8. Chapter 8 #3
Maybe because I came from Iron Valor where fate had quit behaving in tidy species lines a while back.
Maybe because I had seen too much now to pretend bonds were accidents or social conveniences.
Maybe because if I stopped believing that much, then what was left for me besides humiliation and appetite and a prince who could not make himself want me out loud?
Sloan’s face changed a little as she absorbed it. Not defensive. Not resistant. Just thoughtful.
Then she nodded.
“You’re right,” she said quietly. “The Goddess’s plans aren’t mine to question.”
Some of the tension left my shoulders on a breath I had not realized I was holding. Just enough to register.
She took one slow step closer, not invading, only re-entering the conversation with more care than before.
“I didn’t mean fate can’t be real,” she said. “I meant people make a mess of it.”
“Well,” I let out a dry little laugh with no humor in it. “There’s a groundbreaking observation.”
That got the smallest smile out of her.
“I know.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I just... I’ve seen bonds go badly when one party fights them. That’s all.”
Something in the way she said it made my stomach tighten.
“What do you mean?”
Sloan studied me for a second, as if deciding whether to continue. Then, because wolves as a species had apparently never found a door they didn’t at least test, she did.
“There’s a ritual,” she said. “A mate-bond ritual. If a rejected mate wants to have a mate bond with another. It can be done so they can still have that connection with another.”
I went still.
The light overhead hummed on.
I had never heard those words in that order before. Ritual. Mate-bond. Rejected.
Sloan must have seen something come over my face because her voice softened another degree. “It just gives a rejected mate the chance at finding happiness after. It ends the pull of the mate that rejected them and allows a new bond to form with a new mate.”
She said it kindly. As mercy. As a thing offered to women who had been left holding too much pain in an empty heart.
I heard every word.
Eases it.
Ends the pull.
New mate.
My jaw tightened before I could stop it. Then came the blink I could not quite control, the breath held half a second too long before I let it out.
A ritual.
I should have felt relief.
Goddess knew I had complained enough, internally and otherwise, about how this bond sat in me like barbed wire warmed over a fire.
The pull, the ache, the terrible, humiliating certainty of him.
The way my body knew before my pride could intervene.
The way every room changed shape when he entered it.
A reasonable woman should have heard Sloan and thought thank the Goddess, there’s a way to blunt this thing before it guts me.
Instead, the thought that rose in me was immediate and fierce enough to feel almost violent.
I don’t want that.
The certainty of it startled me.
I did not want to end the pull. I did not want to ease the ache.
What I wanted was so much worse.
I wanted Nikolay to want me.
Not a workaround. Not a mercy. Not some magical arrangement that would make it easier to live near him without my insides dragging on the floor.
Him. I wanted him to look at me and stop resisting whatever truth sat between us.
I wanted to be chosen in daylight, in language, in front of the Goddess and anybody else stupid enough to have opinions.
I wanted his wanting without apology in it.
And there it was. The ugliest need in me stripped down to the bone.
I wanted to be chosen.
Not tolerated. Not managed. Not soothed into acceptance. Chosen.
The realization hit my chest like something dropped from a great height, hard enough to ring through me. For one brief second, I could almost feel the shape of the bruise it would leave.
Sloan was still talking, gently now, maybe explaining who performed the ritual, or how uncommon it was, or that she only mentioned it because some people found comfort in having options.
I could not have repeated the words if my life depended on it.
They slid around the louder truth inside me and never found purchase.
Because all at once the corridor felt too bright.
The warmth of the pack lounge had already begun fading from my skin, leaving behind the memory of it rather than the thing itself.
Amber light replaced by fluorescent wash.
Easy laughter replaced by ventilation and scuffed floors.
A body could get comfort in intervals, apparently.
Could borrow belonging for two hours and still end the night right back where she started—holding a truth she had not wanted named.
Sloan finally fell quiet.
I looked at her and found kindness there. Real kindness. No agenda. No smugness over having offered me some practical answer to an impractical wound. If anything, she looked sorry she’d had to say it.
“Thank you,” I said, and heard at once how strange my voice sounded. Too even. Too careful. The voice of a woman balancing a glass thing in both hands and pretending she wasn’t afraid of dropping it.
She searched my face. “You okay?”
No.
“I’m fine,” I said, because women had been lying with that sentence since language began, and I saw no reason to abandon tradition now.
Sloan did not call bullshit this time. Maybe because she could smell how useless it would be. Maybe because wolves knew there were some truths a body had to turn over alone before it could survive anybody else touching them.
She only nodded once.
“All right.”
We stood there a second longer in the ugly white light, two wolves in the back veins of a vampire club, with the music of other people’s pleasures moving through the walls and no help in any of it.
Then Sloan touched my arm, brief and solid, and moved on down the corridor toward the staff exit.
I stayed where I was.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The industrial cleaner bit at the air beneath the club’s sweeter scents. Somewhere beyond the concrete and steel, Obsidian kept selling pleasure to creatures with more money than peace.
And I stood in the middle of that bare corridor with the warmth of the pack lounge fading from my skin and the truth sitting heavy in my chest like a cost I had only just understood.
I did not want relief.
I wanted him.
That was worse.