Chapter 12 - Caitlynn
She wasn’t sleeping.
She’d given up pretending around eleven, when the book stopped making sense, and the lamp started its low, insistent buzz that meant her mood had dropped below whatever threshold the wiring in this house responded to.
She’d turned the lamp off. Turned it back on.
Lay on top of the covers in the oversized shirt she’d stolen from the laundry because it was soft and smelled like nothing, and she refused to examine any further reasoning than that.
The bond hummed at the base of her skull.
She’d started thinking of it that way—not magic, not the thing she didn’t ask for, just the hum.
It was worse at night when the compound went quiet, and there was nothing else to drown it out.
She could feel him downstairs. Not his thoughts, nothing that specific—more like the awareness of a light left on in another room. He wasn’t sleeping either.
She was cataloging the cracks in the ceiling plaster and considering whether it was possible to suffocate from sheer restlessness when the knock came.
Two raps. Quiet. The knuckles of someone who’d stood on the other side of the door for a while before committing.
She lay still. Her pulse kicked up—not fear, something less useful—and the lamp buzzed once and went steady.
She got up. Crossed the room. Opened the door.
Kahn filled the doorframe the way he filled every doorframe, like the building had been constructed around him and then had second thoughts about the dimensions.
His hair was pushed back unevenly, the way it got when he’d been running his hands through it over reports he wasn’t actually reading.
His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He looked like a man who had come upstairs without a plan and was now standing in the consequences of it.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“You knocked on my door at midnight.”
“Before that.”
She leaned one shoulder against the frame. The hum in her skull pulsed once, low, and she pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth until it settled. “Bond thing?”
“Bond thing.”
“That’s unsettling.”
“It’s not intentional.”
“That makes it more unsettling, not less.” She looked at him for another beat—the set of his jaw, the way he was holding himself very still, the vein in his forearm that she was absolutely not going to notice—and then stepped back from the door.
Not an invitation. Just a cleared path. He could make of it what he wanted.
He came in. Scanned the room the way he scanned every room—fast, automatic, the habit of a man who’d been checking for threats since before he knew he was doing it.
His gaze snagged on the flowers she’d picked from the courtyard garden and replaced the staff’s stiff arrangement with, and something moved at the corner of his mouth, and she decided to ignore it.
He sat on the edge of the writing desk, which left the armchair or the bed, and she took the armchair and pulled her feet up and wrapped her arms around her shins because the room had gotten smaller with him in it.
“So,” she said. “You couldn’t sleep either.”
“I was working.”
“You were staring at a wall. I could feel it from here.” The admission was out before she’d approved it. She watched it land—watched his eyes move, the slight recalibration—and kept her face still.
“The border reports aren’t interesting enough to stare at.”
“What are they?”
“Nothing that needs to concern you tonight.”
Her mouth opened. He said, “I came to talk about something else,” fast enough that she knew he’d seen the objection coming, which was irritating because she liked to think she was less predictable than that.
“The mother conversation again.”
“No.”
“The magic conversation.”
“Also no.” He looked at the window. Half a moon hung over the mountains. “I wanted to say that I know I’ve handled this poorly.”
She let the silence sit. Held it. Turned it over. “That’s very big of you.”
“I’m a big person.”
“Six four and still managed to fit through that door. Miraculous.”
“Caitlynn.”
“Kahn.” His name did something on the way out of her mouth—caught on something she wasn’t ready to look at. She swallowed past it. “Fine. What does handling it poorly look like from your end? I’m curious.”
“I didn’t tell you enough. About what the ritual meant, what the bond meant, what to expect.” His voice stayed level. His hands, resting on the desk edge, did not. The tendons in his forearms had gone taut. “I assumed the pack would come around faster. I underestimated Sloane.”
“First honest thing you’ve said to me in three weeks.”
“I’ve said other honest things.”
“Name one.”
He thought about it. “I told you the bread was good.”
“You said it was acceptable.”
“For my household, that’s a standing ovation.”
A sound escaped her—not quite a laugh, closer than she’d meant to let out. His eyes came to her face and stayed there, and her ribs did something tight and inconvenient that she filed away under deal with later.
“Why are you really here, Kahn?”
He looked at her. She could feel the weight of it—not just his gaze but the thing behind it, the hum thickening at the base of her skull until her fingertips tingled with it.
“I didn’t choose any of this either,” he said.
“I know you know that. I know it doesn’t change your situation.
But I spent my entire life being told what the pack needed from me, and not once did anyone ask what I needed, and I agreed to this ritual because Gideon was right—the pack was vulnerable, the attacks were getting worse, and I am the Alpha, and what I want does not factor in.
” He stopped. Started again. “Then the lottery chose you, and I thought you’d be gone in a week, and now it’s been five weeks, and you’re in my armchair at midnight, and I still don’t know how to—”
“How to what?”
“Talk to you. Without it going sideways.”
Wind moved through the trees outside. She pressed her chin to her knees.
“To be fair,” she said, “you did call me weak within the first ten minutes of meeting me.”
“To be fair, you were wearing flour.”
“I was kidnapped. The flour was incidental.”
“You had it in your hair.”
“That is not the point—”
“I’m just saying, first impressions work both ways. You looked at me like I was something you’d find under a rock.”
“I looked at you like you were a man who’d had people agreeing with him for so long he’d forgotten what a counter-argument sounded like.”
“And was I wrong?” he asked.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her jaw ached from how hard she was fighting the thing her mouth wanted to do. “No. Unfortunately.”
“So we’ve established that we are both, at minimum, partially correct about each other.”
“I will grant you partial correctness very grudgingly and only because it’s too late to argue properly.”
“What do you actually need, Caitlynn?” His voice dropped. “Not from the pack. Not from the situation. From me. What would make this workable?”
Her hands tightened on her shins. The lamp buzzed. Steadied.
“I need to know people won’t just leave.
” It came out quieter than she’d meant it to.
The kind of quiet that happened when something had been true for a long time and had never been said out loud.
“I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like a foster care speech, and you can save me the look—I’ve made my peace with it.
But that’s what I need. People who stay. ”
He didn’t look away. “I’m not going anywhere. The magic saw to that.”
“The magic doesn’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because I need it to be a choice.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. His hands uncurled on the desk edge—slow, deliberate, the way a person uncurled when they’d been holding on tighter than they’d realized.
“I have never,” he said, “voluntarily left a room in the middle of an argument with you.”
“That’s because you always have to have the last word.”
“I’m having it now.”
“You are absolutely not—”
“I find that I am.”
“You are the most infuriating man I have ever met, and I once served a customer who came back four times to complain about the same latte.”
“And yet here we are.”
“Here we are.” The words came out different from how she’d expected them to. Softer. Like something she’d been holding at arm’s length had moved closer without her noticing.
He stood. “Get some sleep.”
“You’re not in charge of my sleep schedule.”
“Consider it a strong recommendation.”
“I’ll consider it an unsolicited opinion and do with it as I please.”
“Naturally.” He moved to the door. Stopped. “Caitlynn.”
She looked up.
“I won’t leave,” he said. “Choice and magic and all. I won’t.”
The door closed behind him. His footsteps moved down the hallway—steady, unhurried—and the hum at the base of her skull gentled into something she didn’t have a name for yet. Something that didn’t ache.
She sat in the armchair for a long time after he’d gone, her chin on her knees, listening to the quiet house settle around her.
The lamp didn’t buzz once.