Chapter 2: The News (Amara’s POV)

(Amara's POV)

The car rolled through the rain, and I wasn't seeing any of it.

He has a girlfriend.

The words bounced off the walls of everything I'd built in five years. Every all-nighter. Every textbook. Every time I'd told myself the sacrifice would be worth it, that he'd be waiting, that absence would only make the bond stronger like distance was something you could bank, interest accruing until the day you finally cashed it in.

Maya drove with both hands locked on the wheel, glancing at me every few seconds like I was a bomb that hadn't gone off yet. Maybe I was.

"Amara," she said carefully. "I know this isn't how you pictured today."

I made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a sob. "You think?"

We hit a red light. Rain streaked the windshield, distorting my hometown into something unrecognizable, the trees, the gas station, the church with the crooked steeple, all of it smeared into shapes I used to know by heart. I'd dreamed about this exact drive so many times over the years. The trees arching over the road. Maya singing badly to the radio. The anticipation building with every mile until it turned into something warm and unbearable.

Not this. Never this.

"Tell me everything," I said, flat and clinical, the voice I used to dissect something unpleasant without letting it dissect me back. "From the beginning."

Maya hesitated. The light turned green. She pressed the gas too hard and the car lurched forward, like even the vehicle wanted an excuse not to have this conversation.

"It started about two years ago. You were in your third year of residency, I remember because you sent me that photo of you in scrubs with the coffee IV drip joke, and I showed it to literally everyone at the bonfire that night."

I remembered that call. Four hours of sleep and pure caffeine, phoning Maya just to hear a voice that didn't belong to a patient or an attending. She'd put me on speaker and I'd said hi to half the pack through a bad connection. I'd asked about Damon. She'd said he was fine. Just fine.

She'd lied to me for two years.

"Valerie had just broken up with some guy from Riverside Pack. The one who cheated on her. She was a mess that night crying into her beer, the whole dramatic thing, an audience and everything."

I closed my eyes and could see it without trying. Valerie, beautiful even wrecked, surrounded by wolves eager to comfort her. And Damon, who had never once in his life been able to watch someone hurting without trying to fix it, even when someone didn't deserve fixing.

"He went over to comfort her," Maya said quietly. "Just to talk. You know how he is."

"And it became something."

"It became something." Her voice tightened around the words like she hated each one individually. "They started hanging out. Then they were together. Then, about eighteen months ago, I was officially dating. They've been together for two years now."

Two years ago I'd been sitting in a hospital hallway at three in the morning, holding a dying patient's hand because her own family hadn't made it in time, and afterward I'd texted him, happy moon, old friend into a silence that never answered.

Now I understood exactly why.

"She's not good for him, Amara." Maya's voice sharpened, fierce and defensive on my behalf. "Everyone knows it. Valerie Cross has been with half the unmated males in this pack, and probably some of the mated ones too if you believe the rumors. She doesn't care about Damon. She cares about having the biggest wolf in the territory on her arm, and he's exactly that."

Valerie Cross.

The name hit like a fist to the sternum. I knew Valerie. Everyone did. Two years ahead of me in school, she'd made my life miserable simply because I existed in a hallway she considered hers called me mouse for being quiet, spread a rumor that I'd slept with a teacher for a grade, once "accidentally" poured an entire drink over my head at a pack bonfire in front of thirty people and laughed about it for a week.

And now she has my mate.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold window, willing the glass to freeze something in me before it caught fire.

"Maybe it's not serious," Maya offered, weak and hopeful. "Maybe it's a phase. Maybe he'll wake up one day and realize what he's missing."

"He's dating her in front of the entire pack, Maya. That's not a phase. That's a bond."

Her face crumpled. "I know. I hate this for you. You waited for him."

I did.

That was the part that burned worse. I'd had offers, over five years, a paramedic who brought me coffee every shift for three months straight, a beta who scented the mate bond on me and backed off out of respect before I'd even had to say anything, a fellow resident who asked me out so many times HR eventually had to get involved. I'd said no to every single one, because in the back of a taxi to the airport five years ago, forehead pressed to the glass exactly the way it was now, I'd whispered a promise into the dark that nobody else heard. I'll come back for you, Damon. Just wait.

He hadn't.

"Why her?" My voice cracked down the middle. "Why her, of all people?"

Maya reached over and took my hand. Hers were warm. Mine were ice, the kind of cold that has nothing to do with weather.

"I don't know," she said honestly, which somehow hurt more than a lie would have. "Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he thought you weren't coming back. Maybe she was just there, and you weren't."

You weren't there.

I'd chosen medical school. I'd chosen the city, the hospital, the career I was so proud of I sometimes forgot to be lonely inside it. I'd chosen all of it over him and told myself the bond would hold anyway an invisible tether pulling us together across state lines and time zones, patient and unbreakable, and that he'd feel it exactly the way I did. Every late night in the library, every exam, every life I helped save was somehow a step back toward him too.

I'd been a fool. A brilliant, board-certified fool.

The car turned onto my parents' street. The trees were taller than I remembered. Mrs. Patterson's rose bushes had swallowed her entire front yard. And there, at the end of the cul-de-sac, sat the house I'd grown up in blue shutters needing paint, the porch swing still creaking faintly in the wind like it had never once stopped waiting for someone to sit in it. It looked exactly the same. I felt like a different person entirely.

"Pull over."

"Amara, we're literally two houses away"

"Pull over, Maya."

She killed the engine in front of the Harrisons' place. Rain drummed steadily on the roof, filling the silence where words should have been.

"I waited five years," I said quietly, watching the wipers go still mid-swipe. "Telling myself it would be worth it. That he'd take one look at me and just remember. That the bond would snap back into place like it never left."

Maya didn't speak. She just held my hand tighter, like grip strength alone could hold me together.

"Did he even think about me?" My voice broke before I could finish. "Did he wonder where I"

She pulled me into a hug across the center console before I could get the rest out. I let myself cry for exactly thirty seconds ugly, silent sobs that shook my whole body and then I pulled back, wiped my face with the heel of my hand, and took a breath deep enough to hurt.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?" Maya looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "That's it? Thirty seconds and okay?"

"I'm not going to fall apart. Not yet. I came back to see my parents, to be a doctor for this pack, to actually figure out what I want instead of just chasing a feeling I had when I was sixteen. Just because he made his choice doesn't mean I will stop living."

Her expression shifted from pity into something closer to pride. "That's my girl."

I almost believed it.

We sat another minute while the rain thinned into a drizzle, the kind that had always felt like home even when nothing else did.

And then I felt it.

A tug, low in my chest, beneath my ribs, warmth spreading through my veins like honey, sweet and aching and completely, infuriatingly impossible.

My wolf lifted her head. Him. He's close.

The mate bond. I'd spent five years dulling it with distance, and in the city it had shrunk down to a faint pulse, a reminder of something missing but always just out of reach. Now, on pack land, it roared back to life like a fire fed pure oxygen. He was here. Close enough that if I closed my eyes I could almost feel the shape of him, the broad shoulders, the rough hands, the gold eyes that had haunted five years of dreams I never told anyone about.

Not ours anymore, I told her. Remember? He's hers now.

My wolf whined a real sound, low and mournful, vibrating up through my chest until it slipped past my lips before I could stop it.

Maya's eyes went wide. "Amara? What's wrong?"

I couldn't answer. My wolf was pacing inside me, straining toward something I couldn't have, and every note of the bond sang the same two words on a loop. Find him. Find him.

"I can feel him," I whispered.

Maya's face went soft and heartbroken all at once. "Oh, honey."

My wolf whined again, louder, pure animal grief I couldn't suppress no matter how hard I tried to be a doctor about it, to be twenty-three and capable and whole. I had held hands while lives slipped quietly away. I had built myself into someone strong. None of that mattered to her. All she knew was that her mate was near, and he didn't belong to her anymore.

Somewhere in this town, Damon Blackwood was living a life that didn't include me.

My wolf whined a third time.

And for the first time in five years, I let her.