Chapter Three: The Choice I Didn’t Want

Dara's POV

For a long moment, all I could do was stare at him, the words hanging in the space between us like something too heavy to catch.

"No." It left me before I'd even decided to say it, before my mind had caught up to whatever my mouth had already committed to. "No, absolutely not."

Kai didn't flinch away from the venom in my voice, which told me more than anything else could have. He'd known I would say exactly this. He'd come anyway, walked two hours through territory that wasn't his to be crossing, and stood on this porch bracing for it.

"Dara—"

"He rejected me, Kai." My hands had started shaking, and I hated that they were shaking, hated that even now, hours later, my body hadn't caught up to what my mind already understood as fact. "In front of the entire pack. He looked me in the eye and told three hundred wolves he didn't want me. And you want me to just — what? Walk back in there and save his life?"

"I want you to hear me out. That's all I'm asking." Kai's jaw tightened, some cost written plain across his face — whatever this had taken out of him to say, it wasn't nothing. "You don't have to forgive him. You don't even have to care whether he lives or dies. But you should know what you're choosing before you choose it blind."

Chidi's arm came around my shoulders, steady and furious all at once. "She doesn't owe him anything. Not one more second of her life, not after what he did to her tonight."

"I'm not saying she does." Kai's eyes stayed fixed on me, patient in a way that made my chest ache, because I remembered when Damien used to look at me like that too — before the pack, before politics, before his mother's voice grew louder in his head than mine had ever been allowed to be. "I'm saying if he dies, it won't be quiet, and it won't be clean, and it won't stay contained to him alone. Elder Mackenzie says the curse is already bleeding into the pack bond itself. Wolves are getting sick, Dara. Pups. Elders. The whole pack is tied to their Alpha's life force, and his is failing fast."

The words landed low in my stomach, cold and entirely unwelcome, settling there like a stone dropped into still water.

"That's not my problem," I said, and even as it left my mouth I heard exactly how thin it sounded, how little weight it actually carried.

"Isn't it?" Kai's voice gentled, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed harder. "You grew up in that pack too, before all this. You know half those pups by name. You used to carry the littlest ones home when they scraped their knees on the training grounds."

I turned away from him, wrapping my arms around myself, staring out at the tree line where the sun still hadn't fully broken through the gray. Chidi's coat was still warm from her shoulders, and it smelled like home in a way that made my throat go tight and aching.

"I don't understand why it has to be me." My voice came out smaller now, all the anger drained out of it and something rawer left standing in its place. "There has to be another way to break it. A ritual. An elder's blessing. Something that doesn't require me to walk back in there and hand him something he threw away like it meant nothing at all."

"Elder Mackenzie searched every text the pack has kept for three hundred years." Kai shook his head slowly, like the answer disappointed him as much as it was about to disappoint me. "There's only one cure. The bond, restored. Willingly. By you, and no one else."

"Then he dies." I said it flat, final, and it didn't feel like the lie I wanted it to be. "Because I am not walking back into that pack to hand him something he threw away in front of everyone who ever mattered to us."

Silence stretched between the three of us, broken only by wind moving restless through the trees.

Kai nodded slowly, like he'd expected exactly this answer and had already braced himself for the shape of it. "Okay." Quiet, no argument left in him. "Okay, Dara. I won't ask you again."

He turned to go, and something in the set of his shoulders — the quiet defeat folded into them — cracked open something in my chest I hadn't given permission to crack.

"Wait." The word left me before I'd decided to say it, and I hated myself a little for it, hated the traitorous speed of it. "What—" I swallowed hard around the sudden tightness in my throat. "What does it look like? When it gets worse?"

Kai turned back, and I watched him weigh how much truth to hand me.

"Last night," he said quietly, "it took four wolves to hold him down while the black veins spread past his collarbone. He screamed until his throat gave out, and even after that, the sound didn't fully stop — like something inside him was still screaming, even once he couldn't anymore." He held my gaze, steady, unflinching. "This morning, Elder Mackenzie said if it reaches his heart, there won't be thirty days left. There'll be maybe five."

Chidi's hand tightened on my arm — a silent, useless comfort, because nothing about what Kai had just said left any room for comfort to land.

*Five days.*

I thought of Damien as a boy, sneaking honeycomb from his mother's kitchen, sticky-fingered and grinning like he'd gotten away with something enormous, long before he learned to fold himself into the exact shape his mother demanded of him. I thought of him on that platform last night, his voice flat and final, his eyes refusing to hold mine even as he broke something in me that would never be fully unbroken again.

And then I thought of him on his knees in the dirt, black veins climbing his throat, his hand pressed to his own chest like he could hold his heart together through sheer, stubborn will alone.

"I hate this." I said it to no one and everyone at once. "I hate that some part of me still—" I couldn't finish the sentence. I didn't want to finish it, didn't want to hear myself admit what came after that *still.*

"You don't have to decide right now." Kai's voice had gone soft again, careful, like he was handling something fragile. "But you should decide soon."

He left us there on the porch, disappearing back down the road toward pack territory, and Chidi turned to me with a look I recognized instantly — the same look she'd given me a hundred times growing up, always right before she said something I didn't want to hear.

"You already know what you're going to do," she said quietly. "Don't you."

I didn't answer her. I didn't trust my own voice not to confirm it, not to give away exactly how far gone I already was.

Because somewhere in the last five minutes, between hating him and hating myself for still caring, I'd stopped asking *whether* I would go back.

I'd started asking myself how I was supposed to walk through those gates again without letting him see exactly how much power he still held over me — even now. Especially now.