Daciana looked at Bardolph kneeling before her, and the silence around them carried every broken promise they no longer needed to repair with lies.He asked for no forgiveness, no mate bond, no restored love, and no place beside her that her heart had not freely chosen.For a moment, the old wound inside her remembered the girl who had loved him before pride, betrayal, Ashina, and Blackfang’s cruelty turned love into ashes.Then the woman she had become placed one hand over that wound, not to reopen it, but to thank it for surviving.“You may repair what you helped destroy,” Daciana said, and Bardolph lifted his face with pain shining openly in his eyes.“But your atonement will belong to the children, the servants, the wolves, and the pack you failed, not to any hope of owning me again.”Bardolph bowed his head lower, and for the first time his grief did not reach toward her like a chain asking to be pitied.“It will be enough to serve what I once failed to protect,” he said, and his
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