The kitchen was loud that afternoon.
Steam rising from three different pots, the clatter of prep work, the low murmur of pack members moving around each other in the practiced rhythm of communal meal prep. I had been assigned to the soup station — a demotion in everything but name, since I used to run training drills at this hour. Now I stirred broth and kept my eyes down and told myself it didn't matter.
My wolf had been quiet since the office. Not the wounded quiet of before, when she would go small and still under the weight of the mate bond's ache. This was different. This was the quiet of something that had already decided.
I was reaching for the ladle when I felt her.
Stella moved through the kitchen the way she moved through every room — like she owned the air in it. I heard her before I saw her, that jasmine-and-something-darker perfume cutting through the smell of broth and woodsmoke. I didn't turn around. I kept stirring.
"Here, let me help with that."
Her voice was warm. Helpful. The kind of warm that has teeth underneath it.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You've been on your feet for hours." She was already beside me, reaching past me toward the heavy iron pot on the back burner — the one I hadn't touched yet because it was still at a full boil. "Let me get that."
"Stella—"
The pot tipped.
Not slowly. Not accidentally. It went over in one clean, deliberate arc, and the boiling water came down directly onto my right hand.
The sound I made wasn't a scream. It was something worse — a short, broken thing that came out of me before I could stop it, and then I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, my hand pulled to my chest, the pain so immediate and total that for a moment I couldn't see anything at all. Just white. Just the burning. Just the scar on my palm screaming alongside every nerve in my hand like they were all remembering the same thing at once.
The kitchen erupted around me. Voices. Movement. Someone calling for water.
And then Stella was kneeling beside me.
She put her hand on my back. Gentle. Concerned. Her face, when I managed to focus on it through the blur of pain, was arranged into something that looked almost like distress.
"Oh, Mackenzie," she breathed. "I'm so sorry, I didn't—"
I felt it before I understood what was happening. A quick, sharp tug at the back of my neck. The chain pulled taut, then snapped.
My father's necklace.
I reached for it on instinct, my burned hand moving before my brain caught up, and the pain that shot up my arm nearly took me under again. By the time I could breathe, Stella was already straightening up, her hand at her side, her expression perfectly composed.
The necklace was gone.
I looked up at her. She looked down at me. And for just one second — one single, unguarded second — I saw it. The satisfaction. The same look she'd given me over Kingsley's shoulder in the office. Calm. Deliberate. Done.
Then the kitchen doors swung open.
Kingsley filled the doorway the way he always did — like the room had been waiting for him to arrive and could now organize itself accordingly. His eyes swept the scene: the overturned pot, the water spreading across the floor, me on my knees, Stella standing over me with her hand pressed to her mouth.
Stella's composure cracked on cue. Her voice came out shaking.
"She bumped into me," she said. "I was trying to help and she just — the pot went over and I nearly—" She pressed her fingers harder against her lips. "I could have been badly burned, King."
I opened my mouth.
The Alpha tone hit me like a wall.
It didn't come with volume. It never did with Kingsley — that was the thing people who hadn't felt it didn't understand. It wasn't loud. It was heavy. It pressed down on my wolf like a hand on the back of her neck, and my wolf, already quiet, already decided, went flat and still beneath it.
"Don't." His voice was ice. He wasn't even looking at me fully — his eyes were on Stella, checking her over, and I was somewhere in his peripheral vision. An inconvenience. A mess on the floor. "Clean this up."
"Kingsley, she took—"
"I said clean it up, Mackenzie." Now he looked at me. That flat, cold look I had stopped being surprised by. "Or is that too much to ask from someone who can't even carry a pot without causing a scene?"
Somewhere behind him, I heard someone in the kitchen go very quiet.
I looked down at my burned hand. The skin was already starting to blister, red and raw against the older scar tissue. My father's necklace was in Stella's pocket. My wolf was silent. My mate was staring at me like I was something he was tired of stepping around.
I picked up the mop.
I didn't say another word.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, behind the pain and the humiliation and the hollow ache where the bond used to feel like something worth holding onto, a single thought surfaced and stayed.
Everett Harris, get on that plane.
