Chapter 9: The Reasonable One Loses His Mind

Cax's POV

I am the steady one.

This is not arrogance. It is simply fact, the same way it is fact that Ryker is the coldest and Zephyr is the most unpredictable. We each have a role. Mine has always been this: stay level, stay rational, hold the center when everything else is spinning.

I repeated this to myself at seven in the morning while sitting at my desk, staring at a trade proposal from the Northern Territories that I had now read four times without retaining a single word.

The bond pulled left. Toward the east wing.

I looked right, deliberately, at the document in my hands.

Timber rights. The Northern Territories wanted expanded timber rights in exchange for reduced grain tariffs. This was straightforward. This was exactly the kind of negotiation I handled in my sleep. I picked up my pen and started reading from the top again.

The bond pulled left again. Harder.

I put the pen down.

"Alpha Cax." My advisor, Soren, was sitting across from me with his own stack of papers. He was a careful man, thin and precise, and he was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Concern mixed with confusion. "Should I give you a moment?"

"I'm fine," I said. "Keep going."

He kept going. Timber rights, grain tariffs, shipping routes through the western passage. I nodded at the right moments. I made sounds that indicated I was listening. I watched a maid pass by the window below, dark hair, small frame, and my entire body went rigid.

Not her. Wrong height.

"Alpha Cax?"

I looked back at Soren. He had stopped talking and was watching me carefully.

"The agreement," he said slowly. "You just nodded."

"I'm aware."

"You nodded at the clause giving them full shipping rights through the western passage for the next twenty years."

I stared at him.

He stared back.

"At a fixed rate," he added quietly, "that does not account for inflation."

The silence stretched between us for a long, terrible moment.

"Cancel it," I said.

"I can't cancel it, you nodded, and Advisor Prenn saw you nod, and he has already sent confirmation to his people."

I stood up. "Then uncall it. Tell them I was reviewing and not confirming. Tell them whatever you need to tell them, Soren, but fix it."

He was already writing something down, his mouth pressed into a very thin line. "Of course."

I walked out before he could say anything else.

The corridor outside my study was empty, which was lucky, because I needed it to be empty. I walked until I found a stretch of wall between two unused storage rooms, checked both directions, and then drove my fist into the stone.

The crack was loud. Pain shot up my arm, clean and sharp and grounding.

I stood there breathing for a moment, my forehead against the cold wall, my knuckles bleeding slightly onto the floor.

This was embarrassing. I was a ruling Alpha. I had negotiated peace treaties between packs that had been at war for decades. I had sat across from men who wanted me dead and smiled pleasantly while dismantling everything they thought they had. I did not lose focus. I did not make bad agreements. I did not punch walls.

Except apparently I did, now. Since her.

I pushed off the wall and kept walking.

The rest of my day was marginally better. Marginally. I reviewed the corrected trade terms, which Soren had managed to quietly walk back with impressive speed and zero explanation. I sat through a council dispute about border fencing that took three hours and resolved nothing. I ate dinner at my desk and tasted none of it.

The bond was a constant hum by evening. Not painful. Just present. Pulling, always pulling, like a hand on my sleeve that I kept refusing to acknowledge.

At nine I told myself I was going to bed.

At nine thirty I was standing in the servants' corridor outside her door.

I hadn't planned it. My feet had simply carried me here the way they had the night before, and the night before that, except this time I had stopped myself from going inside. I was standing still, not knocking, not moving, just standing in the dim corridor like a man with significantly better judgment than I was currently displaying.

She was inside. I could feel her through the bond, warm and close, which made the ache in my chest worse and better at the same time.

I thought about knocking. I had things I could say. Reasonable things. I could introduce myself properly, without the overwhelming intensity of the main hall, without Ryker's coldness or Zephyr's instability. I could just talk to her.

I raised my hand.

Then I thought about how she had looked in the hall that first day. Pressed against the wall. Terrified. Trying to disappear.

I lowered my hand.

She didn't want this. Didn't want us. And showing up at her door every night was not going to change that, it was only going to make it worse. She needed time. Space. The chance to breathe without one of us crowding her.

I stepped back.

Then another step. Then I turned around and started walking away, back down the corridor, away from the pull of the bond, doing the reasonable thing for once today.

I was halfway to the end of the corridor when I heard it.

A voice inside her room. Low and familiar, coming through the door just clearly enough for my Alpha hearing to catch.

Max.

I stopped walking.

"You don't need them, Ava." His voice was soft and certain and deeply, deeply possessive. "You never did. You only ever needed me."