005

Rae’s POV

Neither of us moved.

The room had gone, the kind of quiet that sits on our skin. Killian was still gripping the doorframe, his knuckles pale against the wood, and I was still holding my own chest like I could push whatever had just happened back inside and make it disappear.

It didn’t disappear.

The bond was there. Settled into me like it had always belonged, which was the part that scared me the most. Not the suddenness of it or even the fact that it had happened at all. But how natural it felt. Like a key sliding into a lock that had been waiting for years.

I pulled my hands away from my chest slowly.

Killian straightened up. His face had gone back to what it usually was… controlled, unreadable… but not completely. There was something underneath it now that hadn’t been there before. Something he was working to keep still.

I knew because I was doing the same thing.

And then it came. The second wave.

It was like the cramps that had torn through me earlier. This was quieter and more dangerous. A pull that started low in my stomach and moved upward, warm and slow, like the first drink of something strong after a long, cold ride. My eyes dropped to his hands on the doorframe. The lines of his jaw. The way his chest was rising and falling faster than it should have been for a man who was just standing there.

I yanked my gaze back to the ceiling.

It’s the bond, I told myself. That’s all it is. Your body doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and fake.

But then I made the mistake of looking at him again.

His eyes were on my mouth.

His throat moved. A slow, visible swallow, like he was trying to get something under control. His chest was doing the same thing mine was, lifting and dropping in a rhythm that had nothing to do with calmness.

The pull sharpened.

I pressed my back into the mattress and looked away hard. I had no room for this, especially not now, when I was lying in a strange bed in a strange house with dried blood on my collar and a mate bond I hadn’t asked for sitting inside my chest like a lit match.

There was no space in me for anything soft.

The door opened.

Maya came in carrying a small clay cup with steam rising from it. She moved the way she always seemed to, unhurried and certain, like the room rearranged itself quietly around her. She didn’t comment on the silence or the tension that was still sitting between Killian and me.

She just set the cup on the table beside me and pressed two fingers to the inside of my wrist.

I kept my eyes forward.

Killian moved to the far wall and crossed his arms.

I could still feel him looking at me even when I wasn’t looking at him. The bond made that worse, made me aware of exactly where he was standing like I was being aware of a heat source in a cold room.

Maya’s eyes went inward the way they did when she was reading something beneath the surface. I watched her face and waited.

When she looked up, her expression was careful.

“The poison is still there,” she said.

My stomach dropped. “How much of it?

“Very little,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it will fade easily, especially with how deep it went.” She picked her words slowly. “The bond has begun pulling it out but this process will take time. Your body has been fighting this for months without knowing it. It needs to recover from that first before it can do anything else.”

“How long am I going to be lying here,” I said.

“I can’t give you an exact time,” she said. “Everyone heals differently. And the ritual itself has taken a lot from you. Your system is working on two things at once right now.”

I hated that her answer, how sincere she sounded. I hated lying on that bed, the ceiling, and the helplessness that I couldn’t argue my way out of.

But underneath the frustration, something else was already moving. A thought, slow and deliberate.

If I was going to face Colt, if I was going to dismantle everything he had built around his lies, I needed to be able to stand up without the room spinning. I needed my wolf back, sharp and present. I needed my hands steady.

That meant I had to be patient and I must learn how to be good at it.

“When will she be strong enough to move around?” Killian asked from across the room.

“I don’t know,” Maya said again. “What I do know is that pushing it will set her back further.” She gave me a look that said she already knew what I was thinking. “Rest is not optional, Rae… it is what you need at the moment.”

She gathered her things, picked up the empty spot where the cup had been, and walked out without further ceremony.

The room went quiet again.

I stared at the far wall, suddenly very aware that it was just the two of us again, and that the pull hadn’t gone anywhere just because Maya had been in the room. It had just waited. Patient in a way I wasn’t.

I wished he would leave.

I didn’t say it. But I thought it loud enough that part of me expected him to hear it.

He didn’t leave.

Then the door opened again, but this time it wasn’t Maya.

A woman stepped in first. Tall, with close-cropped hair and a jaw set like someone who had already decided how they felt about everything in the room. Behind her came a man, broader, quieter, with a watchful kind of stillness that reminded me faintly of Killian.

The woman’s eyes found me and stopped there. Something moved across her face. Not hostility exactly. More like the decision not to say what she was actually thinking.

“We need a word,” she said to Killian. “Outside, please.”

The man… Ethan, I noticed from the look that passed between them… gave a short nod.

They stepped into the hallway.

Killian followed, pulling the door until it sat almost closed behind him.

Almost.

I lay still and kept my breathing even.

The thing about years of running, surviving spaces where a wrong move meant a shallow grave, was that you learned to listen like your life depended on it. Because it usually did. My training hadn’t left me, even if everything else had.

Their voices dropped. I caught every word anyway.

The woman, Liah, said there was a spy. That someone inside this territory was feeding information back to Iron Hollow, to Colt, and that the timing of my arrival was not something she was willing to call a coincidence. Ethan agreed without hesitation. Said that until they knew for certain, I was a risk they couldn’t afford to treat like anything else.

Then Killian’s voice, low and even.

“That’s true, we are not to make mistakes this time.” He agreed.

I closed my eyes and let that land.

Five years. Five years of making myself smaller, quieter, useful, and invisible, telling myself that the exhaustion was normal and the distance was just how things were. Five years of not seeing what was right in front of me.

And now I was lying in a stranger’s house while men I didn’t know voted on whether I was worth keeping alive.

I was so tired of being the thing that people decided about.

The footsteps came back.

The door opened and Killian walked back in alone.

I watched him cross the room and stop near the foot of the bed.

“Your people don’t trust me,” I said.

“They’re careful,” he said.

I laughed. Small and dry. “No.” I looked at him directly. “That’s not what it seems like.” I held his gaze and kept my voice flat. “It’s you, Killian. You’re the one who doesn’t trust me.”

He said nothing.

“For your information,” I said, “I heard every word.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​