Jaleesa #2
His hand is on the mattress between us. Palm down, fingers spread. Not reaching. Just there, occupying space my hand keeps drifting toward like a compass needle finding north.
“This will be hard.” My voice is clinical. Controlled. The voice I use for settlement negotiations when the numbers aren’t in my favor. “Bond-separation symptoms. Pain, insomnia, hormonal withdrawal.”
“I’ve read the literature.”
“Then you know some people go to the brink.”
“And some don’t.” He’s staring straight ahead, at the window where gray morning light is pushing through the curtains. “There have been documented cases. People who walked away from a recognition bond and survived.”
“Not many.”
“Enough.”
My knee drifts toward him again. I lock it in place.
“We’re gambling our sanity.” I say it plainly, the way I’d state a risk factor to a client. No drama. Just the math.
“Yes.” His voice is quiet. “We are.”
The honesty of the moment—two people staring at what they’re about to do to themselves, with full knowledge of the cost—is worse than any argument we’ve had.
Arguments are adversarial. This isn’t. This is two people on the same side of a terrible decision, and the brief alliance is more dangerous than the enmity ever was.
“We’re both strong.” I say it and I mean it. “We’re both disciplined. We’re both too stubborn to let a weekend in a cabin dictate the rest of our lives.”
He turns his head. Looks at me. And for one unguarded second, before the lawyer slides back into place, his eyes hold something that makes my chest compress—not pain, not desire, but the quiet devastation of a man who is about to do the hardest thing he’s ever done and has already decided to do it anyway.
“We got this,” he says.
I nod. “We got this.”
His pinky finger brushes mine on the mattress. The contact is so small it could be accidental. It isn’t. My breath catches. His hand withdraws. The eleven inches returns.
***
The bathroom mirror again. Same woman, same reflection, same sink I gripped two days ago while my world detonated. Except everything behind my eyes is different.
I trace the edge of the bite mark with my fingertip. The skin is raised. Tender. It will scar—a permanent ridge against my mahogany skin, visible to every alpha, every omega, every person who looks at my neck for the rest of my life. A brand I didn’t consent to. A claim I didn’t authorize.
He appears in the doorway behind me. Our eyes meet in the glass.
“You actually did that.” My voice is flat. The wound underneath it is open.
“I went a little crazy.” He leans against the frame, arms crossed. “When you wouldn’t admit you were mine. It was instinct.”
“Yet you don’t seem unhappy about it.” I watch his reflection.
He tries to suppress it. Fails. The smirk that crosses his face is infuriating and—against every principle I hold, against the entire legal and ethical framework of my adult life—devastatingly attractive.
“Can’t help it.”
I roll my eyes. Actually roll them, full rotation, at the man who just marked me for life.
The gesture is so ordinary, so reflexively me, that it feels more intimate than anything we’ve done in the bedroom.
We are people who roll their eyes at each other.
That’s a category of relationship I didn’t plan for.
“How will you survive?” I ask. Not sarcasm. Real. “The separation. The withdrawal.”
The smirk drops. Something harder, older, more resolved takes its place. “I’m strong. And if I’m not, I’ll have the image of my father wasting away to keep me strong.”
The words land in my chest and sit there.
The boy who watched his father dissolve and swore it would never be him—standing in a bathroom doorway, bracing himself to walk away from his omega by summoning the ghost of the man who couldn’t.
I ache for him. I file it away to examine later, when I’m a hundred miles from his scent and my thoughts are my own again.
“What if you’re pregnant?”
The question is blunt. Direct. Lawyerly. His arms uncross and his posture shifts—straighter, more alpha, the man who negotiates non-negotiables.
“I won’t be. This wasn’t my regular heat. It was triggered by proximity—by you, by the stress of facing a fated mate. An anomaly. Not a cycle. The odds are slim.”
“Not good enough.” His voice drops into the register that means the conversation is over and the verdict is in. “If you are pregnant, you tell me immediately. Not in a week. Not after deliberation. Immediately.”
I hold his gaze in the mirror. The raw terror behind the command—the undisguised fear of a man who just discovered he could create a life with the woman he’s about to walk away from—deserves honesty.
“I will.”
He nods once. Leaves the doorway. His footsteps move down the hall toward the great room, and with each step the distance between us stretches, and my body tracks it the way a compass tracks magnetic north. Five feet. Ten. Fifteen. The pull doesn’t lessen. It sharpens.
I turn back to the mirror. Pull the scarf from my bag and wrap it high around my neck—two loops, tight, the silk pressing against the bite mark until it disappears beneath fabric.
I spray blocker at my wrists, my throat, my elbows.
The French jasmine floods back, thick and cloying, burying his scent under manufactured flowers.
My reflection looks like the woman who arrived here on Friday. Blazer. Scarf. Professional armor, all accounted for. The disguise is flawless.
In my suitcase, tucked between my spare blazer and a stack of legal pads, are two of his sweaters and a dress shirt.
I packed them this morning while he was in the kitchen.
His scent is concentrated in the fibers—dense, warm, layered with the dark complexity of an alpha I am choosing to walk away from.
The withdrawal will come in waves, and when it does, the scent will help.
A controlled dose. Enough to take the edge off until I wean myself clean.
That’s what it’s for. Pain management. Practical. Clinical.
I zip the suitcase shut and don’t look back at the bedroom—the wrecked sheets, the dented pillows, the nest I built without knowing I was building it.
We got this.
I pick up my bag, square my shoulders, and walk out of the Vaughn family lodge on steady legs with my chin high and a stolen sweater pressed against my legal briefs, and I do not let myself think about the way his pinky brushed mine on the mattress, or the crack I put in his foundation over breakfast, or the fact that for now already feels like the most dangerous promise I’ve ever made.
We got this.