Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
CASSIAN
As soon as Soren fell asleep in my arms, the warmth between us was too strong for me to ignore; I carried him to his nest and tucked him in with the sweater I’d been wearing in his hands, and I headed straight for my office.
Ignoring everything else in the room, the photos of people who needed to pay for Raff’s death, the lists of names and addresses, the testimonies of omegas I’d tracked down, I switched on my laptop and typed fated second bond after losing bonded mate into the search bar.
Hundreds of results appeared. Most were folklore sites, spiritual nonsense, anonymous forums full of people insisting they’d recognized their mate’s scent across crowded rooms or dreamed of wolves they’d never met.
I ignored those and searched again, narrowing it to veterinary journals, shifter anthropology papers, old university archives, anything that cited actual research instead of stories passed around campfires.
Bonded mates. Secondary bonds. Multiple fated mates. Mate bonds after death.
There wasn’t much.
Every paper agreed on one thing: a true mating bond was exceptionally rare and impossible to manufacture. Most shifters lived entire lives without finding theirs.
Like I’d found Raff.
After that, certainty disappeared from the research.
One paper, almost sixty years old, suggested that a handful of historical records described individuals who had formed a second true bond after the death of a mate.
The author dismissed most of the accounts as unreliable because they relied on oral histories instead of medical observation.
Another researcher argued the opposite—that shifter society had romanticized the idea of one perfect mate so completely that it had ignored any evidence to the contrary.
Neither could prove anything.
There were references to wolves who had chosen new partners after losing their mates, but every source carefully distinguished between choosing someone to love and actually experiencing another true bond. Those weren’t the same thing.
I rubbed a hand across my face and kept reading.
One article proposed that the instinct to protect vulnerable omegas—particularly pregnant omegas—could be overwhelming for unmated alphas and occasionally for widowed bonded alphas whose wolves had lost their purpose.
The behavior could be mistaken for the beginning of a mating bond when it was nothing more than deeply ingrained biology.
That should have reassured me.
Instead, it irritated me.
My wolf didn’t want to just protect Soren. He settled whenever Soren was near. He listened to his breathing. He knew the difference between Soren’s fear and his exhaustion. He’d accepted Asha before she’d even been born. None of that appeared anywhere in the papers.
Buried halfway through an anthropology text from nearly a century ago, I found a single paragraph I’d almost missed.
Among several northern packs, there existed a belief that fate did not always grant one mate, but one soul at the time it was most needed. Such accounts are impossible to verify, as bonded pairs rarely survived long enough after bereavement for meaningful study.
That was it.
One paragraph.
No evidence. No data. No conclusions.
I stared at the words for a long time before closing the laptop.
It wasn’t proof.
But it was enough to stop me from telling myself I was losing my damn mind.
“I know what I feel.” I rubbed my chest as I muttered the words and felt a burning where my mate bond with Raff sat.
After he’d died, I’d lived because breathing required less effort than dying, and because the house gave me purpose. Now Soren was asleep upstairs with his daughter, and somehow I’d found myself planning beyond tomorrow. I’d even started collating notes and resources.
Where could we go where he’d be safe? I needed to get him up to Quebec, where I had contacts.
I didn’t know much about the Kastor or Dalton families, other than the surface-level shit they had going on, but if I could talk to Ronan, I could learn more and strategize, and between us, we could get Soren over the border,
I just wish he’d call back.
Hoped to hell he was safe.
I was calculating how long it would be before Soren could shift post-baby, already working out routes to avoid the SED. They were strong along the borders, and although I had ways past them as an Alpha who was former ORT, with an omega and baby in tow, it would be nearly impossible.
Three years without allowing myself to imagine next month, never mind three years from now.
My wolf wasn’t only grieving—he was preparing for war.
That frightened me more than anything because it felt like a betrayal.
I closed my eyes as guilt hit me. Raff. It wasn’t that I loved him less.
It wasn’t even possible. Every room in this house still carried pieces of him.
The library existed because Raff wanted somewhere to disappear with a book while snow buried the mountain outside.
The ridiculous wolf mugs he’d insisted on buying from every gift shop we’d ever stumbled across were scattered through the kitchen cupboards because he claimed life was too short for matching crockery.
Half the blankets in the sitting room had been chosen because he was permanently cold, and I’d never once convinced him that one blanket ought to be enough for a grown man.
I still reached for him in my sleep, waking with my hand on cold sheets.
Until Soren.
Wanting to protect Soren and Asha wasn’t replacing Raff.
Living isn’t wrong.
For the first time since the warehouse, I wasn’t following him into death.
I set the untouched coffee in the sink. “I need to talk to Raff,” I said aloud, and my wolf lifted his head immediately.
I headed downstairs, poured coffee out of habit, took one mouthful, then set the mug beside the sink. My gaze was fixed on the hook beside the back door, where my old leather coat still hung.
Raff had bought it for me even though I’d told him it was too expensive. He’d rolled his eyes and bought it anyway because, according to him, if I was determined to spend every morning wandering around a mountain in every kind of weather, I should at least stop pretending I was indestructible.
I wanted my fur, but I stayed in my skin for this, and I shrugged on the coat before I set off down the familiar path.
My wolf loved these woods. He loved the cold air filling his lungs and the rhythm of paws on earth, loved running the boundary lines until every scent belonged exactly where it should and every step carried memories.
There was the fallen pine Raff had insisted we turn into a bench instead of cutting up for firewood because, apparently, every mountain path needed somewhere romantic to sit.
The bench was still there, weathered now, moss creeping over one leg where I hadn’t bothered to scrape it away.
The memories hurt, and they always would.
What surprised me was that they weren’t trying to crush me anymore; instead, they walked beside me. Goddess, was I even making sense anymore?
I stood in front of the stone for a long time before taking off my jacket to sit on and lowering myself onto the packed snow.
I brushed off accumulated ice and rested my hand against the cool granite.
“Hi, baby,” I said quietly, and swallowed hard.
Now what? How did I explain what I’d done?
“I want to make a promise. I’m ready to make a promise.
” The words hung in the stillness between the trees.
“To Soren. He’s an omega. A snow leopard.
He crashed halfway up the mountain because Ronan sent him here.
He was terrified when I found him. Terrified of me, terrified of everyone. ”
I stopped then, not sure what to say next.
“He’s having a baby.” I let out a slow breath.
“A little girl.” Even saying it aloud made something warm settle beneath the grief.
“Her name’s Asha, and somehow she’s already taken the part of my heart I have left, and she’s not even here yet.
” I looked back at the stone. “I want to promise that I’ll protect them, and I don’t know what I’m doing. Why Soren? Why Asha?”
I closed my eyes because this was the hardest part to admit to him.
The awful soul-destroying truth of it all.
“I want to tell Soren that I’ll stay beside him.
” The words broke something open inside me.
“I thought I was protecting them, but what I was really doing was choosing to live, and I don’t understand it.
Goddess, I wish you were here to explain it to me.
I wish you and our child were in this house with me. ”
He’s dead.
My Raff is gone.
“I know that you’re not here; I’m not losing my mind. I know that if you were here, then fate wouldn’t have sent Soren to our mountain.”
Silence. I sat there for a long time, listening to the wind. Every visit, I’d come here hoping for some impossible sign that Raff could hear me. A gust of wind or a bird landing on his stone. Anything to tell me I hadn’t been left entirely alone.
“I’ve been angry with you,” I admitted. “I don’t think I ever said that out loud.
” I rubbed my thumb over the edge of the stone.
“I’ve been so angry that you went back into the warehouse, and that you left me to face seeing you dying in front of me.
” Even now, guilt twisted through me. “And then I feel guilty because you didn’t choose to leave me; I know you didn’t.
” I laughed quietly, shaking my head. “Hell, if anyone had been given a choice to stay or go, it would’ve been you.
You’d have negotiated with death until it gave up from exhaustion. ”
I can’t do this.
“You’d like Soren.” I looked down. “He reminds me of you sometimes, but not because he’s like you at all.
He wasn’t one of the lucky ones; he didn’t have any kind of life, and he’s spent so long surviving that he doesn’t know how to ask for anything.
The trouble he’s bringing to the door is insane; he’s the son of one of the Families, and his baby was fathered by someone from another Family, and Goddess knows how the three of us will get out of this alive. ”
I could hear Raff’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting beside me.
“You’re going to be okay. Don’t stop living because I died.”
Another long silence settled around me, and the breeze stirred through the pines.
“They need me, Raff, and I don’t understand how this has happened, but I need them. They’re mine to look after, to love, to live my life with.” Emotion stole my voice, and tears tracked down my cheeks. “How can I do this to you?”
I cried in silence, but somehow the weight in my bond eased another small bit, the tiniest of movements.
“Please forgive me?”
I waited for a whisper through the pines, but the mountain was quiet.
The answer wasn’t something I heard. It was something I felt.
The guilt that had lived beneath every breath for three years loosened its grip just enough for hope to find a way in.
Raff hadn’t become smaller inside my heart.
I’d simply remembered there was room to keep living around the love I’d never lose.
“I will always love you, Rafferty Moreau,” I whispered. “Always.”
But there’s room in your heart for another.
I started at his voice, clear in my head, different from my wolf, and the trees whispered over and over.
I will always love you, Cassian.