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The separation hurts.

The emotional pain is a landscape of its own. But the bond itself hurts. My body registers Dominic’s absence like a phantom limb, an ache radiating from the silver scar through my chest and into my extremities. My hands ache. My jaw aches. The space between my ribs feels hollow and wrong, as though the doubled heartbeat that’s been living there for weeks has been reduced to a single rhythm and the silence where the second beat should be is louder than any sound.

I’m at my apartment. The one in the West Loop, the monitored cage with the electronic locks and the king-sized bed and the nightstand where the notebook lived for weeks. I haven’t spent the night here in two weeks. The air is stale. The milk in the fridge has expired. The bed is cold and too big and doesn’t smell like him.

I curl on my side and pull the blanket around me and I try to separate the pain into categories the way I separate financial data. Category one: grief. My father was murdered by a man he trusted. A man whose family had trusted him for fifteen years. I knew this intellectually before, suspected it, but the notebook made it real, made it specific, gave it a name and a face and a motive. Viktor Voronov killed my father because my father learned the truth, and the truth, in Viktor’s calculation, was worth more than Marco Marchelli’s life.

Category two: betrayal. The man I love suspected. Maybe not everything, maybe not the details, but enough. He suspected Viktor was involved and he chose not to force the answer. He chose his father, his pack, his secret over my right to know how my father died. Every night he held me, every morning he kissed me, he was holding back the one piece of information that mattered most.

Category three: the bond. This is the category that hurts the most because it’s the one I can’t resolve with anger.

I can be angry about all three of these things. I am angry. The anger is a living thing in my chest, hot and righteous and entirely mine. No bond amplification, no biological manipulation. Just the clean, honest fury of a woman who was lied to by the man she loves.

But underneath the anger, persistent and unwelcome, the bond keeps sending me his pain. I can feel Dominic through the connection, a constant low-frequency transmission of anguish that I can’t block and can’t ignore. He’s hurting. He’s sitting in the apartment we shared and he’s hurting in a way that mirrors my own pain so precisely that I can’t always tell where mine ends and his begins.

I hate that I can feel him. I hate that the bond won’t give me the privacy of my own grief. I hate that even now, even after everything he’s done, some traitorous part of my body wants to go back to him because his proximity would make the physical pain stop.

I don’t go back. I lie in my cold bed and I let the pain come and I tell myself that the pain is the price of reclaiming my autonomy. If the bond hurts when we’re apart, then the hurt is evidence of the manipulation, proof that my body has been rewired to depend on a man I should be free to leave without consequence.

But even as I think it, I know it’s not that simple.

Because I loved him before the mark. I wanted him before the bond. I was falling before any biological mechanism had time to build, and the feelings I carry for Dominic Voronov, the real ones, the ones that live underneath the amplification, are not products of coercion. They’re mine. They started the day he shook my hand and his skin burned against mine. They grew through weeks of arguments and late-night conversations and that almost-smile I can pull from him when I catch him off guard.

The bond didn’t create the laughter in the bathtub. It didn’t create the risotto on the kitchen floor. It didn’t create the look in his eyes when he said I love you.

Those things are real. I’m certain of it with the same certainty I bring to financial analysis. The feelings are real. The bond just made them louder.

The question isn’t whether I love him. The question is whether love is enough to bridge the gap between what he did and what I can forgive.

I’m still lying in bed, still circling this question, when the buzzer sounds.

Katya.

She’s standing in the hallway with two coffees and an expression that manages to be simultaneously sympathetic and no-nonsense. She doesn’t ask if she can come in. She lets herself in and sets a coffee on my bedside table and sits in the chair by the window and waits.

“He sent you,” I say.

“He doesn’t know I’m here.”

I sit up. I take the coffee. It’s black, the way I drink it, and it’s from the cart on the corner near the office, the one she’s been buying from every day. The familiarity of it, the small gesture of a friend who knows how you take your coffee, makes my throat tight in a way that the pain and the anger haven’t managed.

“How is he?” I ask. I hate that I ask. The question comes out before I can stop it, carried by the bond’s relentless pull toward information about him.

“Bad. He’s been in the apartment since you left. Roman says he’s not eating. Not sleeping. The pack can feel it. When the alpha is in distress, everyone feels it.” She pauses. “He’s not the one I’m worried about.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like you haven’t slept in two days.”

“I haven’t.”

“And you haven’t eaten.”

“Not hungry.”

Katya leans forward. Her elbows are on her knees and her coffee is balanced in both hands and her dark eyes are steady and direct and the look she gives me has no professional distance in it. It’s the look of a woman who cares about another woman and is tired of watching her suffer.

“I need to tell you something about the bond,” she says. “And I need you to hear it with the part of your brain that does math instead of the part that’s currently on fire.”