Chapter Six: What We Used to Be

Dara's POV

I pulled my hand back before either of us could say another word about it, putting careful distance between myself and the bed, myself and him, myself and the terrifying ease with which my body had remembered exactly what it felt like to touch him after all this time apart.

"I should go." The words came out too fast, betraying more of me than I wanted him to see.

"Dara." Just my name, quiet, no demand woven into it. "Thank you. For today. Whatever you decide after this, whatever comes next — I mean that, truly."

I didn't trust myself to answer him. I left the room instead, closing the door softly behind me, and stood in the hallway for a long moment with my back pressed against the wood, breathing like I'd run the whole way here instead of simply standing still in one spot.

My pulse hadn't slowed by the time Chidi found me. She took one look at my face and didn't bother asking what had happened — just wrapped an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the front doors, murmuring something to Kai about needing air, about needing space to breathe that didn't smell like sickness and old grief.

"You okay?" she asked once we were outside, the cool evening pressing gently against my overheated skin.

"No." I pushed away from her gently, forcing my spine straight, forcing my voice into something steadier than what I actually felt underneath. "I want to go back to the cabin. Now, please."

She didn't argue with me. Kai walked us to the gate in silence, his expression unreadable in the fading light, and it wasn't until we were well clear of pack territory — until the iron gates and their carved howling wolves had disappeared behind the tree line entirely — that my mind let itself drift backward, unwillingly, helplessly, to a version of Damien I hadn't allowed myself to think about in years.

We were eleven the first time he snuck me honeycomb from his mother's kitchen.

I remembered the sticky gold of it coating his fingers, the careless, delighted grin splitting his face, like he'd pulled off some grand and daring heist instead of simply raiding a pantry two doors down from where his mother held council with the pack elders. He'd split the honeycomb in half without me even having to ask — sharing had never once been a question for him back then, not before he understood what it truly meant to be an Alpha's son, not before his mother began measuring the worth of every friendship he kept by what it might eventually cost the pack politically, strategically, in ways an eleven-year-old boy couldn't possibly have understood yet.

"You're going to get caught one day," I'd told him, licking honey slowly off my thumb, twelve years old and utterly certain the world operated along simple, fair lines that never bent for anyone.

"Worth it," he'd said, grinning wider, honey still smeared stubbornly at the corner of his mouth. "Some things are worth getting caught for, Dara. Always will be."

I hadn't understood, not then, that he would stop believing that the older he grew. That his mother would spend years patiently teaching him the exact opposite lesson instead — that some things, like *me*, weren't worth the risk of anyone's disapproval, weren't worth jeopardizing carefully built alliances and bloodlines and the delicate, deliberate architecture of pack standing she had spent her entire adult life constructing stone by careful stone.

By the time we turned sixteen, he'd already started pulling away in small ways I told myself, over and over, that I was only imagining. Fewer stolen afternoons down at the creek behind the training grounds. More formal distance whenever we happened to cross paths in front of the wider pack, his shoulders straightening on instinct, his voice going carefully neutral in a way that had never once existed between the two of us before that year. I remembered asking him once, half-joking and half not, perched on the fence rail overlooking the pups' training yard while the afternoon sun beat warm against our backs, whether he was embarrassed of me.

"Never." He'd said it too fast, too fierce, like the question itself had physically offended him down to the bone. But he hadn't corrected the growing distance either. He'd simply gotten better, with time and practice, at hiding it — folding it neatly beneath layers of politeness, beneath duty, beneath every reasonable-sounding excuse his mother had ever handed him to explain it away.

I understood now, walking slowly back toward Chidi's cabin with the taste of honeycomb long faded from memory but the ache of losing him somehow freshly reopened, raw all over again, that the boy who once shared everything without a second's hesitation had spent an entire decade quietly learning to hesitate instead. And in the end, his mother's decade of careful, patient lessons had won out completely over whatever the two of us might once have become together.

"You're quiet," Chidi said, glancing at me sideways as the cabin finally came into view through the trees, worry threading through every syllable of it.

"I'm thinking." I didn't offer her anything more than that, wrapping my arms tighter around myself against a chill that had nothing at all to do with the evening air settling in around us.

She didn't push me further. Some wounds needed silence more than they ever needed words, and Chidi had always known, better than almost anyone alive, exactly which kind of comfort I needed and precisely when to offer it without being asked.

That night, lying awake in the unfamiliar cabin bed while a storm rumbled somewhere far off in the mountains, I finally let myself ask the question I'd been carefully avoiding since the moment his hand had eased so easily under mine.

*If some things were once worth getting caught for — was I still one of them? Or had that boy disappeared completely into the Alpha his mother spent a lifetime building?*

I didn't have an answer waiting for me. I wasn't entirely sure, yet, that I wanted one.