Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
She sat on her bed for a long time after the door closed behind him.
The book was still open in her lap, the page she'd pretended to read blurring into meaningless shapes.
She heard the women in the kitchen, voices low and careful the way they always got when they were talking about her.
A cabinet opened. Water ran. Someone set a kettle on the stove, and the normalcy of it all pressed against the back of her throat until she had to swallow hard to keep her composure.
He'd sat on her floor and fallen apart.
She kept coming back to that. Not the words, though they had carved through her one by one, and not the love confession that had stopped her heart and restarted it in a different rhythm.
She kept focusing on the way his voice had cracked mid-sentence, the way he'd pressed his hands against his eyes like a man trying to hold himself together and failing.
Ryker, who never broke, and instead wore control like armor, while spending years convincing the world he was fine, had sat and let her watch him shatter.
And he hadn't tried to make it look good.
That was the part she couldn't dismiss.
She closed the book and set it on the nightstand.
The pen fell out from behind her ear and rolled under the bed.
She let it go. Her hands were shaking, and when she pressed them flat against her thighs to steady them, the scar on her left palm caught the lamplight.
A thin white line across the center, somewhat healed but still tender when she touched it.
She'd done what she had to at the time to save her sanity.
But no matter how much the wound healed, she knew the mark would never fully fade.
She traced it with her thumb, remembering the relief that had flooded through her when the burning had finally stopped.
She'd thought that relief would mean freedom. But she was starting to wonder if the consequences were far more intense.
Because here was the truth she'd been circling around since the cove… Hell, since she'd looked at his mouth ten minutes ago and wanted it on hers so much her whole body had gone tight with it. She was already falling for him again.
She’d listened to him talk to her coven and be as honest as possible, and then he’d stood in front of his pack and humbled himself because it was what she had needed and deserved.
She rubbed at her chest as it tightened a little bit more.
She'd fallen for him the first time because the bond told her to. She was falling for him now because she'd seen who he was when the walls came down, and she wanted that man.
His jacket was still draped over her desk chair.
She reached for it without thinking, pulled it into her lap, and pressed her face into the collar.
Cedar and whiskey and the warm animal smell underneath that she'd never been sure about until she'd seen his wolf on the cabin porch that night, massive and desperate and whining.
It was the scent of the man and the wolf together, and breathing it in made her chest ache with a wanting that threatened her sanity once again.
What exactly was she waiting for?
She jumped off the bed, pulled on her boots, and swept his jacket around her shoulders. She bypassed the kitchen, knowing they would understand and that there would be time to explain later. This couldn’t wait another second.
The cabin door was unlocked and the front porch was empty when she stepped outside. The path toward the village was dark, the festival's lights the only thing vaguely visible through the trees in the distance. Except…
She could see him.
He was thirty yards down the path, walking slow with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the wind he couldn't feel.
A wolf unphased by the cold, giving her the distance she'd asked for even though every line of his body said he wanted to turn around and demand she forgive him.
"Ryker!"
He stopped walking, his shoulders going rigid and his hands emerging from his pockets to curl at his sides. He didn't turn around, and she understood why. Because she’d felt the same way when she’d forced herself to ask him to leave.
"Come back inside."
He turned then. The path was dark but her eyes had adjusted and she could make out his face, and the raw hope he was trying to hold back and failing at.
And the careful way he didn't move toward her even though she could feel the pull of him from thirty yards away.
Not magic. Just the magnetic weight of a man she wanted so much her heart ached.
"Are you sure?"
"I've been sure since the cove. I just wasn't ready to admit it."
He walked back to her, each step slow and deliberate, giving her every chance to change her mind.
When he reached the porch he was close enough for her to see the gold flickering at the edges of his irises where his wolf was pressing forward.
She thought about all the ways this man had hurt her, the cold mornings, the public accusations, the careful cruelty he'd used to keep her at arm's length, and then she thought about the way he'd said I was in love with you when I destroyed you with his hands over his eyes and his voice cracking like a man confessing to a crime.
She reached for his hand and turned it over. The poker chip was in his palm, the edges worn smooth. She closed his fingers around it and held them shut.
"I don't need the bond to choose you," she said. "I fell for you without it, and I want you to know that before the bond comes back and makes everything loud again."
His breath caught. She could feel it through his hand, the way his whole body went still, and his eyes searched her face with an intensity that made her skin heat.
"You can restore it?"
"Maybe. The edges are still there. I can feel where I cut it, like scar tissue. I think if I reach for it, it'll reach back."
He didn't ask her to do it. Didn't beg or push or even lean toward her. He just stood there holding that damned chip and looking at her like she was offering him something he didn't deserve. But the restraint in him, the way he kept holding back, letting her lead, was what made her certain.
"Come inside," she said again, and this time she took his hand and pulled him through the door.
The kitchen was empty. Her coven had cleared out, and Willow felt a rush of gratitude so fierce it stung her eyes. Four mugs still sat on the table, tea gone cold, and someone had left the stove light on so the cabin wasn't dark. They'd known. Of course they'd known.
She led him down the hall to her room and closed the door behind them.
The lamp was still on. Her bed was still rumpled from where she'd been sitting, the recipe book on the nightstand, the indent of his body still visible against the wall where he'd sat on the floor.
She turned to face him and he was right there, close enough to touch, his chest rising and falling with breaths that weren't quite steady.
"Sit on the bed."
He sat. She stepped between his knees, looking down at him, and the reversal of their earlier positions wasn't lost on her.
He'd put himself below her before because she deserved the high ground.
Now she was standing over him because this was her choice and she wanted him to feel every second of it.
She took his right hand and pressed it flat against her hip. Then she took her left hand, the one with the scar, and placed it over his heart.
His skin was furnace-hot through the shirt.
His heartbeat pounding under her palm, fast and hard, and when she pressed down the scar pulsed with a heat that had nothing to do with his body temperature.
The severed bond was there, just beneath the surface, the raw edges she'd created with blood and salt and her grandmother's words.
She could feel them reaching for each other across the gap she'd cut, frayed threads straining toward connection.
"Whether this works or not, I choose you," she said. "Me."
She pressed harder, gathering all of the magic she could muster and reached for the frayed thread with everything she had.
At first nothing happened. Her magic fizzled and the light of it snuffed out.
She held on, fingers curling into his shirt, and searched for the place where the bond had been.
It was there. She felt both sides of it pulling toward each other so hard it hurt to witness.
But every time they got close enough to catch, they fell short, dissolving into the silence where their connection used to live.
She poured more into it. Everything she had left, and it still wasn't enough.
Her hand shook against his chest and she couldn't look at him because whatever was on his face right now would finish her. She had done this and now her magic couldn't undo it. She didn't have the power to fix the damage.
Then the magic hit her like a wave. She cried out in surprise as power and energy soaked her in–love. It was her sisters. Her beautiful broken coven who’d followed her out of hell, was helping her.
And it was working. She could see his end of the bond reaching for her as desperately as hers reached for his.
She took the words given to her by grandmother and reversed them, speaking again in a language that so few understand.
Over and over until the magic had no choice but to follow her command.
More power surged and the connection between her and Ryker slowly began to reform.
It poured through the scar on her palm and into his chest, warmer and steadier than the burning bond she remembered, like stepping into sunlight after a long winter.
She felt the moment the threads stitched back together.
The raw edges found each other and fused, and the bond snapped into place with a force that rocked them both.