022 ~ Broken Bonds ~

Kieran's arm remained firm around Selene's waist as the chaos around them faded into a distant blur.

Fallen leaves stained dark beneath their feet; steel clashed somewhere beyond the clearing, yet neither of them moved or loosened their hold.

She felt his heartbeat through his forearm, too fast, and too close to hers.

Something very fast passed between them, and for one heartbeat she forgot to be afraid of him.

"There!" One of the masked wolves shouted, springing forward with his blade flashing toward her throat.

Kieran turned before he seemed to decide to, and the edge of the blade caught his shoulder instead of her skin, yet he didn't so much as flinch.

Selene pushed herself away from him, not taking her eyes away from the blood already soaking his shirt. "You're bleeding."

"Run," he said, facing the attackers.

"I'm not leaving you."

"That wasn't a request."

"Stop giving me orders." She snatched the dagger off the ground before he could argue further, turning into the fight beside him, and did not look back to see if he approved.

The attackers felt the tide shift against them and stopped pressing. Their leader's voice cut through the clash of steel. "Separate them!"

Selene barely registered it over the sound of her own heartbeat. But Kieran went still for half a second too long, and she understood he'd heard it too— heard what it meant, that whoever sent these men already knew something about the two of them that they didn't.

One of the masked men muttered low to another, close enough for both of them to catch it. "No wonder the Alpha wanted her alive."

"Shut up!" the other hissed, but it was too late; they heard that too.

A horn sounded from the mansion some distance away, and the attackers melted back into the trees.

Their leader, frustration written all over his face, paused long enough to raise a finger at Selene and make sure she saw it. "We'll finish this." Then the dark swallowed him whole.

Selene's hands wouldn't stop shaking as silence rushed in to fill the space he'd left.

"They're expecting us to run back to the estate," Kieran said, already scanning the tree line.

"Then what do we do? I'm not spending the night out in these trees."

He nodded toward a black silhouette against the storm clouds— an old watchtower crouched on the northern border, forgotten by everyone but the wind. "You wouldn't have to. Just tonight. I'll have you back in the mansion safely by morning."

She didn't trust him. She hadn't trusted him in five years, not since the ceremonial hall had emptied her and left a hollow woman standing where a Luna should have been. But she trusted the men in the trees even less, and that was enough to make her feet move.

"This doesn't change anything." She stared into his eyes before walking towards the tower.

The tower's interior smelled of dust and old smoke. Kieran built a fire while the rain started to fall outside, and Selene knelt beside him with a strip of torn cloth, pressing it to the gash at his shoulder before he could refuse.

He flinched anyway.

"Still hate being treated?" she asked, quieter than she meant to.

"Only by people who pity me. It will heal soon anyway."

Her hands stilled against the wound. "I don't pity you, and thanks for reminding me I'm wolfless."

"Selene... You know I didn't mean—" he turned towards her but stopped talking. He was smart enough to know that the more he spoke, the worse the situation became.

The fire popped between them, filling the silence she didn't know how to fill herself. Then, so low it almost didn't survive the sound of the rain: "I just don't want another person bleeding because of me."

He didn't answer that. There was nothing to say to a woman who still carried a massacre in her chest five years later, and they both knew it.

The question had been building in her since the ceremonial hall, since the moment his rejection had rewritten her entire life and she finally let it out. "Why did you reject me?"

"I didn't."

A bitter laughter that carried the weight of her soul tore out of his throat. "Don't insult me. You stood in front of the entire pack."

"No." He shook his head slowly, as if the memory itself was heavy to move. "I remember standing in the ceremonial hall." A pause. "After that—" Nothing followed.

His hand came up to press against his forehead, breath catching in his chest as something had snagged there. "I remember waking three days later."

Selene went cold. "What?"

"Everyone kept saying I'd rejected my mate. They congratulated me." His voice thinned to almost nothing. "But I couldn't remember saying the words."

The fire cracked, but neither of them moved.

She asked him a question again, sharper this time. "Who testified against me? Damien."

"Yes... No."

He blinked, frowning as the ground had shifted under a name he'd been certain of a second ago.

"Ryker?"

"Yeah... wait, no." The names kept sliding out of his grip, one replacing another, none of them holding. "Why can't I remember?" His hands went to his skull as he could physically hold the memory in place. "Every time I try—" He stopped as real pain crossed his face.

Selene had seen liars before. She knew the shape of a man protecting himself with a story. This wasn't that. This was a man watching his own memories rewrite themselves in front of him, in real time, and having no power to stop it.

"Someone changed what you remember," she said, barely audible.

He didn't answer. He was already asking himself the same question, and finding no bottom to it.

Rain hammered the stone above them. Selene stared at the flames burning low, and the sentence she needed to say sat in her throat, refusing to become words.

"If you never rejected me—"

She couldn't finish it. Finishing it meant five years of grief, of hatred, of a life rebuilt around a single moment— all of it standing on nothing.

Kieran looked at her as though one wrong movement might break the moment, his eyes searching her face for something he was afraid to find.

Selene lowered her eyes to the fire, and for the first time in five years, she doubted her own memory of that night.