Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Alex
I'm running.
The forest floor under my paws is frozen solid, the cold not touching me the way it touches humans, just information, just texture, the feeling of packed snow under each stride.
The trees blur past and my lungs pull the air in deep and everything is scent and sound and motion and I am not thinking in words.
Ahead of me, RJ runs.
He’s fast. Faster than I expected — the large grey wolf moving through the trees like he’s lived here long enough to know every root, every dip, every turn.
He glances back at me — just once, those pale eyes catching the moonlight — and then he breaks left and accelerates and I feel it in my chest like a match strike.
He's playing.
I push harder.
The forest opens into a clearing and I come through the treeline at full speed and RJ is already there, already shifting, the wolf becoming the man between one breath and the next — and he turns to face me and his eyes are clear.
Not the fractured distant thing I've been watching through chain link.
Clear. Present. Locked on me with the specific intensity of someone who knows exactly where they are and who they're looking at and what they want.
I shift.
The cold hits my skin and I don't care because RJ is crossing the clearing and he's not stopping and when he reaches me he lifts me like I weigh nothing, my back against the nearest tree, his body pinning mine, and his mouth comes down and I stop thinking about anything at all.
He kisses me breathless. That's the only word for it — breathless, the air going out of me and not coming back because I don't need it, I just need this, his mouth and his hands and the bond blazing between us at a frequency I've never felt before, complete and certain and roaring.
His forehead drops to mine.
"Alex," he says. Just that. My name in his mouth like he's been saving it.
"Yes," I say.
He pushes inside me and I feel the need in it — not just his body, all of him, the thing that has been building since the fence and the chain link and the howl and all the distance between us, finally, finally—
This is what it's supposed to be—
I wake up.
Dark. Ceiling. The cottage.
My lips are still tingling. I press my hand to my mouth like I can hold onto it and feel the ghost of his kiss there, warm and real and already fading.
My body is still warm in a way the room doesn't account for, a heat that has nothing to do with the blanket.
And his scent — impossible, he's five miles away, it can't be here — but it is, faint at the edge of my awareness, pine and cold and RJ, dissolving as I breathe.
I lie there and feel it go.
Don't, I think, at all of it. Don't go.
It goes anyway.
What's left is the absence — the shape of what I just had, the dream-version of him clear-eyed and choosing me, his voice saying my name like he'd been saving it.
What's left is the wanting pressing at my wrist like a bruise and the knowledge that he's at rock bottom five miles away and I'm here with ghost-warm lips and his scent already gone.
Before I can think through the reasons not to—I reach.
Not with my hands. With the bond, the unfinished thing, the wanting that’s been building since the day I arrived at Feral Academy, patient, bruised, not yet.
I push toward it the way you push toward something you can almost touch, the way the dream made it feel possible — extending a reach that doesn’t have a name toward the frequency I know is his.
For a second, nothing.
Then it catches.
My breath goes.
It’s faint — a thread, thin and real, pulling taut between us across five miles of trees. Him. Alive and present and reaching back before he understands what he’s reaching toward, RJ answering a pull he can feel but can’t place.
The ghost warmth in my body surges.
"RJ," I whisper. Into the dark. "It's okay. I'm here."
The bond sharpens.
And then it detonates.
Rage slams into me so hard I can't breathe — not focused, not controlled, wild and tearing and searching in every direction at once.
The feeling underneath it isn't words but it might as well be: where are you where are you where are you.
He can feel me but he can't find me. No scent.
No body. No anchor. Just a presence on the other end of something he doesn't have language for and can't locate, and it's making him worse, the rage turning inward and outward and everywhere at once—
The connection snaps.
Jagged. The echo of it tears through my chest and leaves nothing behind except silence and the knowledge of what I just felt him spiral into.
I curl over my knees.
"Oh God." Into my hands. "Oh God, I made it worse."
My eyes are wet. I press my palm flat against my mouth and breathe through it and feel the absence where the thread was — the emptiness that almost connected and didn't and left him worse for the attempt.
His scent is completely gone now.
My lips have stopped tingling.
The warmth in my body is just the blanket and nothing else and RJ is five miles away in a room I can't reach and I just reached anyway and made it worse and I knew, I knew how he responds to things he can't locate, I know what it does to him when something is there and then isn't, and I reached anyway because the dream felt real and his scent was still on my skin and I thought—
I thought—
The door opens.
I don't look up. The bond shifts — steady, grounded, familiar. Dalton. He comes to where I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and crouches in front of me and doesn't touch me yet. Just waits. Giving me the second to choose it.
I don't pull back.
His hand comes to the back of my neck. Firm. Still. The bond settles around the contact and I breathe.
"What happened," he says.
"I tried to reach him," I say. My voice is wrong. "Through the bond. It's not a bond yet but I thought if I pushed toward it—"
"And."
"It worked. For a second it worked and then he couldn't find me and he—" I stop. Breathe. "He was already bad and I made it worse. I felt him spiral and then it snapped and I don't know what's happening to him right now and I can't—" My throat closes. "I can't get to him."
Dalton's grip on my neck tightens slightly. Anchoring.
"You didn't break him," he says.
I make a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "It felt like I did."
"He's already unstable. You reaching didn't create that."
"Then why did it get worse."
A beat. He doesn't rush to answer. He doesn't fill space with reassurance.
"Distance isn't neutral for him," he says. "It's pressure. You reaching gave him something to respond to and then took it away and he couldn't track where it went." A pause. "It's not your fault. It's not something you could have known."
"I should have known," I whisper. “I just miss him so much.”
"You were half asleep and you missed him," Dalton says. "It’s ok."
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Outside the window the trees are dark. Five miles through those trees RJ is somewhere in Red House with whatever just happened still running through him and I'm here with a snapped thread and ghost-warm lips that don't tingle anymore and not enough.
"So reaching like that," I say. "It's not enough."
"Not like that," he says. "Not from here."
I breathe.
"Lie down," Dalton says.
I don't argue.
I lie back and he moves to sit against the headboard and I put my face against his side and feel his hand move to my hair, slow and even, and I breathe and feel the bonds — Leo west, Gray in the dorm, Jake and Jim together, and the place where the thread was that is now just absence.
"What if I can't fix it," I say. Into his chest.
"You're not going to fix it tonight," he says. "Tonight you sleep."
"And tomorrow."
"Tomorrow we figure out the next thing."
Not comfort. Just true. True is all I have room for.
I breathe.
His hand moves in my hair.
Outside the window the trees hold their dark and cold and somewhere through them RJ is carrying what I just accidentally gave him, and I'm going to have to hold that and keep going anyway because stopping doesn't help him and because the panel meets and before it does I need to be ready.
Not yet, I think. At the unfinished thing. At the bond that snapped.
But I'm coming.
I close my eyes.
Dalton's hand moves in my hair until I stop feeling the absence and fall into sleep.