008 ~Mate (II)~

"Then what are you asking?"

He didn't answer.

Even the corridor held the question like it didn't want it either.

Outside, voices came up from the reception rooms below with Victor's laugh being the loudest, as he performed his summit, and played his chess. There was the clinking of glass and someone's heels going tango on the marble, a whole floor of people who didn't know the building was cracking three stories above their heads.

Kieran looked at her for a long time without blinking. He no longer had the calmness he carried for so long as his breathing had changed— slowed in a way that suggested it had recently required a decision, that somewhere in the last ten seconds he had been fighting something and had and barely, won.

Then he moved towards her, with every step making her heart drop lower into her belly.

He stopped just inches before her, close enough that his scent hit her, cedar and rain, and her body knew it before her mind could argue, less than two feet away.

Something shifted in the air around them as everything went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound. She felt her own pulse in her throat, in her wrists, in the strange hollow place behind her chest that had gone very warm very suddenly, like a coal someone had breathed on.

She didn't move or think in that moment, whether moving meant running or closing the distance completely, and the not-knowing terrified her more than either option alone.

He was looking at the floor. His jaw was tight and his hands had curled into something just short of fists at his sides

"Kieran." His name came out of her smaller than she meant it to. "Walk away."

He didn't walk away.

"You need to walk away right now," she gulped down a spittle she didn't know had gathered.

One more breath, slow, like a man setting something down carefully before it broke in his hands. Then— not spoken so much as let go—

"You still smell like my mate."

At once her lungs forgot their job.

The corridor stopped existing. The reception room three floors down stopped existing. Everything narrowed to the two feet of space between them and the impossible, unbearable, achingly familiar warmth radiating off him like heat off summer pavement.

Then he was moving again— down the corridor, every step visibly costing him something, a man spending the last of his composure on the simple act of walking away from her. Once he reached the corner, he turned and just like that, was gone.

Selene stood alone and pressed the back of her hand against her chest, hard, like she could push the feeling back down where it had been buried for five years.

But the pull was still there, persistent and alive— the same frequency she'd felt in the bar, when she saw him that morning, the night he'd stood in front of everyone and said the words that should have severed this completely.

Should have.

She had felt the bond break, had felt it go silent mid-note, an absence with its own terrible shape, and she had built five years of survival on top of that silence, brick by brick, had needed it to be true.

Her hand pressed harder against her chest, like she could crush the feeling back into nothing but it didn't move.

Around the corner, once out of sight, Kieran put his back against the wall and closed his eyes. His wolf rolled non-stop inside him, threatening to come out.

Despite five years of controlled, methodical work, evidence gathered in secret, witnesses tracked across three territories, files stolen out of his own father's locked study, all it took was one conversation with her in a corridor to almost undo the whole careful architecture of it in under four minutes.

It wasn't because she hated him. He could have survived her hating him. In fact, he had built a life around the assumption that she would.

He even assumed she was furious, certain he deserved nothing from her, even with five years of wreckage lying between them like a body neither of them had buried properly— she still felt like coming home.

And that was the thing that told him, with a certainty colder than anything he'd felt in five years of careful, patient rage, exactly what had been done to them.

He didn't feel home in a bond that had been legitimately severed. He only felt it in one that had been stolen.

"Mate!" His wolf growled deep, and his eyes turned bright red.