Chapter 4 The Body Knows
Rafe POV
The Copper Point pack house was dark when I pulled in, a few hours short of dawn. Every light off, every door shut, the whole compound buttoned down like the ceremony had never happened. My father’s doing. Conrad Sutherland didn’t leave messes where people could see them.
I sat in the truck for a minute after I killed the engine. My hands were steady on the wheel. My jaw was set. I looked like a man who’d made a hard decision and stood by it, which was exactly what I was.
Nora Keane’s face kept surfacing anyway.
Gray-green eyes finding mine across the fire, wide with something that wasn’t quite shock because her body had already known.
The jolt when our hands touched. The way her wolf had reached for mine through the contact, fierce and sure and hungry, and my wolf had answered before I could stop him.
I shoved the memory down. The Goddess confirmed bonds.
She didn’t make choices. I’d made mine nearly two years ago, the first night Delia walked into the treaty hall with her light auburn hair catching the lamplight and her laugh filling the room like she didn’t know everyone was watching.
Nora had never been in those rooms. Custom kept her away, and I’d been grateful for it, because it meant I never had to look at the woman I was promised to and compare her to the one I wanted.
That was the truth, and I was going to build my life on it.
I went in through the side entrance, past the main hall and its row of portraits.
Sutherland Alphas going back five generations, each one painted with his Luna beside him, each Luna chosen by treaty or confirmed by the Goddess or both.
My portrait would hang there someday. Delia would stand next to me, beautiful and smiling, and nobody would remember the night her sister walked away from a fire pit with refusal on her tongue.
My room was on the second floor. I took the stairs two at a time, feeling something tug in my chest with every step, the line running east through the walls and the dark and the miles of pine forest between here and wherever Nora had driven her beat-up truck.
The bond. Still open because she was too stubborn or too angry or too goddamn vindictive to say four words and let us both move on.
I accept your rejection.
Four words. That was all she had to give me, and she’d rather suffer than say them.
I stripped off my ceremony clothes and stood under the shower until the water ran cold.
My wolf was restless, unhappy, scraping at me like he wanted out.
He’d been like this since the fire pit. Since the touch.
Since the moment the Goddess lit us up in front of both packs, and I’d had to stand there with Nora’s scent filling my lungs and say the words that cut us apart.
You chose this, I told him. We chose this.
He didn’t care about politics, treaties, or a love built in stolen hours over almost two years of visits. His mate was out there in the dark, hurting and moving away from him, and I wouldn’t let him follow.
I toweled off and pulled on sweatpants. My phone sat on the dresser where I’d left it. Two calls to Nora, both unanswered. I’d stopped trying after the second one. Her silence said enough, and the bond told me the rest. She was furious. She was driving. She wasn’t coming back.
That was her problem, not mine.
The knock came not long after I got back. Soft. Hesitant. I knew who it was before I opened the door.
Delia stood in the hallway in a thin cotton robe, her hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes red-rimmed but dry. She’d washed the ceremony makeup off. Without it she looked younger, and the uncertainty on her face made something in my chest tighten that had nothing to do with the bond.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
I stepped aside. She slipped past me, her bare feet quiet on the floorboards, and I closed the door behind her.
The scent of her shampoo hit me. Vanilla and something floral.
Pretty. Familiar. I’d buried my face in her hair dozens of times during the visits, in hallways and empty rooms and once in the back seat of her car, and every time I’d felt like I was getting away with something extraordinary.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. She sat on the edge of my bed and pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them.
“Me either.”
“Is she—” Delia paused. “Can you feel her?”
“Yeah.” I leaned against the closed door and crossed my arms. “She’s driving. East, I think. She’s angry.”
“She has a right to be angry.”
“She has a right to be angry and still do the decent thing,” I said. “Accept the rejection. Let us move forward. She doesn’t have to like me, but holding the bond open just to make me hurt—”
“Rafe.” Delia’s voice was quiet. “Not tonight. I didn’t come here to talk about Nora.”
I went still. She uncurled from the bed and stood, and the robe shifted on her shoulders, and I understood what she was offering. What she’d come here expecting now that the ceremony was done, the rejection was spoken, and the only thing standing between us was a bond her sister refused to release.
I wanted her. I’d wanted her for nearly two years, enough to jeopardize a treaty alliance, defy my father, and lose the respect of wolves I’d grown up with.
Delia was the woman I’d chosen with my eyes open and my hands free, and she was standing in my room in the middle of the night with nothing under that robe but warm skin and the courage to show up first.
I crossed the room, cupped her face in both hands, and kissed her the way I’d imagined kissing her a hundred times during those treaty visits, deep and slow, with nothing to hide and no clock running down.
For a few seconds, it was everything I’d wanted.
Then the bond hit.
It started as a twist low in my gut, then spread into a wrongness so deep and absolute it seemed to turn my body against me. The desire that had been building since Delia walked through the door vanished so fast that nausea took its place and stole my breath.
I pulled back from Delia. Her lips were still parted, her eyes soft and half-closed, and the expression on her face was the one I’d spent two years trying to earn.
My stomach rolled. My skin went cold. Every nerve in my body screamed wrong, wrong, wrong, and underneath it my wolf surged forward with a sound like a snarl, rejecting what I was doing, rejecting who I was doing it with, because the only body he would accept was somewhere east of me in a truck on a dark road.
“Rafe?” Delia’s voice reached me through the roaring in my ears. “What’s wrong?”
I made it to the bathroom. Barely. I braced my hands on the sink and the nausea crested and broke, and my body told me in the clearest possible terms what my wolf had been telling me since the fire pit.
She is not ours.
When I came back to the bedroom, Delia was standing exactly where I’d left her. Her robe was pulled tight, her arms crossed. She’d figured it out. I could see it in the set of her jaw and the hurt that had replaced the softness in her eyes.
“It’s the bond,” I said. The words came out flat. Clinical. Like I was reporting a mechanical failure, which in some sick way I was.
“Your body won’t—”
“No.”
The silence stretched. Delia stared at me, and I watched her process it. The rejection she’d helped orchestrate had left me unable to give her what we’d planned, and the proof was written on my face in cold sweat and the lingering taste of bile.
“Because of her,” Delia said flatly.
“Because she won’t accept the rejection. The bond is still open. My wolf—” I stopped. Dragged a hand down my face. “He won’t let me.”
“So call her again. Make her accept it.”
“She’s not picking up.”
“Then go get her. Drive out there and—”
“And what?” I turned on her, sharper than I meant to. “Drag her back? Hold her down and make her say the words? It doesn’t work that way and you know it.”
Delia flinched. The hurt in her eyes hardened into something colder, and she looked at me as if she no longer knew me.
“You’re blaming her,” Delia said. “For this.”
“She’s the one keeping the bond open.”
“She’s the one who got rejected in front of everyone she ever knew.” Delia’s voice shook, but her gaze held mine. “She never promised to make it easy for us, Rafe. She never promised to cooperate.”
She was right. That was exactly what I’d expected.
I’d expected Nora to be what she’d always been.
Dutiful. Reliable. The older Keane daughter who did what she was told and kept the gears turning and never made a scene.
I’d expected her to accept the rejection quietly and never let me see what it cost her.
I’d expected her to erase herself so Delia and I could have what we wanted without facing what we’d done to her.
“She should have accepted,” I said, because I didn’t have a better answer.
“Maybe.” Delia retied her robe’s belt with stiff, angry fingers. “But she didn’t. And you can’t touch me. So where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us waiting. Once she accepts, the bond breaks. My body—”
“I know how bonds work.”
“Then you know this is temporary.”
Delia moved toward the door. When she reached it, she stopped with her hand on the knob and looked back at me. Anger made her eyes bright. She had wanted this badly enough to betray her sister, and we still couldn’t have the life we’d planned.
“My feelings for you are real, Rafe. I didn’t come to your room because of a treaty or a ceremony. I came because I love you. That should count for something, even if your body won’t follow.”
She left. The door clicked shut behind her, and I stood in the middle of my room with the bond drawing taut toward the east.
I didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I remembered how my body had decided something my mind hadn’t agreed to, and I could do nothing about it.