Chapter 18

FREYA

I found him two days later, near the edge of the training yard where the tree line started, far enough from the main house that nobody would overhear if this went the way I expected it to. He was alone, sharpening something at a low bench, and he didn’t look up when I approached, though the set of his shoulders told me he’d heard me coming long before I got close.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Do we.”

Not a question. I stopped a few feet away, close enough to see the tension along his jaw, and waited for him to actually look at me. He didn’t, not for a long moment, his attention fixed on the blade in his hands like it mattered more than anything I might have to say.

“You’ve been avoiding me since the courtyard,” I said. “Since before that, actually. Since the marker stones.”

“I’ve had a lot to do.”

“You carried me across a border and then vanished for two days.” I heard my own voice climbing and didn’t try to pull it back down. Two days of watching him disappear down hallways the second I entered a room, two days of catching him watching me from across courtyards and training yards only to find him gone the moment I turned to actually look. “I want an answer, Dante. Just one. Why did you save me?”

His hands stilled on the blade. “Does it matter?”

“Yes.” The word came out sharper than I meant it to. “It matters. You rejected the bond the night we met. You made it very clear you wanted nothing to do with whatever this is between us. And then somehow you’re the one who finds me half-conscious on your border, and you don’t say a word about it, and you won’t even look at me when I ask you why.”

“Damien found you,” he said. “Not me.”

“Don’t.” I took a step closer, forcing him to either look up or keep staring at something that clearly no longer needed his attention. “I know what I smelled. I know whose scent that was on me when I woke up. Don’t stand there and lie to my face about it after everything else this week has already taken from me.”

His expression changed immediately, and he finally set the blade down and looked at me properly, and I almost wished he hadn’t. There was something raw in his eyes I hadn’t expected, and it certainly didn’t match the cold, closed-off version of him I’d been bracing for.

“What do you want me to say,” he said. “That I felt something the second you crossed onto our land, half-dead in the dirt? That some part of me that I’ve spent weeks telling to shut up woke up the second I caught your scent on the wind and I couldn’t make myself stay away even though every reasonable part of me knew I should have?”

“Yes,” I said, quieter now. “That’s exactly what I want you to say. Because I don’t understand you. I don’t understand how someone can reject a bond and then act like this, like you can’t decide whether you want me here or not, like every time I get close you find some new reason to disappear before I can ask you anything real.”

“You don’t need to understand me.”

“I think I do, actually. I think after everything I’ve lost this week, I’m allowed to ask one person in this entire territory to just be honest with me for five minutes.” My voice cracked on the last part, and I hated it, hated that after holding myself together through my father’s hand and Rowan’s cruelty and every stranger’s stare, this was the moment it finally slipped. “Why does it matter to you what I think is happening between us? You made your choice already. You don’t owe me an explanation for a bond you already threw away.”

“I know what I owe you,” he said, and something in his voice had gone hard again, defensive in a way that told me I’d struck closer to something than either of us wanted. “I know exactly what I owe you, and it isn’t what you think it is.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

He didn’t answer. The silence stretched long enough that I felt something in my chest start to cave in around it, some hope I hadn’t fully admitted to carrying finally giving out under the weight of his refusal to give me anything at all.

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t tell me. But at least admit that whatever this is, it isn’t nothing. I felt something the night we met, Dante. Before you rejected it, before any of this happened, I felt something real, and I’ve spent weeks trying to convince myself I imagined it because you made it so clear you wanted no part of it. I need to know if I imagined that too.”

“You didn’t imagine it,” he said, low, almost too quiet to catch.

“Then why.”

“Because it doesn’t matter what either of us felt,” he said, and the hardness came back into his voice all at once, like a door slamming shut on whatever had briefly cracked open. “It doesn’t matter what I feel now. There are things about why I did what I did that you don’t understand, that I’m not going to explain to you standing in a training yard two days after your entire life fell apart. You deserve better than half an explanation delivered because you cornered me into giving you one.”

“I don’t want half an explanation. I want the truth.”

“You want a version of me that doesn’t exist,” he said, and the spark in his eyes had gone flat and distant again, the warmth from a moment ago folding itself back away like it had never been there at all. “I’m not the person you think you felt something for that night. Whatever you imagined standing across from me, whatever the bond made you believe, it wasn’t real. Not the way you wanted it to be.”

“That’s not an answer. Dante!” I said almost immediately, I was growing tired of his excuses. 

“I’m sorry.”

I stared at him, feeling something inside me go very still and very cold, the last thread of hope I’d been carrying since the marker stones finally giving out completely. I thought of waking with my cheek against his scent, certain for one disoriented moment that he’d been the one to carry me to safety. I thought of two days spent catching him watching me and telling myself it meant something.

“I should have known better,” I said. “I should have known better than to think there was anything worth finding out here.”

When he spoke again, his voice had dropped 20 octaves lower and colder than anything he’d said yet, colder than I’d ever heard from him, even the night he’d rejected the bond in front of everyone.

“I should have left you where I found you,” he said.

The words landed somewhere deep and quiet in my chest, and for a moment neither of us moved, like even he hadn’t expected them to come out as harsh as they had. I didn’t give him the chance to take them back, if he’d even meant to.

I turned and walked away before he could see what they’d done to my face, back toward the house, back toward the only place in this entire territory I had left to go, and I didn’t look back to see whether he was still standing there watching me leave the same way he’d watched everything else.

My hands were shaking by the time I reached the tree line separating the training yard from the house, and I stopped there for a moment, pressing my palm flat against the rough bark of the nearest tree, trying to breathe through whatever had just cracked open in my chest. I told myself it shouldn’t hurt this much. I told myself I had no real claim to him, no promise he’d ever made me, nothing but a single night weeks ago and a bond he’d already made clear he wanted no part of.

It didn’t help. The words kept replaying anyway, colder every time I turned them over. I should have left you where I found you. Not I don’t know how I feel, not I need time, not any of the smaller, gentler refusals I might have found some way to survive. He’d chosen the cruelest version available to him, and some part of me knew he’d done it deliberately, had reached for the sharpest thing he could find because it was easier than whatever truth he wasn’t willing to give me instead.

I thought about the way his voice had cracked, just barely, right before it went hard again. I thought about the warmth that had briefly surfaced in his eyes before he buried it. None of it matched the words he’d actually said, and I didn’t know which version of him to believe, the one who’d almost told me the truth or the one who’d slammed the door shut the second I got close enough to see through it.

By the time I reached the house, I’d managed to stop the shaking, mostly, and I told myself that would have to be enough for now. I didn’t have the energy left to figure out what any of it meant. I only had enough left to keep walking, one foot in front of the other, away from a man who apparently regretted ever pulling me out of the dirt in the first place.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

DANTE

I returned back to sharpening the blade as she walked away. 

My heart tugged in an unfamiliar way, like someone had stabbed me with a knife and kept twisting it in the wound repeatedly. 

I had hurt the only person my wolf has ever longed for with my words. 

“It was to protect her,” I tried to convince myself. But I knew deep down that the only person being protected was myself.