Gave No Choice - Cassia

Not the soft kind of regret. Not the kind that makes you wish you'd sent a letter or made that one last phone call. No. This was the kind of regret that gnawed at bone, lived in the bloodstream, never really let go.

I watched it tear through him, inch by inch. And I hated that part of me still cared.

“Move,” I said, quieter now, my voice scraping at the edges of my restraint.

“No.” One word. Flat and final. It hit like a slammed door.

“Kade...”

“You left.” The words cracked from his throat like something unhealed. His voice faltered, just enough to make me still. “You didn’t give me a chance.”

The weight of it hung between us, thick with everything we hadn’t said in five years. I didn’t rush to answer. I let the silence stretch, let his words hang like smoke in the air. Let them sink in and spoil.

Because he had the audacity to say that.

He had the gall to talk about chances.

“You didn’t give me a choice.” I didn’t yell it. The truth had a way of cutting cleaner when whispered. And it landed.

I saw it. That flicker—barely there. A flinch, quick and shallow. But it was real. And it was mine.

He tried to recover. Tried to speak, but the words tangled behind his teeth.

“I would’ve,”

“What?” My voice snapped, sharp as the break in my chest. “Fought for me?”

His mouth parted. No answer, because there wasn’t one. Because he hadn’t, not when it mattered.

And we both knew it.

“You rejected me in front of the entire pack, Kade.” My voice didn’t shake, but it rang too loud in the narrow hall, brittle and sharp and full of everything I hadn’t let myself say. “You stripped my title. My name. My place. You stood there, looked me in the eye, and called me unworthy like it meant nothing. Like I meant nothing.”

The word lodged like glass in my throat, but I forced it out anyway. Let it cut.

“What exactly would you have done after that?” I asked, and I let the word twist. “Alpha.”

His jaw locked. One muscle twitching in his cheek, grinding under skin stretched too tight. Then he leaned in. Not aggressive, close.

Close enough to feel the shift in the air. The way it thickened, crackled between us.

His breath hit my cheek. Warm, so goddamn familiar. I still remembered the way it used to turn molten against my skin, softer when he whispered my name, rougher when he...

No.

My hands balled into fists at my sides. I turned my head away.

Because I still wanted him.

Even now, after everything, my body remembered what it felt like to be held by him. Claimed by him. I hated it. Hated that he could still make me feel like I belonged to something.

To someone.

He didn’t touch me. But the heat between us throbbed, like the bond hadn’t fully died. Like it was just sleeping, waiting to be woken.

He stilled.

“I should hate you,” I said, quiet but vicious, the words catching on something raw in my chest.

“Then do it,” he said, low and rough and barely human. A challenge. A dare.

But we both knew I wouldn’t, not completely, maybe not even a little.

His hand dropped from the wall beside me like it burned to let go. Something in him wanted to stay right there, caging me in.

He stepped back, just enough for the pressure to ease. For the air between us to move again. For me to draw breath that didn’t feel like it was being stolen straight out of my lungs.

But even as I breathed, every inhale scraped against the ache I was trying to ignore. And he was still too close, still him.

I should’ve walked away.

Should’ve thrown his words back in his face, snapped something sharp and final and cutting. Should’ve turned my back and let the past stay buried beneath everything we didn’t say.

But I didn’t move.

The weight of him kept me rooted, his scent still clinging to my skin, his voice echoing too loudly in the spaces inside me I’d spent years trying to empty.

“I should put you in a separate wing,” he said, quiet now. That flat, disinterested tone he used when something mattered more than he wanted it to. When he was trying not to let it show.

“Then do it,” I shot back, my chin lifting as I forced my spine to stay straight, my gaze steady. Daring him to prove me wrong. To push me. To touch me. Anything.

“I want you close.”

The words hit harder than they had any right to.

My heart jolted, then slammed forward in a frenzied rhythm, wild and uneven. Panic, maybe. Or something worse. Something foolish. Like hope.

I didn’t know which terrified me more.

“Why?” The question came out sharper than I meant it to, but I didn’t take it back.

He didn’t answer right away. Not with the usual clipped dismissal or one of his smug, infuriating non-replies. His gaze shifted, but not to my mouth. Not to my throat. This time, his eyes didn’t linger on the parts of me he used to know.

They went somewhere else entirely.

Not around me.

Through me.

And then, as if he hadn’t meant to say it aloud, as if the thought had escaped his chest before he could catch it, he murmured, “They’re too quiet.”

My body went still. Every instinct I had snapped taut, spine locking, breath freezing mid-lung. “What?”

His eyes met mine again. Careful now, testing the weight of the floor beneath us.

“The kids,” he said slowly, and I could hear the way his voice changed. “They don’t act like pups.”

There was nothing I could do but hold his gaze, make my body lie better than my mouth could.

“They’ve been trained,” I said, every word deliberate. “To survive.”

His jaw worked once, twice. No outward reaction, but I felt the shift. Saw the tension settle into his shoulders. Not disbelief, older than that. Something with teeth.

“By who?”

The pause before I answered stretched longer than it should have.

“By me.”

That silence again. Full of what we’d lost, what we might’ve had. What he was starting to suspect, and what I couldn’t let him see.

For the first time since coming back, I wasn’t sure which one of us would survive it.

We stood in silence for a long moment, suspended in that narrow space where old wounds met unfinished business. The air between us was heavy, dense with everything we didn’t say. Everything we couldn’t afford to. Words crowded the back of my throat, aching to be released, but none of them made it past my lips.

And then finally, he stepped back.

“Keep them close,” he said. His voice was low. “Things are… shifting. I can feel it.”

I felt it too.

The slow churn of something ancient stirring beneath the surface. A ripple in the balance, pressure building in the air, subtle but undeniable, like the deep hum of a storm still too far away to see but close enough to make your skin itch.

Something was coming. And it would want blood.

Kade turned before I could answer, his boots making dull, measured thuds against the polished floor as he strode into the dim corridor. The shadows swallowed him quickly, but the imprint of him remained, etched into the air.

His shoulders were too rigid, his fists clenched too tight. He was unraveling, and trying like hell to hide it.

But I knew his scent. Knew how it changed when his thoughts turned sharp. And what he left behind in his wake wasn’t just confusion, it was recognition. A low, feral awareness he hadn’t caught up to yet, but it was rising inside him all the same.

The moment the door clicked shut behind him, I exhaled, but my pulse was still a war drum in my chest.

He didn’t know yet, but he was close. Closer than I wanted, closer than I feared.

I could feel it happening, the shift behind his eyes. The instinct kicking in, the primal part of him beginning to stir, ancient and male and unforgiving. He’d looked at them, but he hadn’t seen them.

But when he did?

When it finally clicked?

There’d be no going back.

No clean line between then and now.

No walls strong enough to keep what we’d buried from clawing its way out.