Chapter 5
Jack
Here’s what most people get wrong about me: They think the chaos is the whole thing.
It’s not. The chaos is the surface. It’s my forward momentum, my grin, my tendency to follow interesting things at speed without consulting the part of my brain that handles consequences.
That’s real, all of it, I’m not faking any of it.
But underneath the chaos is something that is very, very good at reading situations.
I read situations. And the situation I’m currently in, sitting at the counter of Tristan’s café watching Lola eat eggs with the focus of someone who hasn’t had a proper meal in days, is the following:
I bit her.
While having sex with her. I bit an Omega I’d known for two hours and created a partial bond she didn’t agree to. We were getting along so well, having so much fun, and then… yep. I’m not proud of my lack of restraint.
And now she’s here.
In my town. In my pack’s café. Eating Tristan’s eggs and arguing with Archer, which under any other circumstances, I would find the most entertaining thing to happen this week.
Currently I find it the second-most complicated thing to happen this week.
I sit at the counter and I say nothing and I let her have the space, because space is the only thing I have to offer right now that she might actually want.
Ryan sent me a look when we walked in. Not a surprised look—Ryan doesn’t do surprised, Ryan processes and responds and the processing is invisible—but the look that means I felt this last night and I’ve been waiting for the context and here it is.
I gave him the context at two in the morning and he gave me the framework: give her space, let her come to it, don’t push.
I am not pushing.
I am sitting at the counter being very deliberately not-pushing about everything.
Archer, bless him, is doing his territorial thing, which is not ideal timing, but watching Lola dismantle it with surgical precision is genuinely extraordinary.
I would be enjoying it completely if I weren’t also tracking the partial bond, which is right there, right across the café, warm and present and humming at a frequency that has been doing things to my nervous system since last night.
She’s here.
That’s the part my nervous system keeps returning to. She’s here and she didn’t leave. The bond-pull is keeping her in territory range but she could have fought it. People fight it, it’s not a cage, and she’s still here.
She stayed.
I’m not making that mean more than it means. I’m noting it.
The moment comes when I step around Archer.
She’s been tracking me the whole time. I know this the way I know most things, by paying attention to where people’s attention is when they think no one’s watching.
She’s been tracking me and pretending she hasn’t and when I lean on the counter two stools down from her and she looks at me, the partial bond flares with the frequency of two people acknowledging something they’ve both been feeling.
She says you.
One word. The tone she’s been saving since that moment last night. And I do what I should have done better last night, which is: I don’t deflect. I don’t charm my way out. I just look at her and say yes and mean it.
“You’re in a pack,” she says.
There it is.
“Yes,” I say.
I watch her process this, the rapid internal conversation, the implications of it expanding outward.
A partial bond to an Alpha is significant enough.
A partial bond to an Alpha in an established pack means the bond-pull doesn’t stop at me.
It touches the edges of all of us. She would have felt it when she walked in, or before.
She breathes in.
“Later,” she says.
“I’ll be here,” I reply.
And then the conversation continues around us. I stay at the distant end of the counter and I watch her. She argues with Archer, accepts food from Tristan without realizing she’s doing it, and actually takes note of Ryan.
She’s extraordinary. I knew this last night. I knew it at the bar and I knew it in the house. I knew it at one in the morning when she was gone and the bond-pull was running hot in my chest. I was sitting on my bed working out how badly I’d miscalculated. I knew it even then.
I know it more now, watching her dismantle Archer’s suspicion piece by piece just by being exactly who she is.
She leaves at the same time she was always going to leave—when she’s decided she’s done, not a moment before—and I follow her out because the later was a promise and later is now.
She’s on the cobblestones, hands in her jacket pockets, and she doesn’t look surprised when I run down the street after her. She just finally turns, and we stand on Main Street in the morning light. I wait, because waiting is what I owe her.
“How much of last night was deliberate?” she asks.
“None of it,” I explain. “The bite… none of it. I wouldn’t—” I stop. “I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. I want to be completely clear that I know what it is and I know what it means and I did not choose it. I certainly did not mean to force it on you.”
She observes me for quite a while. Reading me. I suspect that she’s very good at reading people and I am making myself completely legible, which goes against several of my natural instincts but is the correct call right now.
“I know you didn’t choose it,” she says, eventually. “I know what an instinct bond looks like. I’m not accusing you of a deliberate claim.”
“Okay.”
“I’m accusing you of sloppy instinct management,” she continues.
“That’s fair. That’s completely fair and I have no defense for it.”
Something in her jaw shifts. Not softening, but the adjustment of someone who came armed for a fight and has found the other party isn’t fighting back.
“The pack,” she says. “Tell me what it means. The partial bond and the pack.”
I remember to breathe. “It means the pull isn’t just toward me. It’s toward all of us, technically. You would have felt it when you walked into the café. The pressure of it.”
“The air.” She nods. “I thought it was… I’ve been feeling it since I drove into town. I thought it was the territory generally.”
“It is the territory generally. The pack bond is woven into the place. We’ve been here long enough.” I pause. “The partial bond adds a frequency on top of that. A direction.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I thought she was beautiful last night in the smoky lights of The River. Out here, with the sun catching the highlights in her hair, she is stunningly gorgeous. If I have to be tethered to someone, I’m glad it’s her.
“Can it be undone?” she asks.
The question lands the way I knew it would. I’ve been running it since two in the morning, the same calculation, and I’ve been honest with myself about what I want the answer to be and what the answer actually is, and those are not the same thing.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Partial bonds are rare. There’s not a lot of precedent for undoing them.
Most of the time they either complete or they fade if the parties separate for long and far enough.
But that could take decades.” I hold her gaze.
“I’ll look into it. Properly. I’ll contact people who know more than I do. ”
She scowls at me.
“I mean it,” I continue. “If you want it undone, I will find out how to undo it. I’m not saying it to make you feel better. I’m saying it because you didn’t choose this and you deserve every option to undo it.”
The silence between us is different from the silence at the counter. Less charged. More honest.
“Find out,” she says.
“I will.”
“Fast.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I won’t be in town long.”
I hold that. Not arguing with it. Not faking acceptance of it. Just holding it, the way you hold something that has weight and requires your full acknowledgment.
“How long do I have?” I ask.
“I don’t know. But I need to move on.” She looks at the cobblestones. “I have things following me that I don’t want landing here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious, Jack. Look into it.”
“I know you’re serious.” I pause. “I’ll have something for you as quickly as I can. It’s my highest priority.”
She nods. Once. The nod of someone who has accepted the terms and will hold you to them. “Last night,” she says, after a moment. “Before.”
“Yes?”
“That was…” She stops.
“What was it?” I prompt when it appears she’s not continuing.
“I’m not saying it was a mistake,” she says carefully. “I’m saying it became complicated.”
“The timing was—” I stop, redirect. “I’m sorry. Not for the night. For the morning. For not having better control than I apparently should have.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “You have terrible instinct management.”
“An established fact,” I agree.
A slight smile touches her lips. Not a smile—not yet, not quite—but the precursor to one, the thing that happens before a smile in people who don’t give them easily. “As soon as you can,” she says. “Tell me when you have something.”
“I promise.”
She nods again and puts her hands back in her jacket pockets and turns. I watch her go—the even pace, the straight shoulders, the auburn hair in the morning light—and I feel the partial bond running warm and constant in my chest.
I should be focused on finding the undoing. I am focused on finding the undoing. I meant every word. She didn’t choose this, she deserves every option, I will turn over every stone.
And while I’m turning over the stones, I’m going to be honest with myself about one thing: The partial bond happened because something in me, in the deep instinctive place that doesn’t consult the rest of me, recognized something. I’m not telling her that. But I’m not pretending I don’t know it.
She reaches the corner of Main Street.
She doesn’t look back.
The bond hums.
I go back inside to find Ryan, because Ryan will have already started making calls, because that’s what Ryan does, and because I need to know everything there is to know about partial bonds before she disappears out of town.