The hallway smelled like antiseptic and pine cleaner. I walked fast, my boots loud on the tile. The pack healer had called me twenty minutes ago. Stefan was awake. The rogues had cut him deep across the ribs and shoulder, but he was awake.
My chest still ached from the bond. Ever since the ambush yesterday, I had felt every tug of his pain like a hook behind my sternum. My wolf, Lila, paced inside me and whined his name. *Stefan. Stefan. Stefan.* I pressed a hand to the wall and kept moving.
I am Gabrielle Greene. Daughter of Diane and George Greene. Fated Luna of the Ironvale Pack. And the man on the other side of that door was my mate.
I pushed through.
Stefan lay propped against three white pillows. Bandages wrapped his chest and one shoulder. His Alpha aura was thinned down to a quiet hum, the kind of low light you get from a lamp covered with cloth. He turned his head when the door opened, and his eyes met mine.
"Stefan," I said. I crossed the room. "Goddess, I came as fast as—"
"Stop."
I stopped two steps from the bed.
He looked away from me. Not down. Not at the floor. He turned his face toward the window like the sight of me hurt his eyes. The bond inside my chest yanked once, hard, like a dog pulling on a leash.
"Stefan," I said again, softer. "What is it?"
"I can't smell you."
The words came out flat. No breath behind them. No grief. He said them the way a man reads a line he has practiced in front of a mirror.
"What?"
"Your scent." He still would not look at me. "It's gone. I don't know when it happened. Maybe when the rogue's claws went through me. Maybe before. But it's gone, Gabrielle. The bond is severed."
Lila threw herself at the inside of my ribs. *Liar. Liar. Liar.* The bond burned in my chest, intact and screaming, and he was telling me it was dead.
I did not move. I did not speak. I let him keep going.
He finally looked at me. And there it was. The tell I had clocked the very first time he tried to lie to me, three years ago, about a meeting he had not actually attended. He held my eyes a fraction too long. Steady, unblinking, overcorrected. A man who has rehearsed *don't look away.*
Footsteps in the doorway. Soft ones. I did not need to turn to know.
"Eva," Stefan said. His voice changed completely. It went warm.
She stepped in past me as if I were a piece of furniture. Pale silk dress, hair brushed loose, eyes wet right on cue. She went to the side of the bed I had not been allowed to reach, and Stefan took her hand.
"Her scent," he said. His thumb moved on her knuckles. "Hers is the one I can smell now. Lavender and honey. It's the only thing in this room."
Eva's eyes lifted to mine over the bandaged shoulder of my mate. Her lower lip trembled in a way that almost made me admire her training. Almost.
"I'll mark her," Stefan said. He was speaking to the ceiling now, to the pack he could not see, to the record he was already building. "When I am healed. Eva will be Luna of Ironvale. The Moon Goddess took one bond and gave me another. I won't refuse her gift."
The bond in my chest screamed.
I breathed through my nose. Once. Twice. I let my hands stay loose at my sides. I let my face do nothing at all.
"I understand," I said.
That was all. Two words. I inclined my head a quarter of an inch—the courtesy a Luna gives an Alpha, no more, no less—and turned for the door. My spine was a steel rod. My boots made the same even sound going out that they had made coming in.
I did not look at Eva. I did not need to. I had her face memorized already.
I made it down the hall, past the healer's station, out the side door, across the gravel lot to my car. I got in. I closed the door. I put both hands on the steering wheel and waited until I was sure no one was watching the windows.
Then I let my forehead drop against the leather.
Ten minutes. I gave myself ten. Lila howled inside me, long and broken, and I let her. I let the tears come hot and silent down my face. I let my shoulders shake once, hard, the way a building shakes before it decides whether or not to fall.
The bond pulsed. *He lied. He lied. He lied.*
I knew. I knew, Lila. I had known the second his eyes held mine a beat too long.
Nine minutes in, my fingers found the silver band on my right hand. My mother's ring. The small moonstone caught the gray afternoon light and turned it milky. I rubbed my thumb across it the way I had rubbed it across every grief of my life.
*Mom,* I thought. *He wants the territory. He thinks if he calls the bond dead, he can take it.*
I sat up. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I checked the mirror, fixed my eyeliner with one finger, and started the car.
He had given his speech. Now I would write mine. Quietly. On paper. With clauses and seals and the signature of a lawyer who had never set foot inside an Ironvale meeting.
Let him plan his ceremony.
I was going to bury him in his own contracts before he ever got to the altar.
