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The wolf howls. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to close the distance, to hold her, to press my mouth against the scar and let the bond flood her with the calm and the safety and the love that I feel for her so strongly it’s like standing in the middle of a fire. But the man knows that the last thing she needs is more of my will imposed on her body.
“Take the car downstairs,” I say. “The driver will take you wherever you want to go.”
She picks up her bag. The notebook is inside it. She walks to the door. She opens it.
She turns back. Her face is a ruin of tears and fury and underneath both of those, visible only because the bond lets me see what her expression hides, a love so deep and so wounded that it makes my knees go soft.
“I loved you,” she says. Past tense. The cruelest two words in any language. “I loved you and you let me love you without telling me the truth. And now I don’t know if any of it was mine.”
She walks out. The door closes.
I stand in the living room alone. The bond is screaming. Her distress hits me in waves, physical, disorienting, a pain that radiates outward through my chest and into my limbs.
I hear the elevator. I hear the lobby door. I hear the car door close outside, forty stories below, through the glass and the concrete and the distance that is already becoming unbearable. The engine starts. She’s gone.
Roman calls twenty minutes later. I answer because ignoring my phone would require caring about something other than the pain in my chest, and I don’t have that capacity right now.
“Lex said your car left the office fast. What happened?”
“She knows,” I say. “She knows everything.”
“About us?”
“About us. About the bond. About the mark. About Viktor and her father.” I press my hands against my eyes. “I told her everything, Roman.”
He’s quiet for a moment. I hear him breathing. I hear his heartbeat, steady and controlled, the rhythm of a wolf who has not just watched his world come apart.
“Good,” he says.
“I know it doesn’t feel like it right now,” he says. “But this is what needed to happen. You couldn’t keep lying to her. Whatever happens next, at least it’ll be real.”
“She said she loved me. Past tense.”
Roman is quiet again. The silence has a different quality this time. Sympathy, maybe. Or recognition. My brother has spent a lifetime watching me navigate every crisis with cold precision, and this is the first time he’s seen me break.
“Go after her?” he asks.
“She asked me not to.”
“Since when do you do what people ask?”
“Since I finally understood that keeping her and caging her are not the same thing.”
A pause. “We’ll talk later,” he says, and hangs up.
I sink into a chair. The wolf is pacing beneath my skin, furious at the distance, furious at me, furious at every locked door between us.
She’s gone.
The wolf wants me to follow. I don’t. Not because I agree with her leaving. I don’t. Not because I think distance is good for either of us. The bond is already proving otherwise. I stay because she asked me to.
One choice. Hers. I can give her that.
Even if I hate it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sophia
