Chapter 2: The News (Amara’s POV)

The car rolled out of the parking garage and into the grey afternoon, but I wasn’t seeing any of it.

He has a girlfriend.

The words echoed inside my skull, bouncing off the walls of everything I’d built over the last five years. Every all-nighter. Every textbook. Every moment I’d told myself that the sacrifice would be worth it, that he’d be there when I got back, that absence would make the bond stronger.

Maya drove with both hands on the wheel, her knuckles still white. She kept glancing at me like I was a bomb waiting to go off. Maybe I was.

“Amara,” she said carefully, “I know this isn’t how you pictured today going.”

I let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sob. “You think?”

We hit a red light. The rain streaked across the windshield in rivulets, distorting the familiar streets of my hometown into something unrecognizable. I’d dreamed about this drive so many times. The way the trees would arch over the road. The way the pack territory would feel like a warm blanket settling over my shoulders. I’d imagined Maya chattering about nothing, both of us singing along to bad music, the anticipation building with every mile.

Not this. Never this.

“Tell me everything,” I said. My voice was flat. Clinical. The voice I used when I had to dissect something unpleasant. “From the beginning.”

Maya hesitated. The light turned green. She pressed the gas too hard, and the car lurched forward.

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

I remembered that night. I’d been exhausted, running on four hours of sleep and pure caffeine, and I’d called Maya just to hear her voice. She’d put me on speaker, and I’d said hi to half the pack. I’d asked about Damon. Maya had said he was fine. Just fine.

She’d lied.

“Valerie had just broken up with that guy from the Riverside Pack,” Maya continued. “The one who cheated on her. She was at the bonfire too, and she was… a mess. Crying into her beer. The whole pathetic thing.”

I closed my eyes. I could see it. Valerie, beautiful even in tears, surrounded by sympathetic wolves and Damon, who couldn’t stand to see anyone in pain, who’d spent his whole life fixing broken things.

“He went over to comfort her,” Maya said quietly. “Just to talk. You know how he is. How he was. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“But it became something.”

“It became something.” Maya’s voice tightened. “They started hanging out. Then they were together and then, about eighteen months ago, they started dating and they’ve been dating for 2 years now.”

I’d spent that night in the hospital, holding the hand of a dying patient. I’d thought of Damon. I’d sent him a message, happy moon, old friend and he’d never replied.

Now I knew why. He’d been too busy sinking his teeth into someone else’s throat.

“She’s not good for him, Amara.” Maya’s voice was fierce now, defensive on my behalf. “Everyone knows it. Valerie Cross, she’s been with half the unmated males in the pack. Probably some of the mated ones too, if the rumors are true. She’s notorious. She doesn’t care about him. She cares about having the biggest, baddest wolf on her arm, and Damon is exactly that.”

Valerie Cross.

The name hit me like a punch to the sternum. I knew Valerie. Everyone knew Valerie. She was the kind of wolf who wore too much perfume and laughed too loud at her own jokes. She’d been two years ahead of me in school, and she’d made my life miserable for no reason other than that I existed. She’d called me mouse because I was quiet. She’d spread a rumor that I’d slept with a teacher to get a good grade. She’d once poured her drink on my head at a pack party and called it an accident.

And now she had my mate.

I pressed my palm flat against the car window. The glass was cold. I wished it would freeze the anger building in my chest.

“Maybe it’s not serious,” Maya said weakly. “Maybe it’s just… a phase. Wolves make mistakes, right? He’ll realize what he’s missing.”

I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide, hopeful, desperate to give me something to hold onto.

“Maya.” My voice was gentle, even though everything inside me was screaming. “He is dating her. In front of the whole pack. That’s not a phase. That’s a bond.”

Maya’s face crumpled. “I know. I know. I just, I hate this for you. You waited for him. You waited.”

I did.

That was the part that burned the worst.

I’d had offers over the last five years. Other wolves. Humans, too. A charming paramedic who’d brought me coffee every shift for three months. A quiet beta from a neighboring territory who’d scented the mate bond on me and backed off respectfully. Even a fellow resident who’d asked me out so many times that HR had to get involved.

I’d said no to all of them. Every single one because I’d made a promise to myself, in the back of that taxi driving me to the airport five years ago. I’d pressed my forehead against the window, the same way I had on the plane today and I’d whispered it into the dark.

I’ll come back for you, Damon. Just wait. Just wait for me and he hadn’t.

“Why her?” I asked, and my voice cracked on the last word. “Why her?”

Maya reached over and grabbed my hand. Her fingers were warm. Mine were ice.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he thought you weren’t coming back. Maybe she just… was there and you weren’t.”

Those words landed like shards of glass in my chest.

You weren’t there.

I chose to leave. I chose medical school. I chose the city and the hospital and the career. I chose all of it over him.

But I’d thought, I’d hoped that the bond would be enough. That he’d feel it the way I felt it, an invisible tether pulling us together across state lines and time zones. That he’d know, somehow, that every late night in the library was for us. Every exam I aced. Every patient I saved. Every single step forward was a step toward coming home to him.

I’d been a fool. The car turned onto my parents’ street. The trees were taller than I remembered. Mrs. Patterson’s rose bushes had taken over her front yard. And there, at the end of the cul-de-sac, was the house I’d grown up in. The blue shutters needed painting. The porch swing creaked in the wind.

It looked exactly the same. I felt completely different.

“Pull over,” I said.

“Amara, we’re literally two houses away”

“Pull over, Maya.”

She obeyed, killing the engine in front of the Harrisons’ house. The rain pattered against the roof, filling the silence between us.

I stared at my childhood home through the windshield. Somewhere inside, my mother was probably stirring a pot of soup. My father was in his workshop, listening to old records. They had no idea I was a hundred feet away, falling apart in a friend’s beat-up sedan.

“I waited five years,” I said quietly. “Five years of telling myself that it would be worth it. That he’d take one look at me and remember. That the bond would snap into place and everything would make sense.”

Maya didn’t speak. She just held my hand tighter.

“Did he even think about me?” I asked. “Did he wonder where I was? Did he ever” My voice broke. I couldn’t finish.

Maya pulled me into a hug across the center console. Her shoulder was bony, and she smelled like vanilla and sadness, and I let myself cry for exactly thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of ugly, silent sobs that shook my whole body.

Then I pulled back. Wiped my face with the back of my hand. Took a breath.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?” Maya looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

“I’m not going to fall apart. Not yet. I came back for a reason. I came back to see my parents and to be a doctor for this pack and to” I swallowed. “And to figure out what I want. Just because he made his choice doesn’t mean I stop living.”

Maya’s expression shifted from pity to something like pride. “That’s my girl.”

I almost believed it.

We sat in silence for another minute. The rain began to lighten, turning from a downpour into a soft drizzle. The kind of rain that always felt like home.

And then I felt it.

A tug. Low in my chest, just beneath my ribs. A warmth that spread through my veins like honey, sweet and aching and impossible.

My wolf lifted her head.

“Him, she whispered. He’s close”.

The mate bond.

I’d spent five years trying to ignore it, to dull it with distance and distraction. In the city, surrounded by strangers and skyscrapers, it had been a faint pulse. A reminder that something was missing but not something I could touch.

Now it roared to life like a fire fed by oxygen.

He was here. In this town. On this pack territory. Close enough that if I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the shape of him. The broad shoulders. The rough hands. The golden eyes that had haunted my dreams for half a decade.

“No, I told my wolf. Not ours anymore. Remember? He’s hers”.

My wolf whined.

Not a metaphorical whine. A real one, low and mournful, vibrating through my chest until it escaped my lips as a sound I couldn’t control.

Maya heard it. Her eyes went wide.

“Amara? What’s wrong?”

I couldn’t answer. My wolf was pacing inside me, restless and wounded, pulling me toward something I couldn’t have. The bond hummed in my blood, a song I’d memorized long ago, and every note said find him, find him, find him.

He was close.

So close.

I pressed my hand to my chest, over my heart, as if I could physically hold the bond in place. Keep it from dragging me out of this car and across town to wherever he was. To whatever he was doing. With her.

“Amara.” Maya’s voice was sharp now, worried. “Talk to me.”

“I can feel him,” I whispered.

The words hung in the air between us. Heavy. Terrible. True.

Maya’s face softened into something heartbreakingly gentle. “Oh, honey.”

My wolf whined again. Louder this time. A sound of pure, animal grief that I couldn’t suppress no matter how hard I tried.

I was a doctor. I was twenty-three years old. I had saved lives and held hands while they slipped away. I had built myself into someone strong and capable and whole but none of that mattered to my wolf.

All she knew was that her mate was near and he didn’t belong to her anymore. The rain stopped. The clouds began to part, thin rays of sunlight breaking through the grey and somewhere in this town, Damon Blackwood was living a life that didn’t include me.

My wolf whined a third time.

And I let her.

Because for the first time in five years, I didn’t know how to be strong anymore.