Chapter 17
Caleb
“Is the bond just a leash?”
I remembered her voice. Not loud. Not breaking. It was empty.
I told her the one true thing I had left: she was free. I meant it. Every word of it.
I didn’t look at her, but I could feel everything she was in the moment. I could sense her heartbeat slow to a crawl. The lack of will. How broken she felt.
She didn't argue. She didn't cry. She just nodded once, very slightly and then she left.
I stayed at the window. I heard the sound of her footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t dare follow her. I was too ashamed.
I heard her pack. Then the stairs. Then the car. She was gone.
Donovan once told me that my secret would hurt no matter what. Somehow, I hurt Olivia the worst with my choices.
And now, she was gone.
The vertigo hit quickly.
I tried to cross the room, but the world tilted.
My legs gave way.
All of a sudden, the heat dropped out of me. Cold took its place.
I wasn't prepared for the speed of it. It was only an hour after she drove off, but I could already feel the bond stretched and thinned.
My pulse turned thready. I could sense the wolf inside me grow quiet. Everything dimmed.
Not just the light. Everything. The color of the wooden floors, the sound of the wind and the noise of the first floor. I could barely smell anything.
I heard running in the hallway.
Jake appeared in the doorway, still wearing the clothes he'd had on at dinner. His already pale face turned paper white.
"No," he said.
He crossed the room in four strides and dropped to a crouch at my side, one hand gripping my arm above the elbow. He scanned me. Fast. Clinical.
"We can still catch her," he said. "I could call her. I could —"
"No." It came out slurred.
Jake's grip tightened. For a moment, he didn't move. He just held on, and I watched something move across his face. He chose not to argue.
He turned toward the door.
"Donovan!" he called out.
His voice hit the stone walls and came back sharp.
Donovan's footsteps were already in the corridor, suggesting that he hadn't been far. When he came to the doorway, he paused to assess my condition.
He didn't ask immediately.
"What happened?" he said.
"She knows." My breath thinned even more. "She left."
Something moved through Donovan's expression. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed as he drew closer.
I knew him well enough to know that he was already calculating. Territory, timeline, the Voss pack at the perimeter, me on the floor. What it all added up to.
Donovan didn't share his insights immediately. Instead, he directed Jake to the left of the room.
"Help me get him to the sofa," he said.
I felt another wave of vertigo as they hoisted me up. I didn't know what was upright anymore. My legs were functional — just barely — and I used them to push myself onto the seat.
"Master Caleb!"
Maureen's voice came from the hallway before she did. She was already moving fast, faster than I’d ever heard. She appeared in the doorway with her hands clasped in front of her and that look she got when something was wrong.
"The car," she said. "Miss Cruz drove off. I didn't notice until Tomas told me what he saw and —" She stopped when she saw me on the sofa. Her hand went up to her mouth. "No. Please don't tell me."
Donovan and Jake could only stare back.
She crossed the room without being asked and sat beside me, settling there wordlessly.
The truth was I kept two things from Olivia. First was what happened to her parents, and the second was that… the bond wasn’t just a connection. It was a tether. Distance weakened me. But nothing had ever been like this.
By the time Stella arrived, the estate had gathered itself into the kind of quiet that preceded decisions no one wanted to make. She came through the back entrance without knocking. She sensed the air the moment she walked in.
Jake met her in the hall, and I could hear the low, quick exchange between them — his voice, then hers cutting in before he finished.
When she came into the study, she took in the room: Donovan at the window, Jake in his chair, Maureen at my side.
Then her eyes landed on me and she let them stay there for a beat — longer than Donovan did. Whatever she thought, she chose not to voice it.
She looked at Donovan near the window, and something in her posture shifted. It wasn't softening. It was a kind of bracing.
"She went east," Stella said. "Two towns, maybe three. I tracked the scent line to the highway, but it faded after that."
It didn't matter how far she went. I didn't want her to come back.
Maureen, still beside me, tried to get me to eat. She raised some soup to my mouth.
"You need sustenance," she insisted.
Both of us knew that wasn't how it worked. But I took a few spoonfuls, if only to help Maureen feel like she could do something.
"We'll deal with Olivia later," Donovan said.
Stella bristled, but didn't retort. She set her jacket over the back of a chair and moved through the room, stopping near the fireplace.
"The Voss pack's scent is closer than it was this morning," she said. "They're not moving yet, but they're positioned. They already know."
Donovan turned from the window. "They know she left. Elias, no doubt."
Stella kicked at the grate of the fire. "They know more than that. They probably know Caleb is down. They've been waiting for exactly this."
"They're going to attack," Donovan finished for her.
Maureen clutched her chest. “Are you certain?” she asked. “But that’s against the code.”
Donovan shook his head. “It’s not going to be an ordinary attack,” he said. “I’m sure the Voss pack have thought of a way to skew the circumstance in their favor that won’t piss off the other packs.”
“It’s true,” Stella said. “They screwed us up this far, right?”
No one argued.
The fire in the grate burned down to coals. Nobody moved to add wood to it.
Jake sat stiffly in his chair. He couldn't muster any words. I watched him press his hands together in his lap and then separate them. He didn't say it, but I could tell how much Olivia leaving had hit him. He had liked her from the first day. Of all of us, he had been the most honest about it.
"Maureen," Donovan said, "how is he?"
I'm right here, was what I wanted to say. But I was too tired to really argue.
Maureen set the soup on the tray beside us. She looked at me first before she answered him — a small thing, a courtesy, before she said anything to him. I gave her a look of permission. I would have nodded, but I was too tired at the moment.
"Dwindling," she said. "He's in no shape to be doing anything. Let alone fighting. If this keeps up, he'll —" She pressed her lips together and refused to say anything more.
The words hung there. Everyone heard the end of it anyway.
Donovan turned to Stella. He didn't have to say anything for her to pick up on what he was asking.
"No," she said firmly. "I'm not going after her."
"But —"
"She made her choice, Donovan." Stella's voice stayed even, which was its own kind of severity. "We don't get to override it just because the timing is bad for the pack."
"She doesn't know, though."
This time, the voice came from Jake. He remained still in his chair, not looking at anyone. He had the particular stillness of someone who had been turning a thought over for a while and finally decided to let it out.
"If she knew," Jake continued, "she would come."
"Right," Stella said. "Because holding Olivia hostage with guilt is fair."
Jake shrank back. “I’m just saying… She would want to know. Wouldn’t she?”
Stella couldn’t answer that.
But what Stella said was exactly why I kept it from Olivia to begin with.
Olivia was the kind of person who would put herself on the backburner if it meant she could help someone. If she knew about this —
Donovan's jaw tightened. "People die while we wait."
"And people lose more than their lives if you take the decision away from her," Stella said.
"No one goes after her."
Everyone looked at me. No one expected me to be able to talk. I forced myself upright. Maureen hovered close, ready to catch me if I tipped again.
"I don't want her to come back for that," I said. "I won't do that to her."
"You keep saying that." Donovan moved closer.
He wasn't raising his voice, but each word landed like something measured and deliberate.
"You keep talking about what you won't do to her.
But you've been making decisions for her since the night she arrived.
You decided what she needed to know. You decided the truth about her parents could wait until it detonated on its own. This is the same thing."
I didn't deny it. I had nothing to throw against it.
But it was all the reason I wouldn't budge.
Donovan stopped in front of me. He didn't crouch. He looked down at me.
"You are doing the thing you said you'd never do." His voice changed, more direct.
I would flinch if I could.
"That's different…” I murmured.
Donovan shook his head. For a moment, I saw the smallest glimpse of disappointment. "It isn't."
I was quiet.
"Tell me I'm wrong," Donovan said.
I thought about my mother's face. Drawn, listless, unable to say no to the man who loved her.
I promised myself, young enough that the promise had become the foundation of everything I tried to be, that I would never become that kind of man.
That I would never use a bond as a claim.
That I would always ask what she wanted.
And I kept that promise in every place but the one that mattered most. I withheld the truth because I believed she couldn't bear it. Because I believed I knew what she needed better than she did.
I didn’t deserve her.
Which was exactly what my father had always believed about my mother, too.
Donovan held my gaze for another beat. Then he stepped back, slowly, like a man who had said what he came to say and was no longer interested in pressing the wound.
Stella picked up her jacket. “I’m going back to the perimeter,” she said. “We can’t lose track of their motions now.”
“Is that really the best idea?” Donovan challenged.
“I don’t see what else we can do right now,” was all she replied.
She moved to the door. No one tried to stop her.
She glanced at me. I thought I saw the smallest glimmer of an apology. It didn’t last.
Donovan stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Then he turned back to me. His expression settled back into the one he'd worn at the start of the night.
"This can't keep up," he warned. "And it's not just Olivia who's at stake here. Everyone is."
Donovan left the room. Perhaps to follow Stella, perhaps to make his own rounds.
Maureen left to get me refreshments, ignoring the nearly untouched bowl of soup next to me.
Only Jake stayed.
Jake moved the chair nearest the sofa closer and sat down. He didn't speak, but he did thumb through a book. I noticed it was the one from the night I told Olivia about my story.
I leaned back and looked out the window.
I wondered where Olivia was now. The bond was thin. I could barely make out where she was headed. I could only imagine what she was going through.
As much torment as I was in, she was probably in more.
Misery I brought upon her, no less.
The fog crept in. It settled into place, just like the cold evening air. The firs outside blurred together as my sensations dwindled further. Color drained to gray.
I had stood at this window in every version of what this estate had been. My father's house. The pack's house. My own. The tree line had always been something I could read and answer. Tonight it just looked like the edge of something I was going to have to let come.