Ivar must have scented the turmoil behind my silence, the gunmetal-and-juniper of him sharpening as he caught the unease bleeding off my skin, because he pressed on.
"You're doing the right thing, Dorian. Ciara is part of this Pack. Your father's Moon Oath binds you to shelter her. That is sacred. That is a debt of honor, sworn under the Goddess herself. Neva will understand once the anger has passed and she can think clearly."
I turned back to him, doubt still heavy in my chest, my wolf restless beneath it.
"You really believe that?"
"I'm certain of it." A note of quiet confidence threaded through his voice. "Don't let this consume you. It's nothing. Neva is hurt right now, but she will realize you were fulfilling your duty. Nothing more."
I nodded slowly. I had been so tangled in guilt and frustration that doubt had started to poison everything, distorting my judgment about what this would mean for us. I was doing the right thing. I could not run two trails at once. What I did for Ciara was what any Alpha would have done. What my father would have expected of the one who took his place.
"I just don't want to lose Neva." The words came out barely above a whisper, and I hated how vulnerable they sounded in the stillness of that den.
"You won't." Ivar's voice carried the weight of absolute conviction. "Neva loves you. That's precisely why this is hitting her so hard. But she'll come around. The two of you have been bound together too long for a single incident to sever it."
I let out a long breath, and some of the iron tension in my chest began to loosen. Ivar was right. He was always right about these things.
"Thanks, Ivar. I needed to hear that."
He smiled, and there was a glint in his eyes that caught the lamplight, gold flickering low and gone.
"Anytime. That's what I'm here for."
I pushed myself up from the chair, feeling lighter than I had since the moment Neva's voice had gone cold across the mind-link. The talk with Ivar had helped, but I still had a great deal of damage to repair. The fracture between Neva and me was real, and no amount of reassurance from my Beta could mend it. Only I could do that. But at least now, the guilt was no longer drowning me.
"I'll talk to her later tonight. Give her time to cool down first."
"Smart. Neva has a soft spot for you, Dorian. Always has. Use that to your advantage."
We walked to the study door together, and for the first time in hours, I felt prepared to face whatever came next.
Ivar clapped a hand on my shoulder, his grip firm and familiar.
"You've got this. Just remember you're not alone in this."
"Thanks, Ivar."
He left, and the weight on my shoulders had lifted enough that I could breathe again. But now came the harder part. I had to find a way to make things right with Neva.
I crossed the eastern territory to the den Neva and I shared. It was our private ground, set apart from the pack estate, the one place where we were not the Alpha and his Intended but simply two people who had chosen each other. Or so I had believed.
When I opened the door, the den was dark. The kind of dark that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with absence.
"Neva?"
My voice echoed off the stone floors and died against the walls. No answer. And then my wolf went very still, because the air was wrong. I moved through the rooms, checking the kitchen, the sitting room, the bedchamber. Everything was in its place. Everything except the things that mattered. The frost-and-white-birch of her, the cold river-stone and that thread of moonflower that had lived in these walls for years, had thinned to almost nothing.
Instinct seized me, cold and sudden, and I walked to the closet. I pulled the doors open.
Empty. Every hanger bare. Every shelf cleared. Her boots, her coats, the small leather case where she kept her grandmother's moon-rosary. All of it, gone.
Neva had left me.
My legs gave out, and I sank to the floor of the closet, surrounded by nothing but the faint ghost of her scent and the hollow click of empty hangers swaying in the draft. Somewhere beneath my ribs my wolf threw back its head and made a sound I had never heard it make, a low keening that scraped at the inside of me with no name to give it. The silence pressed in from every side, absolute and merciless, and for the first time since I had become Alpha of the Nightveil Pack, I felt completely and utterly powerless.
