Chapter 3 Eastbound
Nora POV
The tears dried somewhere around dawn. The grief stayed, but my body had nothing left to give it.
Morning came gray and reluctant, the sky lightening over the road ahead while the pines on either side stayed dark.
I’d been driving for hours on a highway that cut through nothing but pine and birch and the occasional shuttered gas station.
My fuel gauge sat just above a quarter tank.
The coffee from the garage mug was long gone and my stomach had turned sour and empty.
The bond pulsed. A wave of nausea that wasn’t mine rolled through my gut, thick and miserable. Rafe. He was sick. The sensation was distant and secondhand but unmistakable.
I hoped he was puking.
The thought was mean and small and I didn’t take it back. He’d stood in front of two packs and gutted me. If the Goddess wanted to make his stomach turn every time my anger spiked through the bond, that felt like the bare minimum of cosmic justice.
I rolled my window down and let the September air cut across my face. Cold enough to sting. The pine smell hit hard, clean and sharp, and underneath it the faintest mineral edge that meant water. Big water. Lake Superior was somewhere ahead of me, and the highway was angling toward it.
The steering wheel tugged at my hands. The truck dragged right, subtle at first, then insistent. I had to fight to hold my lane. I eased off the gas and listened. A low grinding hum vibrated through the floorboard, rhythmic, getting worse.
Wheel bearing. Passenger-side front, from the sound.
I found a wide gravel shoulder where the road curved past a stand of white birch and pulled over. The engine ticked as it cooled. I sat for a moment with my hands still on the wheel while my body adjusted to the sudden stop.
Then I got out and went to work.
The jack was behind the seat. I set it on the flattest patch of gravel I could find, chocked the rear wheels with rocks, pulled the front end up, and slid a stand under the frame.
The lug nuts fought me. Three of them were rusted tight, and I had to stand on the breaker bar to crack them loose.
The physical effort felt good. My shoulders burned and my lower back complained and none of it had anything to do with Rafe Sutherland or his ice-blue eyes or the way his scent had filled my lungs at the ceremony and made my wolf sing.
The bearing was failing. When I pulled the hub assembly apart, I found heat discoloration and the beginnings of scoring on the race where the grease had failed.
I didn’t have a replacement bearing in my toolbox, but I had lithium grease, clean rags, and steady hands.
I cleaned the assembly, repacked the bearing, set the preload, and lowered the truck back down.
It might hold long enough to reach a parts store. I wouldn’t know until I tried.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and sat on the tailgate with my boots hanging over the edge.
The sun had climbed above the tree line, pale through a thin layer of cloud.
Cars passed on the highway in ones and twos, nobody slowing, nobody looking.
Just a woman sitting on her truck with grease on her knuckles and no place to go.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I pulled it out.
Seven missed calls. Three from Gordon. Two from Delia. Two from Rafe.
Voicemails waited in a neat little stack. The notification badges stirred neither curiosity nor anger. Even being wanted after I’d been thrown away brought no satisfaction, only a flat, tired emptiness.
I didn’t block any of them. I didn’t listen to any of them either. I put the phone back in my pocket and jumped down from the tailgate.
The service station appeared forty minutes later, a small block building with two pumps and a hand-painted sign that read LUND’S GAS & BAIT.
I filled the tank and went inside. Live minnows bubbled in a tank beside the beef jerky, and old coffee cooked down on a stained burner.
The woman behind the counter had iron-gray hair pulled back in a braid and a face weathered by years of Lake Superior wind.
She watched me pay for the fuel and a pack of peanut butter crackers and a bottle of water without comment, then said, “Long drive?”
“Getting longer.” I pocketed my change. “Anything east of here hiring an engine mechanic?”
She considered the question before answering. “Karlsson Boatyard, over in Pine Harbor. Wade’s been short-handed since his last wrench quit in June. Marine engines, though. Diesels and outboards. Not cars.”
“Diesel’s diesel. What’s Pine Harbor like?”
“Small. Quiet. Lake town. Fishing, tourists in summer, fog the rest of the year.” She paused. “Different kind of folks over there. Keep to themselves, but they’re decent. Wade Karlsson’s fair. Pays on time.”
I nodded. Something in the way she said different kind of folks made my wolf’s ears prick.
Pine Harbor had a reputation among wolves.
Its pack was small and held little influence, assembled from strays who’d left other territories for their own reasons and found a place that didn’t ask too many questions.
The pack had no treaty alliances or obligations to return a runaway Alpha’s daughter to her father’s doorstep.
“How far?”
“Long way yet. Follow 28 to the lake road and keep going till you smell fish.”
I bought a second pack of crackers and left.
The highway opened up as I drove. The pines thinned and the sky got bigger, and then the lake appeared in pieces between the trees.
Dark water showed through gaps in the forest, vast and cold beneath the lowering sky.
Out there, mating treaties and pack politics meant nothing.
Neither did the way a woman’s chest could ache when a bond she hadn’t asked for kept feeding her someone else’s discomfort.
Rafe’s irritation came through again around noon, sharp and restless. I pushed back without thinking, shoving my own anger down the thread between us, and felt him flinch. Good. Feel that.
My wolf stirred. She was hurting. The rejection had wounded her differently than it had wounded me.
I understood the betrayal, the politics, the calculated cruelty of what Gordon and Conrad had arranged.
My wolf only knew that her mate had spoken words that burned and then stood next to another female while the fire was still going.
She wanted to run. She wanted to howl until someone answered.
She wanted to go back and fight Delia for what was hers.
He’s not ours, I told her. He chose.
She didn’t accept that. Wolves don’t understand choice the way humans do. The Goddess confirmed the bond. The touch proved it. Everything after that was supposed to be simple.
I ate the crackers while I drove, washing them down with water that tasted like the plastic bottle. The road curved along the lakeshore through small towns that were barely more than a gas station and a church. The trees got taller, and the air got colder.
My phone buzzed twice more. I didn’t look.
By late afternoon the light was fading and the truck was running rough.
The bearing repair was holding but the engine needed attention I couldn’t give it on a roadside.
I needed a lift, a parts store, and at least a day of uninterrupted work.
I needed a place to park where nobody would tell me to move along.
I needed to stop long enough to make a plan.
The overlook appeared around a bend in the shore road, a wide gravel pullout with a split-rail fence and a view that dropped straight to the water. Lake Superior stretched out below, dark gray under a sky that was going purple at the edges. The far shore was invisible, and water filled the horizon.
I backed the truck in so I could see the water through the windshield, killed the engine, and sat.
Without the engine noise or road hum, the cab felt hollow. Wind moved through the pines, and waves struck the rocks below in an even rhythm.
I put my forehead against the steering wheel and let the grief come.
At the ceremony, grief had been sharp and bright, all shock and fury and the specific horror of being publicly discarded. This was the other kind. The slow one that came after the adrenaline burned off and seemed likely to stay.
I grieved the life I’d expected. I’d never had a life with Rafe.
We’d been kept apart since I turned eighteen, separated by custom so the Goddess could have Her clean confirmation.
I didn’t know him. I’d built no memories with him, shared no meals, no arguments, no late nights talking until the words ran out.
What I’d lost was the certainty of that promise.
It had given me a place, a role, and a future that justified all the years I’d spent being dutiful, patient, and good.
Luna of Copper Point. Mate of the Alpha’s heir. A woman whose mechanical skills would have been tolerated as a charming eccentricity while her real job was standing beside her husband and producing the next generation of Sutherland wolves.
I’d wanted it. That was the part that made me angry at myself.
I’d wanted it because wanting it was easier than wanting something I’d have to build from nothing.
Wanting it spared me from having to choose.
The decisions had been made, and the future seemed certain.
All I had to do was show up in a green dress and let the Goddess say yes.
She’d said yes. And then Rafe had said no.
I pulled my jacket tighter and reclined the seat as far as it would go. The cab smelled like diesel and cold metal and the faint chemical sweetness of lithium grease on my hands. Familiar smells. Safe ones.
My phone sat in the cup holder. The screen was dark.
I picked it up and looked at the call log.
Nine missed calls now. Gordon, Delia, Rafe, repeating in a pattern that told me they were taking turns.
Coordinating. Working the problem as a team, the way they’d worked the problem of replacing me with my sister.
I set the phone face down and closed my eyes.
Sleep came in fragments, broken by wind gusts that rocked the cab and the occasional sweep of headlights from a passing car.
Between the thin patches of rest, I lay awake and stared at the lake through the windshield.
The moon was low and the water caught its light in long silver streaks that shifted with the waves.
The bond was quiet. Rafe must have been sleeping, because the thread between us had gone slack and dim.
I could still feel him at the far end of it, a presence like a light left on in a distant room.
Alive. Unhappy. Not reaching for me, not pulling, just existing at the other end of something neither of us had asked for and only one of us had tried to destroy.
I didn’t imagine winning him back. The thought never formed. Whatever the Goddess had intended when She confirmed our bond, Rafe had made his choice and Delia had made hers. I wasn’t going back to fight for a man who’d rejected me in front of everyone I’d ever known.
And I didn’t imagine crawling home to plead.
Gordon had watched me walk into that ceremony unprepared and unwarned, and if he called a hundred more times I would hear the same thing in his voice.
Come back, do what I need, make this easier for me.
There would be no apology, no admission that he should have told me.
Only the flat expectation that duty would override damage, the way it always had.
I slept again. This time the dreams were mechanical. Axles and bearings and the clean logic of torque specifications. Things that made sense. Things that worked the way they were supposed to if you treated them right.
Dawn came cold and clear. The sky turned from black to deep blue, then pale gold spread across the lake. I sat up stiff and sore, my neck cramped from the angle of the seat, my boots still on, my hands still carrying yesterday’s grease in the creases of my knuckles.
I ate the last pack of crackers and drank the rest of the water. I checked the oil and tire pressure, then jacked up the passenger side and rocked the wheel with both hands. The bearing was still tight and holding.
The phone showed two more missed calls from overnight. Delia at eleven. Gordon at one in the morning. No new calls from Rafe. Either someone had told him to stop or the nausea had finally put him in bed.
Pine Harbor was less than two hours east. A small town with a boatyard that needed a mechanic. A pack that took in strays and didn’t owe Gordon Keane or Conrad Sutherland any favors.
I didn’t know if they’d hire me. I didn’t know if Wade Karlsson would care how well I could rebuild a transmission or if he’d decide that a twenty-four-year-old woman with an unresolved rejection bond was a complication he didn’t need.
I didn’t know if Pine Harbor’s pack would tolerate the low hum of Rafe’s presence in my chest, that persistent, unwanted signal that I was still tethered to a man three hundred miles behind me.
But I knew engines. I knew tools. I knew how to show up early and work until the job was done, and I knew that if someone gave me a chance to prove it, I wouldn’t waste it. A few paychecks would buy a new bearing and the other repairs the truck needed.
I turned the key. The old Ford coughed, rattled, and caught. The bearing hummed at the edge of hearing, a warning only a mechanic would notice. I needed it to last until Pine Harbor.
I pulled out of the overlook and turned east on the shore road. The lake filled my driver’s side window, enormous and dark, whitecaps running in long lines toward a shore I couldn’t see. The pine trees on my right stood thick and close, their tops bending in the wind off the water.
My jack and loose tools sat behind the seat. My toolbox rode in the bed, secured with the bungee cord. Everything I owned fit in one truck, and most of it was metal.
The bond held steady in my chest. Thin, sore, persistent. A thread I couldn’t cut and refused to let guide me. Let Rafe feel me driving farther away. Let him feel the grim, clear-headed focus that came after the crying stopped. Let him wonder what it meant.
I didn’t owe him an answer. I didn’t owe anyone an answer.
The road curved north and the lake disappeared behind a ridge of granite. I followed the highway through one more cluster of houses, past a boarded-up motel and a bait shop with a CLOSED FOR SEASON sign, and then the trees opened up and I saw a green road sign.
PINE HARBOR — 38 MI.
I pressed the gas and kept driving.