Chapter 5: The Decision (Damon’s POV)

The bathroom door clicks open.

I don’t move from the window and don’t turn around. My reflection stares back at me from the dark glass, my jaw locked, my hands shoved deep into my pockets so Valerie won’t see them shaking.

She padded across the room in that deliberate, soft way of hers. The way she always does when she knows she’s done something and wants to manage my reaction before it happens.

“Damon.” Her voice was honey over broken glass. “You’re upset with me.”

I let the silence stretch. Outside, the pack house grounds lay still under a bruised twilight sky. Somewhere beyond those trees, Amara was driving away. Or maybe she’d already reached the highway. Maybe she was already gone.

The thought carved something out of my chest.

“I’m not upset,” I said finally. My own voice sounded foreign. Flat. “I’m trying to understand.”

Valerie came up behind me. I felt her hand on my shoulder blade, light, tentative, the touch of someone who knew exactly how much pressure to apply. Two years with her, and she’d learned every weak spot I had.

“I did what I had to do,” she said.

I turned then.

She stood there in the dim light, her blonde hair loose over her shoulders, her blue eyes wide and glistening. The perfect picture of wounded innocence. She’d always been beautiful, that was never the question. Valerie turned heads the way the moon pulled tides. But standing there, fresh from humiliating my mate in front of half the pack, something about her looked different.

Sharper.

“She looked at you like you were hers,” Valerie whispered. A single tear slipped down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. Of course she didn’t. She wanted me to see it. “I had to set boundaries, Damon. You’re mine. We’ve built a life together. And she shows up out of nowhere, after two years of silence, and expects to just…”

“She didn’t expect anything.” The words came out rougher than I intended. “She came to talk. That’s all.”

Valerie’s face flickered. Just for a second. Something cold and quick beneath the surface, there and gone before I could name it.

Then she stepped into me, pressed her palms flat against my chest, and rested her forehead on my shoulder.

“You don’t understand because you’re not a woman,” she murmured. “I saw the way she looked at you. Like she still had a claim. Like the past two years didn’t happen. Like I didn’t happen.” Her fingers curled into my shirt. “I love you, Damon. I’ve stayed when everyone else left. I’ve held this pack together for you. And I will not let some ghost from your past waltz in and pretend she has any right to you.”

My wolf stirred, not in defense of Valerie and definitely not in comfort.

He was angry.

Not at Amara. At the hands on my chest. At the voice in my ear. He didn’t want her scent this close. He wanted, no needed something else entirely. The mate bond wasn’t just a whisper anymore. It was a roar. A primal, merciless scream in my blood that said wrong, wrong, this is wrong, she is not ours.

I closed my eyes and forced it down, breathed through the clawing inside my ribs.

Amara left.

She walked away. Two years ago, she looked me in the eyes and chose her freedom over us. Over me. She didn’t send word. Didn’t explain. Didn’t give me the chance to fight for her. She just vanished like smoke, and I spent six months convinced I was dying from the absence of her.

Valerie found me in that darkness and Valarie stayed.

Valerie held me when I couldn’t sleep. When the withdrawal from the bond felt like my veins were full of acid. She brought me food I didn’t ask for, sat in silence when I couldn’t speak, and slowly, painfully, she helped me rebuild something that resembled a life.

That has to mean something.

Does it? The thought was a knife between my ribs. Or did you just get tired of drowning and grab the first hand that reached for you?

I opened my eyes. Valerie was looking up at me now, her chin tilted, her expression soft and expectant. Waiting. She’d said her piece. Now she needed me to say mine. To choose her. To slam the door on Amara so definitively that even the memory of her couldn’t slip back through.

“Valerie.” I lifted my hand and cupped her face. Her skin was warm, familiar and safe. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The smile that broke across her face was radiant. She rose on her toes and kissed me, soft at first, then deeper, her fingers sliding into my hair. I let her. I kissed her back. I told myself that this was right. That this was what I wanted.

But my wolf went quiet, not peaceful, not content. Quiet the way a predator goes quiet before it strikes. Waiting. Biding its time. Knowing something I refused to acknowledge.

Later that night, Valerie fell asleep with her head on my chest. I stared at the ceiling and didn’t close my eyes.

Her breathing evened out. The pack house settled into that deep, creaking silence that only comes after midnight. And I lay there, paralyzed, as the mate bond screamed so loudly I was sure it would wake the dead.

She’s out there. The thought was a splinter I couldn’t dig out. She’s out there, and she’s hurting, and you let her walk away. You let Valerie…

I stopped that line of thinking cold.

Amara left. She made her choice. She doesn’t get to come back two years later and expect the world to stop spinning just because she finally decided to show up.

But the bond didn’t care about logic. It didn’t care about loyalty or history or the fact that I’d spent two years building something with another woman. The bond only knew one thing: mine. And right now, every instinct I had was screaming that mine was driving away from me, and I was lying here with someone else.

I slid out of bed without waking Valerie.

My feet moved on their own. Through the dark hallway, down the back stairs, out the kitchen door into the cold night air. The grass was wet with dew. The moon hung low and full, spilling silver light over everything.

I didn’t plan to shift but my bones had other ideas. The change ripped through me faster than it ever had, like my wolf had been waiting for this moment, coiled and desperate, and the second my bare feet touched the earth outside pack territory, he took over. Muscle and sinew rearranged themselves in a cascade of heat and power. My senses exploded outward. The world became scent and sound and instinct and then I was running.

Not toward anything. Away.

Away from the pack house. Away from Valerie’s perfume still clinging to my skin. Away from the bed where I’d just spent the night pretending I didn’t feel like I was drowning.

My paws tore up the ground. The forest blurred past trees, ferns, the dark ribbon of the creek, all of it meaningless. I ran until my lungs burned. Until my muscles screamed. Until the miles stacked up behind me like a debt I’d never repay.

I didn’t stop until I was ten miles from the pack border, maybe more. I stopped because the scent hit me like a wall.

Hers.

Not a trail. Not a fading echo from earlier tonight.

Fresh.

Amara had come this way. Recently. Within the hour. She hadn’t taken the highway. She’d gone into the woods. Alone and in the dark.

My wolf surged forward, dragging my nose to the ground. The scent was everywhere, her skin, her hair, that impossible sweetness that had haunted my dreams for two years. She’d passed through here. Walked right through this clearing. And from the way the scent lingered, she hadn’t been running.

She’d been standing still and waiting.

For what?

For me?

The thought cracked something open in my chest. I lifted my head and scanned the tree line. Nothing moved. No sound but the wind and my own ragged breathing. But I could feel her. The bond was a live wire between us, humming with proximity. She wasn’t far.

Go, my wolf snarled. Find her. Now.

I took one step, then another. Then I stopped, my claws digging into the soft earth, and I forced myself to remember every reason I couldn’t.

Valerie.

The pack.

Two years of history.

A promise I’d made, even if I’d never said the words out loud.

Amara left.

I repeated it like a prayer. Like a curse. Like the only thing keeping me from tearing through these trees and never looking back.

Amara left. She chose to leave. You chose to stay. You chose Valerie. That has to mean something.

I turned around.

Every step back toward the pack house felt like walking through fire. The bond pulled at me, physically pulled, a hook in my sternum dragging me back toward her. My wolf fought me with every stride. He didn’t understand loyalty. He didn’t understand obligation. He only understood that our mate was close, and we were walking away from her again.

By the time I reached the pack house, dawn was breaking. I shifted back in the treeline, naked and shaking and covered in dirt. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling. My chest felt like someone had cracked my ribs open with their bare hands.

I stood there for a long time, watching the sun rise over the roof of the pack house. Then I went inside, showered the forest off my skin, and climbed back into bed beside Valerie.

She murmured something in her sleep and curled into me. I stared at the ceiling and told myself I’d made the right choice. I told myself that the mate bond would fade eventually. That it had to. That two years of distance had weakened it, and with time, it would become nothing more than a dull ache, a scar instead of an open wound.

I told myself that Valerie was enough, that love was a choice, not a curse, that I could learn to be happy with what I had, instead of destroying everything for what I’d lost.

I told myself all of these things and somewhere, deep in the woods behind the pack house, the wind shifted. Her scent drifted through the cracked window and my wolf howled.