Chapter 6 - Bron

Bron

Rejection doesn't feel like heartbreak. I want to be clear about that, because every story I ever heard growing up made it sound like heartbreak, like something soft and sad you cry about in private. It's not that. It's like getting gutted.

The second the words leave her mouth, something inside my chest just rips. Not metaphorically. I actually feel it tear, deep under my ribs, right where the bond's been burning since the second I saw her across that ballroom, and my knees nearly buckle right there in front of Adrien Conrad and his security and my own fiancée standing three feet away watching it happen.

I don't fall. I refuse to give him that. But I can't speak either. I just stand there while she turns and walks out the door, and every step she takes away from me feels like something's being pulled out of my chest by the root.

"Well." Adrien's voice cuts through the ringing in my ears, satisfied in a way that makes me want to put my fist through the wall behind him. "That resolves things nicely, doesn't it?”

I don't answer him. I can't. I'm too busy trying to breathe through the hole she just left in my chest.

"Alpha Ashborn." He steps closer, and I can feel Serena watching me too, arms still crossed, face unreadable. "I trust we can put tonight's unpleasantness behind us now. A moment of confusion. Nothing more."

Something in me wants to grab him by the throat. I don't. I've spent my whole life not doing the thing I want to do, and right now that training is the only thing keeping this room from ending in blood.

"Get out of my study," I say instead, and my voice comes out wrong, rough, nothing like the voice I use to run a pack.

"Excuse me?” He says in confusion.

"You heard me." I finally look at him, and whatever's on my face makes even Adrien Conrad take half a step back. "Get out. Take your security. Take your daughter. We'll discuss the treaty tomorrow, when I'm not standing here bleeding from something you don't understand."

"I understand rejection when I see it," he says, cold now, no more satisfaction. "The bond is broken. There's nothing left to discuss."

"Then you understand nothing." The words come out before I decide to say them, low and furious. "Get out."

He goes. Serena follows without a word, one last unreadable look thrown over her shoulder before the door shuts behind them, and then it's just me, alone in my father's study, my hand pressed flat against my ribs like that's going to do anything at all to stop what's happening under my skin.

It doesn't stop. If anything, it gets worse over the next hour, a slow, grinding ache that settles in and doesn't move, like something in my chest decided to just stay broken instead of healing clean. My wolf's gone quiet again, but it's a different quiet than before. Before, it was waiting. Now it feels like something curled up around a wound, refusing to move, refusing to let me forget for even a second what just happened.

Ronan finds me an hour later, still standing in the same spot, still pressed up against the window like I've been carved out of the same stone as the house.

"Hey." He shuts the door behind him, careful, none of his usual noise. "I heard. Everybody's heard, probably, by now."

"Did you find her?” I ask.

"I was looking." He rubs the back of his neck, and I can tell from his face there's more he's not saying yet. "I got about halfway through the staff records when your mother apparently beat me to it."

"My mother." That lands strange, even through the ache. "What does she have to do with any of this?"

"That's the thing I don't have an answer for." Ronan's watching me carefully now, the way you watch something that might be about to break. “Bron. You look like hell."

"I feel like hell.” I let out.

"About the rejection?” Ronan asks.

"Yeah."

"How bad?” He asks. I don’t think we have ever met anyone who had been rejected before, not from our generation at least. A mate bond is not something you find every day.

I don't answer that honestly, because the honest answer is bad enough that saying it out loud feels like it might make it worse, might make it real in a way it isn't yet if I just keep standing here not talking about it.

"She didn't mean it," I say instead.

Ronan's quiet for a second. "You sure about that? Because from what I heard, she said it pretty clearly."

"She said it to protect me. Adrien was standing right there threatening a war, and she…” I stop, because saying it out loud makes something in my chest twist harder. "She did the math faster than I did. She figured out that if she didn't say those words, I was going to stand in that room and let him declare war rather than let go of her first."

"Would you have?” He asks.

"Yes."

He doesn't look surprised by that, which somehow makes it worse. "Okay. So what now?"

"Now I find her,” I say.

"Bron." His voice goes careful again. "She rejected the bond. In front of witnesses. That's not something you can just walk back because you want to."

"I don't care what it's not supposed to be."

"You should care. You know what a rejection is supposed to do, right? To her, not just you. It's not just pain. It's supposed to be final. If you go chasing her down now, if you try to force this back open…”

"I'm not forcing anything." My voice comes out sharper than I mean it. "I just need to know she's safe. That's it. That's all I'm asking for tonight."

Ronan studies me for a long moment, and whatever he sees in my face makes him nod slowly, dropping the argument. "Okay. I'll find out where she lives. Staff housing, probably, on the east side of the property. I'm not promising anything beyond that."

"That's all I need."

He heads for the door, then stops, hand on the handle, the way he always does when he's got one more thing to say and hasn't decided if he's going to say it.

"For what it's worth," he says, "I don't think it's really broken."

"What?"

"The bond. You're standing there in more pain than I've ever seen you in, over a girl whose full name we still don't even have, and you're not talking about the treaty, or your father, or Conrad's threats. You're talking about finding her. That doesn't sound like something that's over to me."

He leaves before I can answer, which is probably smart, because I don't have an answer. I just have the ache under my ribs, steady and deep, and the memory of her face right before she turned and walked out that door, not triumphant, not relieved. Wrecked. Like saying those words cost her as much as hearing them cost me.

My father finds me twenty minutes later, and for once he doesn't lecture me. He just stands in the doorway, studying my face with an expression I can't read, something almost like approval underneath the usual coldness.

"I heard she rejected you," he says.

"You heard right."

"Good." He says it simply, like it's just a fact, like he's not standing in front of a son who's currently bleeding out from the inside. "That's the smartest thing that's happened all night. Let it heal clean, Bron. Don't go looking for her. Don't make this worse than it needs to be.” I don't answer him. "Bron."

"I heard you,” I say, and he watches me a moment longer, something calculating behind his eyes, and then he nods once, sharp, and leaves without another word, like he's decided the conversation went exactly the way he needed it to.

The second the door shuts, I press my hand back against my ribs and let myself feel the whole weight of what just happened, alone, finally, without anyone watching.

It doesn't feel healed. It doesn't feel like it's healing at all.

It feels like something's still there, faint and stubborn, refusing to let go even though she said the words that were supposed to sever it completely. A thread instead of a rope. Thin enough to almost miss.

But not gone.

And somewhere out there tonight, in a staff housing block on the east side of a property I own and barely know, there's a girl with silver-gray eyes who just tore both our chests open to save my life.

I don't care what my father thinks healed means.

I'm not done with her. Not even close.