Chapter 15 #2
I already resent her, but this? This makes it worse.
Thalassa made sure I’d forget Noa. Forget us.
All the time we spent orbiting each other as pups, the bond that had already begun to take shape, she stripped it clean from my mind like it never meant anything.
And now I’m mourning something I had and lost without realizing it.
Every missing memory feels like a wound I didn’t know was bleeding.
Noa’s eyes flick up to mine. Along with pained understanding, guilt is also written plainly across her face, like she’s the one responsible for the damage her mother left behind.
I squeeze her hand, silently telling her I don’t blame her and pleading with her to keep talking.
“Whenever I thought about this place, it was like looking through dirty glass. Shapeless shadows and sounds, but nothing solid. I could never hold on to the details…not even your name. When I came back and saw you, I knew you instantly, but before that, I told myself maybe the haze was a blessing. Because remember this place, this home I thought I’d been banished from, it broke something in me.
It hurt to think I’d been cast out for being latent. ”
My throat works around a protest, but she cuts me off with a small shake of her head.
“I know now that you were right,” she concedes, but it physically pains her to do so. “That day in the clearing, when you told me my own mother was the reason I couldn’t shift…you were right. She caged my wolf.”
Guilt claws at me, sharp and relentless.
I used that information as a weapon the day I rejected her.
I wanted her to hate me, thought it’d make it easier on her.
But she never has. Even after everything I’ve done, she’s only ever looked at me with understanding twisted with sadness.
Never disgust or hatred. That mercy—her capacity for forgiveness—hurts worse than anger or punishment ever could.
She’s quiet for a long moment before she finally continues. “But I also know when my mom caged my wolf away, chaining that piece of me down, she also stopped me from accessing my charmer gifts.”
Charmer gifts.
The phrase has something in my brain hesitating. It shouldn’t. Not when Thalassa Alderwood was her mother—one of the most powerful charmers on record—but somehow, I’d never connected that her daughter might also hold the same kind of magic.
“Are you a weaver like Thalassa?” The question slips out before I can stop it, my thumb still tracing the pale line of the scar on her palm.
She hesitates, shoulders lifting slightly. “I don’t think so?”
My brow furrows, waiting her out.
“Zora thinks I’m an oracle,” she says, almost like she’s testing how the title feels on her tongue. “I’ve been able to hear things…fragments of people’s thoughts, little flashes here and there. So far, it’s only happened during moments of heightened emotion.”
That gives me pause. I’ve heard of oracles. Foresight. Visions. Those I understand, but hearing minds? That’s rare, bordering on almost unheard of. But then again, I shouldn’t expect anything less from the Alderwood bloodline since power seems to be their Goddess-given birthright.
“Have you always been able to do that?”
“No. The first time it happened was when I came back…when I saw you again.”
My pulse stumbles.
That day. On my house’s back deck. Her reaching out when my control had started to slip.
I hadn’t understood the chaos then, the way my wolf had surged forward, desperate to claim what he couldn’t yet name.
But I do now. He’d known her instantly. Recognized what I had been too blind—or too damn stubborn—to see.
“I touched you and I heard you in my head. You kept saying…” She stops, bites her lip. “You were repeating it over and over.”
Mate. Mate. Mate. Mate. Mate.
Like we’ve switched roles, the word tumbles from me before I can stop it. “Mate.”
Her eyes flicker to the side, sunlight catching on tears she won’t let fall. There’s relief on her face, but familiar pain, too. It’s a perfect mirror of my own.
“Yes,” she breathes. “It’s all I could hear or focus on. And I didn’t understand what it meant, so when I repeated it back to you, I—” Her laugh is humorless and fragile. “I didn’t mean to claim you. It just happened. And then everything went to hell in a fucking handbasket from there.”
Noa’s sad smile guts me.
Her version of that day brings the truth into sharp focus—how one accident, one spoken word, had set off the chain of everything that followed.
Her declaring me as hers in front of Talis and Cathal.
The perfect shitstorm that gave the McNamaras the tools to back me into a corner.
And Carly—fuck, Carly—had been the last piece that had solidified my misguided decision.
Self-hatred and remorse chew through me with their sharp unrelenting fangs.
I lift her hand to my mouth and press a kiss to the mark there. She trembles, breath catching, and I feel it resonate through me.
“That never should have happened,” I manage, my throat tight with regret.
She gives a pitiful, wet laugh, blinking fast to keep more tears at bay. “No,” she agrees on an exhale. “I doubt that’s what my mom had in mind when she put all this in motion.”
“Thalassa told me she always mean for you to find your way back to me,” I tell her, holding her wrist and tucking her palm against the curve of my jaw. “Said she left safeguards in place to make sure of it.”
Noa’s reaction is small, but I catch it, the way her shoulders tense and her breath hitches. “I figured as much,” she admits slowly. “She told me once that you were going to be my ‘key’.”
I frown. “Key?”
“Don’t you get it?” she presses, stepping closer, searching my face like the answers might be written there.
“My wolf. My gifts. My memories of this place, of you, of why she took me away in the first place. All of it was locked up, but being near you? It’s…
cracking the cage she made. My memories are coming back in pieces.
My wolf feels closer. Like she’s tangible, and not just a fragment of my imagination.
And my charmer powers, they’re there, even if I don’t fully understand them.
I even managed to reach out for you when we were under attack—”
“That was your power?”
Her brows pull. “What did you think it was?”
I hesitate, feeling heat creep up my neck. “Our bond?”
She looks away at that, her throat working, but she doesn’t pull back.
Her fingers flex on my jawline. “Maybe it was part of it. Maybe that’s why I could reach you from so far away.
I don’t know. What I do know is everything changed after I came back here and saw you again. Like my mom said—you’re the key.”
I don’t want her to just have fragments of herself. I want her to be whole. In every aspect of her life.
“How do we make sure you get it all back?” I ask, my instinctual need to heal her making my question come out rougher than I mean it to.
She hesitates, the corners of her mouth tightening. “A bond that isn’t broken?” She voices it like a question, but we both know it’s not one.
I swallow hard, and for what feels like the hundredth time, I recite my oath, “I’ll fix this, Noa. I’ll fix us. You just have to let me.”
And that’s the hard truth of it. I can bleed for this bond, for her, for everything we lost, but it means nothing unless she chooses it too. She has to want me—the man who ruined her—to be the one to put her back together again.
Her hand still captured in mine, I draw her palm along my jaw. Slow, deliberate. The warmth of her skin burns a trail that my wolf acknowledges with a low, restless hum. Her scent clings to me and mine catches on her skin in return. It’s a wordless promise between us.
I lower her hand, keep it between us like a tether I can’t cut loose.
Caught by the uptick in wind, a stray strand of her hair slips forward, brushing her cheek, and I catch it.
Twist it once, twice, feeling the soft strands glide across my knuckle before I tuck it gently behind her ear.
My touch lingers at her temple before tracing the edge of her cheek and the slope of her jaw.
She doesn’t retreat.
The air between us changes, thickens with everything unsaid until I’m positive I may choke on it.
Her breath hitches and mine falters to match it. My fingertips continue their journey and glide down the side of her throat, brushing the delicate skin over her pulse. It thunders wild and fast beneath my touch, and I swear I can feel my own heart syncing with it.
She looks up at me then, eyes wide and shining with something like surrender.
And that’s all it takes.
The last of my restraint unspools and lands at her feet in offering.
When I dip my head to hers, it isn’t primal hunger that drives me.
It’s raw need—pure and terrifying in its simplicity.
Her breath catches, hesitation still lingering in her bright gaze, and just when my heart constricts with fear that she’s going to pull away, she lifts on her toes and meets me halfway.
Noa’s lips touching mine is the sweetest victory, and it’s even sweeter on my tongue.
My sweet Noa.
The kiss starts careful, testing and trembling, but it builds fast as need edges out any uncertainty. Every long night spent outside her door, every ache for her I’ve swallowed down, pours out of me. Noa tastes like something I’ve been waiting my whole damn life to earn.
Because I have.
Whether I knew it or not.
Her fingers twist in my shirt, yanking me closer like she’s terrified I might leave her. Never going to happen, sweet one. That small, desperate sound she makes, it fucking ruins me. A cross between a whimper and a whine. My wolf surges beneath my skin to answer its call.