rather than simply lost. I didn't know yet what any of it meant. I knew it wasn't nothing, and I knew my mother had access to that archive as freely as I did, and had never once mentioned any of it in twenty-four years of raising me to run this pack.

“Find out where the Wilders are,” I said, before I'd fully decided to say it, the same way the rejection itself had come out of me three weeks earlier. “The rogue pack. Past the western treaty line.”

Marcus's eyebrows went up, slow. “You want to go there.”

“I want to know if the border incidents are connected to her. That's all.”

“That's all,” Marcus repeated, in a tone that made it very clear he didn't believe a word of it, and didn't feel like arguing with me about it either. “I'll have something for you by tonight.”

My mother found out before tonight. My mother found out most things before I wanted her to, which I'd once mistaken for competence and had lately started recognizing as something closer to surveillance.

“You cannot be serious.” Selene stood in the doorway of my study with the particular stillness she used when she was genuinely rattled and didn't want it showing. “You rejected her in front of three packs. Walking into rogue territory to find her undoes every piece of ground we've held since.”

“The border incidents match a pattern that started the same week as the ceremony. I want to know if that's a coincidence.”

“It's a coincidence.”

“You don't know that.”

“I know Blackthorn cannot afford its Alpha wandering off into unclaimed territory chasing a bond he already severed, over a theory with no evidence behind it.” Her voice had gone sharp in a way I rarely heard from her, the composure cracking at the edges just slightly, just enough that I noticed. “Leave it alone, Damien. I've told you that already.”

“You've told me that twice now, about two different things, and both times you've refused to explain why. I'm not a pup you can manage with a firm voice anymore, Mother. I'm the Alpha. If there's something you know about what's happening at our borders, or about her, I need you to say it plainly, right now, instead of asking me to trust you the way you've been asking me to trust you my whole life without ever quite explaining what I'm trusting you with.”

For one unguarded second, something moved behind her eyes that I had genuinely never seen there before. Not anger. Something closer to fear, old and carefully buried, gone again so fast I could almost have convinced myself I'd imagined it.

“There is nothing to say,” she said, each word placed with more care than the sentence needed. “I raised you to protect this pack. That is what I am doing.”

“Then you won't mind if I go find out for myself.”

She didn't stop me. She also didn't wish me well, which told me more than anything she'd actually said.

Marcus had the location by nightfall; a rough sense of it, at least, gathered from a contact who traded with the Wilders occasionally and knew better than to ask too many questions about why Blackthorn's Alpha suddenly wanted directions to rogue territory. I told him I'd go alone. He told me, with the flat certainty of a man who'd already decided the argument wasn't worth having, that I absolutely would not, and that he was coming whether I ordered him not to or not.

We left before dawn, on foot the last several miles once the terrain got too dense for the car, into the country that didn't feel like it belonged to the Northern Territory at all; older trees, quieter in a way that had nothing to do with lack of wildlife and everything to do with something that had decided, a long time ago, to stop announcing itself to strangers.

The ache under my ribs changed as we walked. It didn't lessen. It sharpened, gathered itself into something with direction instead of just weight, a pull I could have followed blindfolded if I'd had to, growing more insistent with every mile like whatever lived on the other end of this bond had started, somewhere, to feel me coming.

“You feel that?” Marcus asked quietly, a few hours in, when even his patience had started fraying at the edges.

“Yeah.”

“Does it always do that? Get stronger the closer you are?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I've never rejected a bond and then walked toward the person again. There isn't exactly a manual for this.”

By mid-afternoon the pull had become something almost unbearable, a livewire hum under every inch of skin, and I understood, with a clarity that should have unsettled me more than it did, that whatever waited for me at the end of this walk was not going to be a simple conversation. Three weeks of silence didn't undo a public humiliation. Showing up wasn't an apology. It was, at best, a start, and I had no guarantee she'd even let me get that far.

The trees thinned ahead of us into what looked like the edge of a clearing, woodsmoke drifting faint on the wind, and somewhere past it, close enough now that my whole chest had gone tight with it, I felt her.

Not a memory. Not an ache anymore. Her, present tense, close enough that some old animal part of me wanted to break into a run and cover the last half mile before my own better judgment could stop it.

A wolf stepped out of the treeline ahead of us before I got the chance; black-furred, enormous, one ear notched clean through, planting itself directly in our path with an expression that needed no words at all to communicate exactly how unwelcome we were.

“Blackthorn,” a man's voice said, stepping out beside the wolf a moment later, dark-haired, a scar through one eyebrow, watching me with the particular stillness of someone doing quick math on how much of a problem I was about to become. “You're a long way from anywhere that's yours.”

“I'm looking for someone.”

“I know who you're looking for.” Something hardened in the man's face, protective in a way that had nothing to do with territory and everything to do with a person. “And I'm going to need a much better reason than you've got before I let you anywhere near her.”

“She's in danger. I don't know from what yet, and neither do you, but something's moving at every border in the Northern Territory, and it started the same week the bond between us snapped into place. I need to see her.”

“You rejected her in front of four hundred people.” The man's voice hadn't risen, which somehow made it worse than shouting would have. “She walked out of that ceremony and collapsed in the woods, and it was my pack that found her, not yours. You don't get to show up three weeks later because you've decided the timing's inconvenient for you.”

“I'm not asking for forgiveness.”

“Good,” he said. “Because you're not getting it from me, and I doubt you're getting it from her either.”

Behind him, further into the clearing, woodsmoke curled up thin against a sky going gold with late afternoon, and somewhere past the treeline I felt her close the distance without moving an inch; the pull sharpening again, unbearable now, close enough that I understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic, that she'd felt me arrive the same way I'd felt her three weeks ago across four hundred feet of ceremonial ground.

The black wolf's ears swiveled toward the trees behind him a half second before I heard it too; footsteps, quick and deliberate, someone who'd stopped bothering to move quietly the moment they'd realized who was standing at the edge of their camp.

The man in front of me didn't turn around. He didn't have to. Whatever he saw in my face told him everything he needed to know about who was coming.

“Lucian.” Her voice; it was the same voice I'd heard from across a crowd of four hundred people, and every single nerve I had recognized it instantly, the way I hadn't fully let myself believe a voice alone could still do that. “What is he doing here?”

I turned toward the sound of it, and for the first time in three weeks, the ache under my ribs went suddenly, completely silent; not because it had healed, but because the thing it had been aching for was finally, impossibly, standing in front of me again.