Flint

The morning after the crisis, I woke with a headache that wasn’t mine.

Dull. Heavy. Sitting at the base of my skull like a stone someone had placed there while I slept. I pressed my fingers against the spot and felt the echo of something deeper underneath. Not pain. Absence. A place where a wolf should have been and wasn’t.

Tarn’s wolf was retreating again. I could feel it in my own body.

I sat on the edge of the bed and breathed through it. The ache faded to a hum after a few minutes, but the hum didn’t stop. It sat behind my ribs like a second heartbeat. His heartbeat. Living inside me now whether I wanted it or not.

The bond had gone bidirectional.

Every healing session, every touch, every night I’d pressed my palm against the locked door. I’d been deepening a connection that was no longer one-directional. I wasn’t just reading his body anymore. I was carrying it. His pain echoed in my bones. His wolf’s distress pulled at something behind my sternum. When I closed my eyes, I could feel where he was in the compound without looking. A warmth in the dark. A compass that always pointed toward him.

I was tethered to the man I’d sworn I would never trust. And the tether was getting shorter every day.

I spent the morning in the greenhouse. Alone. I sent word through Mace that I needed to catalogue my stores and prepare new compounds. Clinical reasons. Valid reasons. Reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that being in the same room as Tarn was becoming impossible to survive without reaching for him.

The work helped. Grinding valerian into fine powder. Measuring sassafras bark. Sorting the dried linden blossom into batches by potency. My hands in the soil. My mind in the formulas. The healer in me could still function when the woman in me was falling apart.

But the bond didn’t care about distance. By midday the hum behind my ribs had grown louder. A tightness in my chest that flexed when the poison flared in his body. I was standing at the potting bench measuring chamomile when a wave of nausea rolled through me that wasn’t mine and I had to grip the edge to stay upright.

He was somewhere in the compound having a bad moment, and my body was having it with him.

I worked through it. Gritted my teeth and kept measuring. Made it through the afternoon by focusing on the weight of each ingredient in my palm, the temperature of the water, the color of each compound as it steeped. If I stayed precise enough, the bond couldn’t pull me under.

Mace came at dusk to walk me to the quarters. I told him I wasn’t going.

“I’ll sleep here tonight. I need to monitor the new compounds.”

He leaned against the doorframe and studied me with those steady amber eyes. “You’re monitoring compounds. Or you’re avoiding the Alpha’s quarters.”

“Both.”

“Linden. You can’t outrun the bond by sleeping on a greenhouse floor.”

“I’m not outrunning it. I’m managing it from a clinical distance.”

He didn’t argue. He also didn’t leave. He stayed at the door while I set up a cot between the potting bench and the north wall, and I felt his silence settle around me the way it always did. Calm. Open. The absence of pressure.

It lasted an hour.

The greenhouse door opened and the bond surged so hard I dropped the jar in my hands. Chamomile powder scattered across the bench. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was. My body already knew. Every nerve ending had pivoted toward the door like the night jasmine pivoting toward darkness.

Tarn stood in the doorway. Mace had stepped aside. The two brothers exchanged a look I couldn’t read, and then Mace disappeared into the corridor. Leaving us alone.

“You’re avoiding me,” Tarn said.

“I’m managing the treatment from a clinical distance.”

“You’re scared.”

“I’m strategic.”

“Those aren’t different things.”

Four sentences. Each one shorter than the last. Each one closer to the truth. He was standing in my greenhouse doorway with candlelight on the scar and his gray eyes seeing straight through every wall I’d built since the day he pointed at me and said “that one.”

“The bond is bidirectional now,” I said. “I feel your pain. I feel your wolf retreating. When the poison flares, my body responds. I can’t heal you objectively if I’m inside your symptoms.”

“Is that the clinical reason?”

“That’s the only reason.”

“Then why is your hand shaking?”

I looked down. My right hand, resting on the bench, was trembling. Not from the chamomile I’d dropped. From his proximity. From the warmth pouring off him in the doorway. From the bond screaming at me to close the distance between us and touch the man whose heartbeat I could feel from ten feet away.

“Go back to the quarters, Tarn.”

He didn’t move. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me through the glass on the second day. Through the fog. Through the claiming courtyard. Like I was the only thing worth seeing.

“When you’re ready to stop being strategic,” he said, “I’ll be on the other side of the door.”

He left. The warmth left with him. The greenhouse went cold in a way that had nothing to do with November.

Mace reappeared. Walked me to the quarters in silence. At the door to my room, he stopped.

“He’s not wrong,” Mace said. Quiet. “You are scared.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

The linden blossom I’d planted outside the Alpha’s door was blooming in the dead of winter. Full white petals. Impossible fragrance. Both of us could smell it.

Mace looked at the bloom. Looked at me. Something moved behind the amber that he didn’t let reach his face.

“Goodnight, Linden,” he said. And walked away.

I went inside. Locked the door. Pressed my back against it. On the other side of the connecting wall, I could feel Tarn’s warmth like a hand pressed flat against my spine.

The linden blossom outside the door smelled like everything I was trying not to feel.

It was the strongest scent in the corridor.