Semua Bab THE HUSBAND SWAP (bound to the wrong body): Bab 31 - Bab 40

"SOMETHING WAS WRONG AND I WAS DONE PRETENDING I DIDN'T KNOW IT."KAYDEN.I had known something was wrong for days before that. Maya had been off since Wednesday of the previous week and I had clocked it immediately because I had been paying attention to Maya for longer than I was comfortable admitting and paying attention to her meant I noticed things. Small things. The way she checked her phone and then put it face down too quickly. The way she had stopped finishing her meals. The way she laughed at the right moments in conversation but the laugh did not reach all the way up to her eyes the way it usually did.Something was sitting on her.Something heavy and specific that she was carrying alone and had decided none of us were going to know about.Which, for Maya, was not unusual. Carrying things alone was basically her primary skill. She had been doing it since before I met her and she had gotten very good at it and on a normal day she was good enough that you might not notice.The

"WRONG FACE, RIGHT MAN, WRONG EVERYTHING."MAYA.By the time the evening ended I was holding myself together with very little left underneath.Sera was back. Kayden had been asking small careful questions all week that I had been answering with small careful lies, and every single one of them landed slightly wrong, like a key that almost fit a lock and stuck halfway. I could feel him watching me differently now. Not less warmly. More carefully. Like he was looking at a puzzle instead of a person, which was somehow worse than suspicion.And underneath all of it, the deadline. The full moon. Days slipping away while I carried a secret that was getting heavier instead of lighter.I was exhausted in the specific way that had nothing to do with sleep.We had been at a small pack dinner that evening — low-key, a handful of senior families, nothing that required the full performance, but a performance all the same. I had worn the earrings Yulian liked, the ones with the small sapphires that

Kayden’s gaze held mine across the kitchen island, steady despite the exhaustion etched into Yulian’s features. “Blindfold,” he said simply. “When you and Yulian want to be together. You don’t have to see Kayden’s face while you’re trying to be with your husband. You just… feel his hands. His voice. The way he actually is with you. None of the visual confusion getting in the way.”I stared at him, the weight of the suggestion settling between us like something fragile and sharp-edged. The practicality of it was so utterly Kayden—direct, selfless on the surface, yet laced with a quiet pain he refused to name. Before I could find words, the hallway door opened with a soft click. Yulian stepped in, still wearing Kayden’s taller, broader frame like an ill-fitting coat. His eyes—those familiar warm depths shining through someone else’s face—found mine immediately.“I agree,” he said, voice low and certain, crossing the room to stand beside his best friend. The two men stood shoulder to sho

"WE NEED TO TALK."KAYDEN.I had been avoiding this conversation since the day Yulian married Maya.I want to be honest about that, even just to myself, sitting here in the early grey light with the apartment quiet around me and Maya finally, finally asleep down the hall, her body wrung out from everything the last few weeks had asked of it. Five years. Five years of not talking to my best friend about the one thing that had been sitting underneath every conversation we'd ever had since he married her. I had told myself it was protecting him. I had told myself it was protecting her. Mostly I think I had been protecting myself, because saying it out loud meant making it real in a way I couldn't take back, and I had gotten very good at letting things stay unreal as long as I could manage it.I wasn't managing it anymore.Last night had changed something. Not just between me and Maya, not just between Yulian and Maya — between me and Yulian. I had stood in that room and given him somethi

"YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO HAVE ANY OF THIS."SERA.Four years ago, I sat on the edge of my bed the night before that dinner and I cried in a way I had never let anyone see me cry before.Not because I didn't think Yulian Voss was a good man. He was. Everyone said so. He was steady and serious and exactly the kind of match our families had been quietly engineering for years, the kind of arrangement that made sense on paper and meant nothing to me except the precise shape of the cage I could feel closing around my future.I had worked too hard. I had clawed my way through a medical degree that nobody in my family had thought I could finish, had stayed up countless nights memorizing things that mattered more to me than any dinner, any betrothal, any Alpha's attention. And I looked at Yulian Voss — at the seriousness in his eyes, the weight of responsibility that already sat on him at twenty-six like it had been bolted there — and I did not see a husband.I saw the end of everything I h