Chapter 17 - Kahn
Something was wrong with his mate.
She wasn’t shy to eat and never picked at her food. Tonight she pushed a piece of rigatoni from one side of the plate to the other, turned it over, and pushed it back.
On Sunday, she’d had three helpings of the lamb stew and told him he could have some if he asked nicely, which for him meant saying please twice while she pretended to consider it.
On Monday, she’d stolen toast off his plate without breaking eye contact.
Now she was conducting a funeral procession for a single piece of pasta.
He counted. Four bites in twenty minutes. Five. She set her fork down and picked it up again. His wolf pressed against the inside of his ribs hard enough that the muscles across his shoulders went rigid.
“You’re not eating,” he said.
“I’m eating.”
“You’ve had four bites in twenty minutes.”
“I’m savoring.”
“You don’t savor. You told me last week that savoring was a scam invented by people who couldn’t commit to the meal.”
“I’ve evolved.”
“In two days?”
The look she gave him—the flat green-eyed one that shut conversations like a slammed door—would have stopped anyone else.
He filed it away and let it go. Cleared the plates.
Ran the water hot enough to scald and stood at the sink while she drifted out of the kitchen without the energy that usually followed her through a room like weather.
That was the other thing. The quiet. Caitlynn didn’t do quiet—even her silences had volume, charged with the sense that at any moment she might say something that would require him to rearrange his entire evening.
But for three days, she’d trailed off mid-sentence.
Stood at windows with her hand pressed low against her abdomen and dropped it the instant she caught him looking—fast, reflexive, the speed of someone hiding a tell.
He sighed and closed his eyes. Something was wrong. He just didn’t know what.
His suspicion of something being off was confirmed the next morning again.
He came into the kitchen for coffee, and she was at the counter with Elena, her hands in dough, and he stood close enough that his arm brushed hers, reaching for the pot.
The candle on the windowsill flared—a sharp spike of flame that licked two inches higher than it should have before settling.
Elena glanced at the candle. Then at Caitlynn. Then at her inventory list. She said nothing, with the weight of a woman who could have said volumes.
“Your candles are dramatic today,” Kahn said.
“The wicks need trimming.”
“Mm.” He poured his coffee. “I’ll add it to the list. Right under Caitlynn’s proximity to open flames and structural fire risk assessment.”
“I’m not a fire risk.”
“The tapestries in the east hallway would disagree.”
“That was once.”
“It was twice. I had the scorch marks repainted.”
She turned to face him, flour on her hands, a retort halfway up her throat—and stopped.
He was looking at her. Not the way he usually looked at her, or not only that.
He was looking for the thing she wasn’t telling him, and she knew it, because her jaw tightened and her eyes went flat and she turned back to the dough.
“Get out of my kitchen,” she said.
“It’s my kitchen.”
“Not between six and noon. House rules.”
“You made those rules.”
“And you haven’t contested them, which makes them binding.” Her hands worked the dough with a steadiness that didn’t reach the rest of her. “Go run your pack. I’m busy.”
He left. In the hallway, the candles along the wall guttered as she walked the other direction—every single one, a chain reaction that followed her like a breath blown down the corridor.
He stood there and watched the flames right themselves one by one after she’d passed, and the hairs on his forearms lifted, and his wolf pressed forward so hard his vision blurred at the edges.
Something in the bond had shifted. A new frequency threaded through the hum between them, faint and fast, and he couldn’t identify it.
It sat below the range of conscious hearing, like a sound he could only feel.
He’d been trying to name it for three days.
It wasn’t distress—he knew what that felt like through the bond, the sharp, cold spike of it.
It wasn’t anger. It was something else. Something that lived in a register he didn’t have a reference for.
He went to his study. Didn’t read. Sat at his desk, pressed both palms flat on the wood, and breathed through the ache behind his ribs while the morning light moved across the floor.
A cup had cracked in her hand at breakfast the day before. Not dropped—cracked, a clean fracture down the center while she held it, tea pooling across the counter. She’d looked at her hand and then at him and said, "Don’t” before he’d opened his mouth.
Yesterday, a stack of books on his desk had slid three inches to the left while she stood six feet away, looking out the window at nothing.
She’d glanced at them. Looked away. The expression on her face—not surprise, something closer to resignation—was the face of a woman whose body was doing things without her permission.
Her magic had been getting stronger for weeks. Fire came easier, more controlled. But in the last three days, control had slipped. Whatever was happening inside her was leaking through the seams, and she wouldn’t let him close enough to help.
He tried again at lunch. She was in the sitting room—her sitting room, the armchair with the Caitlynn-shaped indent, a book open on her lap, and her bare feet tucked up under her.
He stood in the doorway, and she didn’t look up, but her hand drifted to her stomach and rested there, palm flat, fingers spread.
She held it for three seconds before she registered his presence and dropped it to the armrest.
Three seconds. Long enough. His wolf surged against his ribs hard enough that he had to press a hand to the doorframe.
“If you’re going to hover,” she said, still not looking up, “you could at least bring tea.”
“You’ve stopped drinking coffee.”
A beat. The briefest pause—blink-and-miss—before she turned a page. “I’m trying something new.”
“You’ve had the same coffee order since the day you got here. Black, one sugar, no commentary.”
“People change, Kahn.”
“In three days?”
“I’ve been here for months. That’s plenty of time for a personality overhaul.” She turned another page. “Tea. Ginger, if they have it. Thank you.”
He brought her the tea. She took it without meeting his eyes. The mug was warm in the space between their hands for a half-second, and the bond pulsed with that strange new frequency, and her fingers tightened on the ceramic, and he let go before she had to pull away.
Viktor arrived at four for the patrol logs and found Kahn staring at the same page he’d been staring at since two.
“Your head’s not here,” Viktor said, marking positions on the map table with hands that moved the way fifteen years of practice moved—steady, economical, certain.
“My head is fine.”
“You’ve read that page four times.” Viktor didn’t look up. “Eastern border?”
“No.”
“The wards?”
“No.”
Viktor set down the marker. Crossed his arms. Leaned against the map table and waited. He had a talent for silence—the kind that created a vacuum other people rushed to fill. It worked on nervous recruits and stubborn Alphas alike.
“Something’s shifted,” Kahn said. “In the bond. I can feel it, but I can’t name it. She’s different. Her magic’s different. And she won’t talk to me about it.”
“Have you asked?”
“She bit my head off.”
Viktor’s mouth moved. On anyone else, it would have been a smile. “She’s interesting.”
“She’s maddening.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” The marker came back up. “She’ll tell you when she’s ready. Pushing her will make it worse.”
He knew that. His wolf didn’t care what he knew.
It paced the length of him through the rest of the afternoon and into the evening—through dinner, where she ate slightly more than the night before but kept pausing with her fork halfway to her mouth, staring at something he couldn’t see.
Through the dishes, where she washed, and he dried, and they argued about whether the cast-iron pan needed re-seasoning, which was not a real argument but the kind they had when the real things were too large to approach directly.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I seasoned it last week.”
“It’s not fine. There’s a dry spot on the left side.”
“There is not a dry spot.”
“I can see it, Caitlynn. It’s right there.”
“That is a shadow.”
“It is bare metal.”
“Your standards for cookware maintenance are pathological.”
“My standards are correct. There’s a difference.”
She flicked water at him from the sink. It caught his jaw, ran down his neck.
She didn’t smile, but the corner of her mouth moved—the ghost of the thing she would have done a week ago, before whatever was eating at her had turned the volume down—and his wolf went still for a fraction of a second.
Listening. Reaching for whatever she was holding behind her teeth.
After dinner, she went upstairs. He stood at the bottom of the staircase and listened to her footsteps, and didn’t follow.
At nine, he found her in the hallway outside their room, standing at the window with her hand on the glass.
Her other hand was on her stomach. She didn’t drop it this time.
She stood there—palm flat, fingers spread—and the lamplight caught the side of her face, and she looked like something he didn’t have a word for.
Not afraid. Not happy. Something between the two that was large enough to hold both.
Then she saw him. Her hand fell. Her chin came up.
“Are you going to stand there all night?”
“I was considering it.”
“Consider faster. You’re blocking the hallway.”
He stepped aside. She passed close enough that her shoulder brushed his chest, and the bond thrummed between them, and her eyes met his for a half-second, and what was in them—the enormity of it—knocked the air from his lungs.
She went into the bedroom. He followed.
Later, in the dark. Sheets tangled. The lamp casting everything amber.
Her head on his chest, his arm around her, and her heartbeat running against his ribs.
His wolf was quiet for the first time in days—not asleep but listening, tuned to something just below the range of what he could consciously hear.
Her breathing had slowed. Not into sleep—he knew the difference. Sleep was heavy, her body going limp against him. This was deliberate stillness. Words being stacked in the right order before she let them out.
He waited. His hand rested on her hip. The bond hummed between them. She opened her mouth, then turned—and walked away.