Threshold

I stopped being strategic at three in the morning.

The evidence made it impossible. I’d spent four hours cross-referencing the compound markers from Tarn’s system, and the answer made strategy irrelevant.

The poison wasn’t a single compound. It was a sequence. Five botanical agents in a specific order, each one degrading a different layer of the wolf-bond. The dosing was precise. The progression was elegant in the way only a master’s work could be.

Someone with a healer’s training. The same training my mother had.

I sat in my locked room with the notes spread across the bed and felt the implication settle like frost. The person poisoning Tarn had been trained by the same tradition that trained my mother. The healer who was killing the Alpha and the healer who’d been killed for trying to save the last one were connected by knowledge. By craft.

My mother’s ghost was in this poison. And I was the only person alive who could read her fingerprints.

I couldn’t hold this until morning. Not with his heartbeat humming in my ribs and this knowledge burning in my hands.

I got out of bed. Crossed the room. Unlocked the door.

The connecting room was lit by a single candle. Tarn was sitting at the table. Not sleeping. Not reading. Just sitting. Like he’d been waiting.

Maybe he had. The bond ran both ways now. If I could feel him through walls, he could feel me.

I sat across from him and spread my notes on the table. The candle threw shadows across the pages. His face was half-lit. The scar caught the light on one side. The unscarred side was in shadow. He looked like two men sitting in one chair.

“The poison is a sequence,” I said. “Five compounds, administered in order, each one targeting a different layer of the wolf-bond. The spacing is precise. The dosing is exact. Whoever designed this didn’t just know plants. They knew shifter physiology at the deepest level.”

He listened. He always listened to me the way he listened to nothing else. Like my words were the only sound in the room that mattered.

“Whoever made this compound has a healer’s training,” I said. “The same training my mother had.”

The candlelight flickered. His eyes found mine across the table. The gray was still. Deep. The surface calm that hid the current underneath.

“You’re telling me the person killing me was trained the same way your mother was.”

“Yes. And the person who killed her may be the same person poisoning you.”

The word sat between us. The conspiracy that had been circling since the death howl had just landed on the table, and neither of us could look away.

He stood. Slowly. Came around the table. Each step measured. Deliberate. The way he’d walked down the claiming line. The way he’d walked to my greenhouse glass. Except now there was no glass between us. No courtyard. No locked door. No table.

He stopped in front of me. Close. Closer than the claiming. Closer than the healing sessions. Close enough that the heat from his body reached my skin through the thin fabric of what I was wearing and I realized with a jolt that I’d come to him in my nightclothes. That I’d unlocked the door and crossed the room in bare feet and a sleep shirt and hadn’t even thought about it.

The bond had brought me here. My mind had just followed.

His scent filled the space between us. Woodsmoke. Pine. The iron underneath, fainter now than it had been a week ago. My treatments were working. His wolf was closer to the surface than it had been since I’d first smelled him through the glass. I could feel the second heartbeat through the bond without touching him. Stronger. Steadier. Reaching.

“If I ask you to heal me fully,” he said, “the bond will deepen. It won’t be something either of us can walk away from.”

His voice was low. Rough. The same voice that had said my name through clenched teeth when his hand hovered at my jaw. The same voice that had said “the worst symptom I have isn’t the poison” and walked out of my greenhouse.

“The full treatment means sustained contact,” he said. “Hours. My wolf will bond to you permanently. What you’re feeling now will become something else entirely.”

“I know what it will become.”

“Do you?” He lifted his hand. Not to my face. To my hair. His fingers stopped an inch away. I could feel the heat of them against my temple. The same almost-touch from the greenhouse, except now it was three in the morning and I was in my nightclothes and every wall I’d built was collapsing into the space between his fingertips and my skin.

“It will become irreversible,” he said. “You need to understand that before you agree. Once the bond completes, there’s no going back. Not for my wolf. Not for yours, if you have one. Not for us.”

I looked at him. The son of the man who killed my mother. The Alpha whose heartbeat lived inside my ribs. The man whose grief had cracked me open and whose fear had made me promise to save him on a greenhouse floor.

The man whose hand was an inch from my hair and trembling with the effort of not closing the distance.

I should say no. I should step back. I should lock the door and manage the treatment from a clinical distance the way I’d been telling everyone I could.

But the linden blossom was blooming outside the door I’d left unlocked. The bond was humming so loud I could hear it in my teeth. And his wolf’s heartbeat was reaching toward me through the dark the way it had been reaching since the first time I pressed my palms against his skin.

“I know,” I said.

And I didn’t step back.