Chapter Five

|| Mira||

"Mate."

Anya didn't scream it. She howled it.

The sound tore through me from the inside, raw and ancient and so full of wanting, it knocked the breath out of me.

It was the sound a Lycan makes when it finds the thing it has been running toward its entire life without knowing what it was running toward.

The bond snapped into place like a lock finding its key, hard and sudden without warning.

The room became too small and the air was too thick with tension. Kael was right there, his hand still around my wrist, and every instinct I had lurched toward him before I could stop it.

I pressed my hand to my heart and tried to breathe through it as Kael dropped my wrist like it had burned him.

He staggered back a step and ran his hand on his face, and started pacing.

“Shit.” he hissed, moving like a man who had been caught off guard, and for one raw, unguarded second his face showed everything. The shock. The recognition.

His wolf wasn't making it easy for him. It was pushing forward behind his eyes, turning them amber, wanting something his human half was already preparing to refuse.

A low growl tore from his throat. Then his lips thinned out and the mask smoothly slid back into place, like it had never slipped at all.

We stared at each other across the space he'd put between us. The bond tugged under my skin, warm and insistent and perfectly unbothered by the situation it had chosen to manifest in.

Then everything started clicking into place. The pull at the club. The recognition I couldn't explain. The way Anya had gone electric the second he sat down, like every cell in her had suddenly found north.

It had been the bond the whole time.

Kael was my mate.

No.

Absolutely not. Not him. The man who had drugged me and chained me and mapped out my destruction like a business plan could not possibly be my mate.

The Moon Goddess wouldn't. She couldn't be this cruel, glancing down at my life and deciding I hadn't been broken enough yet.

She could pick anyone else. Why him?

But who was I kidding, the bond didn't ask. It never did. It just happened, and then you had to live inside it, and apparently this was what I was living inside now.

Kael shook his head.

"You are not my mate."

His voice came out rough. Cracked at the edges, like the words had cost him something he hadn't budgeted for.

"Don't," he added.

"I'm not doing anything," I whispered.

"Don't look at me like that."

I understood what he meant. I could feel it myself. Anya pushing forward, wanting his wolf to see her, the bond pulling my eyes toward him without asking my permission first.

He turned away. Both hands went to the back of his neck, head dropped, and for one unguarded moment his shoulders fell. He didn't look dangerous. Didn't look cold.

He looked gutted. Like a man who'd just had the ground yanked out from under a plan he'd been standing on for years.

Then he turned back and whatever had surfaced was gone, buried under six feet of self-control and something that looked a lot like anger, at me, at the bond, at the Moon Goddess, at everything.

Join the club, I thought.

"This changes nothing." His voice was flat and final. "I don't care what you felt. I don't care what the bond says.”

“Kael—”

“ And I sure as hell don’t care what the Moon Goddess wants.”

"Kael —"

"You are still here for one reason. That hasn't changed."

"I’m —"

"You are a mistake."

The words landed like a hand across the face, clean and hard, and exactly aimed where it would hurt.

"This bond is a mistake."

Anya went silent.

Then she howled.

It was not the triumphant sound from moments ago. This was grief in its purest form, rising from somewhere so deep in me I felt it in my back teeth. The sound of a Lycan who had recognized her other half and watched him turn away in the same breath. I couldn't contain it and I didn't try. I let her howl until the sound filled every corner of me and then slowly, slowly faded into something quieter and more permanent.

An ache that I already knew wouldn't leave.

"You're a Sloan," he continued. "The sister of the men who murdered my family. That is all you will ever be to me." His eyes dropped to the space between us with a look that said he meant every word. "This means nothing."

The tears came before I could hold them in. I hated them. Hated that they came now, hated that he was standing right there to see them.

"Cry all you want, princess."

His words were cruel than him holding a knife to my neck.

"It changes nothing."

He walked out. The bolt slid home and the sound of it settled over the room like another set of chains.

The warmth was still there. Still pulling, still reaching toward the man who had just told me I was nothing — because bonds didn't have the sense to take a hint.

I pressed my hands flat against the mattress and breathed.

Anya was still inside me. I could feel her, finally, warm and present after hours of nothing. But she was weak and grieving something she’d barely been allowed to find before it was taken from her.

I sat with her in it. Neither of us had anything left to say.

****

⸻

||Kael||

Mirabel Sloan was my fucking mate.

The sister of the two men I’d spent four years rebuilding myself for the sole purpose of destroying was my fated. The thought was almost funny. Almost.

I made it to the end of the hall. That was as far as I got before my back hit the wall and my legs decided they were done.

I stood there, both hands dragged over my face, lungs doing something I wouldn't call breathing, and tried to remember what it felt like to have a plan. A clear one. The kind I'd had four hours ago, before she'd looked at me with those eyes and the universe had decided to have a sense of humor.

Inside me, my wolf was not interested in my plan.

He was relentless. Shoving hard against every wall I was trying to hold, howling at me to turn around, go back, and open the door. He wanted to be with her and he wasn't confused about it. He didn't have competing priorities or four years of grief wrapped around a single consuming purpose.

He had one thought: Mine! And he wanted to act on it immediately.

"Fuck off," I told him.

The hallway absorbed the words.

He didn't.

That was the fundamental problem with wolves, they recognized what was theirs and they moved toward it. No master plan. No history. No two graves they'd stood over and made promises at. Just the bond, and the pull, and a complete absence of anything resembling self-preservation.

I was not my wolf. I held more power than he did in human form.

I forced a breath. Then another. Made myself stand straight instead of pressing into the wall like it was the only thing keeping me vertical.

I was twenty-two when they killed Rylan. My little brother. The boy who used to follow me everywhere like a shadow that had decided it had opinions, who thought I could fix anything, who I had promised — actually promised, out loud, with my hand on his shoulder — to protect.

I hadn't protected him.

I had buried him six feet deep.

And then eleven months later, my father. After that I hadn't built a life — I'd built a purpose with only one goal in mind: make them understand. Make them feel it. Make them watch something they loved disappear the way I'd had to watch, and understand finally, in their bones, what they had done.

But the Moon Goddess had looked at all of that and decided to tie me to her.

To her of all people.

I thought about Mira's face when the bond hit. That stunned expression when something in her had recognized something in me. Then the tears, which she'd hated. I could tell she'd hated them. The way she'd looked at me with that fierce, furious embarrassment of someone who cries against their own will.

My chest did something I didn't have a name for. I didn't want a name for it.

Then her wolf had howled.

I felt it move through the bond like a current. Part grief and part fury. It was so rawly animal it hit my own wolf like a physical blow. He'd faltered and pressed forward, and made a sound in my throat. I'd had to clamp down on it before it got out.

I was still clamping down on it.

The bond was already making me pay for every word I'd said in that room. I could feel it throbbing beneath my ribs, sharpening every time I thought about her expression when I called her a mistake.

Good, I told myself. Pain was familiar. It was something I could withstand. Something I’d been living with for years.

I pushed off the wall and walked back to her door. I didn't go in. I just stood there — one hand flat against the wood without meaning to put it there — and listened. Her heartbeat was steady on the other side. She wasn't falling apart.

Of course she wasn't.

My wolf surfaced and huffed in annoyance at my thoughts.

"She's hurting." he announced.

"I know."

"She's alone."

"I'm aware."

"She's ours."

"She's not."

The denial came out sharper that time. Like volume was the same thing as truth.

The bond pulsed once in response. It was profound and sluggish and willful. Like a warning. Like it had heard me and found the whole thing faintly amusing.

I stepped back from the door. Repeated the words until they almost sounded real.

She is a means to an end. That is all she is.

I walked away. The bond ached with every step.

But I kept walking.