"I'm sorry, Seraphina. I was wrong. I wouldn't dare dream of mating with Theron anymore. I'll take the pup and go far away. Please, I'm begging you, just stop hurting us, okay?"
"What are you doing? Putting on another act?"
The pain in my abdomen was getting worse. A dark premonition crept through me, and deep in my chest, my wolf stirred from her long silence. Not in anger. In fear. She pressed against my ribs from the inside, whimpering low, her body curling around something she was trying to protect. Terrified that something was actually happening to my pup, I moved toward the door to find a healer, but it swung open before I could reach it.
A crowd stood in the doorway. At the front was Theron.
The moment he saw Corvina and the pup on the floor, the infant screaming in raw, bloodcurdling wails that cut through the room like a blade across bone, the color drained from his face. His Alpha aura surged outward in a violent pulse, thick enough to press against the walls, and the wolves behind him flinched back a step. He dropped the bowl of bone broth in his hands without a second thought and rushed over to scoop the pup up.
"What happened? We were gone ten minutes. What the hell happened?"
"Theron..."
Corvina lifted her face. The handprints across her cheek were vivid and unmistakable.
She was trembling, tears streaming down her face. The cloying sweetness of her scent, that honeysuckle and warm vanilla, thickened in the air until it was almost suffocating, wrapping around every wolf in the room like a snare. "It's my fault. I never should have come to you for help. If I weren't so afraid my pup would grow up without a pack, I'd never have degraded myself like this! Ms. Silvercrest, if you didn't want me and Theron to register the bond and place the pup under his bloodline, then why did you pretend to agree and then turn around and try to force us out? Hitting me was one thing, but throwing a newborn pup on the floor?"
Her shrill sobs and accusations sent a chill through the room.
Everyone turned to look at me. "Seraphina, you..."
"Seraphina!"
Theron walked toward me with the pup in his arms and struck me across the face.
The blow sent my vision black. I nearly passed out.
My wolf howled. Not outward, not in any way anyone else could hear. The sound was inside me, reverberating through my bones, through the hollow place where the mate bond lived. It was a sound I had never heard her make before. Not rage. Something worse. Something that had no name, a keening that started in the marrow and didn't stop.
I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor.
The stone was cold beneath my palms. The impact jarred through my knees, my wrists, my belly. The pain in my abdomen sharpened into something bright and terrible. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. Inside me, my wolf had gone completely still. Not calm. The kind of still that comes before something breaks apart.
"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to the severing! How can you be this two-faced? The pup is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground! You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own pup will pay for what you've done?"
My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.
For the sake of Corvina's pup, he had cursed ours.
The mate bond between us, that fraying thread I had held onto for five years, pulsed once. Weak. Sickly. Like a heartbeat trying to keep going when the body around it had already given up. My wolf pressed her nose against it from the inside, and I felt her recoil. His end of the bond tasted like ash. Like scorched iron gone cold.
"Yeah, Seraphina, how could you do that? She just gave birth. You shouldn't have hit her!"
"No wonder Theron says he's more comfortable with Corvina. Seraphina's temper is way too much."
They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. Their voices blurred into a single wall of sound, and beneath it, I could hear my own pulse. Too fast. Too thin. My wolf was pacing now, frantic circles in the dark, her claws scraping against something inside me that felt like it was coming apart.
"Enough! All of you, shut up! 'Seraphina' and 'Corvina'? Do none of you have any sense of right and wrong? This isn't the dark ages. An Alpha doesn't get to keep a mate and a mistress! Theron broke the bond. That's on him! And even if I did hit Corvina, she had it coming!"
My outburst stunned the room into silence. For one breath, the Alpha aura that had been pressing down on everyone wavered. Theron's eyes narrowed.
"Theron was only kind to me and the pup because of my late mate!" Corvina sobbed, crawling to Theron's legs. The scent of vanilla and honeysuckle surged again, so thick it coated the back of my throat. "The pup fell from a height. I don't even know if he'll survive. Theron, please, don't waste any more time. Call a healer!"
"Don't be scared. I won't let anything happen to him."
Theron turned to leave with the pup in his arms.
And in that moment, I felt something warm and wet sliding down between my legs.
The sensation froze me with terror.
My wolf went silent. Completely, utterly silent. As if she had stopped breathing. As if she already knew.
I looked down. A shock of red was spreading beneath me.
"Theron, my pup... our pup!"
The words tore out of me, raw and broken, and I reached for the bond. Reached for it with everything I had left. Pulled at it like a rope in the dark, desperate for him to feel what I was feeling, desperate for his wolf to hear mine.
He didn't turn around. He didn't even slow down.
"Seraphina, I've never been more disappointed in you. Get yourself home. I'll be staying at the Healing Hall with Corvina and the pup for the next few days. And you'd better pray her pup is all right. Because if he's not, I won't let you off."
Every last one of them followed him out the door.
The room emptied. The silence that filled it was absolute. Not peaceful. The kind of silence that exists inside a wound.
I stayed on the floor. The cold seeped through my clothes, through my skin, into the place where my wolf had been pacing only moments ago. She wasn't pacing anymore. She lay curled at the bottom of me, nose tucked against her tail, and she would not lift her head. The blood kept spreading, warm against the cold stone, and I pressed my hands harder against my stomach as if I could hold everything inside me together by force.
The bond stretched thin toward the door Theron had walked through. I could still feel him at the far end of it. Moving away. His wolf hadn't even flinched.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
