Chapter 10 Through the Bond
Rafe POV
The heat woke me.
The sickness came with nausea and shaking. This heat was different, and it came from Nora.
Her arousal slid through the bond like a lit fuse, sudden and unmistakable, and I jerked upright in bed with the sheet twisted around my hips and my heart slamming.
The sensation climbed through my chest and sank lower, spreading warmth into my gut, my thighs, between my legs.
I gripped the mattress and tried to breathe through it, but the bond didn’t care about my breathing.
The bond cared about Nora. And Nora was being touched.
I knew the difference. I’d felt her anger, her grief, her cold determination when she crossed the county line and left me behind. I could brace against those feelings and wait for them to pass. Now someone had his hands on her body, and the bond was making damn sure I knew it.
Pleasure built through her in surges that hit me one after another. Whoever was touching her took his time, and her body welcomed the deliberate pace. She was opening herself to someone by choice, and every second of her wanting drove my fingers deeper into the mattress.
My wolf howled in recognition. Somewhere out there, his mate was choosing another wolf, and the sound inside me carried a loneliness I had never heard from him before.
I pressed my fists against my eyes and bit down until I tasted blood on my tongue.
Her first climax made my arms buckle.
It rolled through Nora and poured through the bond without mercy.
Her pleasure echoed through my body as a ghost orgasm that wracked me from skull to groin and left me shaking on the sheets.
My cock was hard. That was the cruelest part.
My body, which had refused Delia with violent nausea, responded to Nora’s pleasure like a dog called to heel.
I hated her for keeping the bond open. I hated whoever had his mouth or his hands or his cock on her while the bond forced me to witness every goddamn second.
I even hated the Goddess for making me endure consequences I had never agreed to feel.
The sensation eased, but before I could recover, a deeper satisfaction reached me with the unmistakable sense of fullness and friction.
Someone was inside her, thick enough to stretch her, and I could almost hear the sounds she made.
Her pleasure settled into a deep rhythm and began building again.
Whoever this was knew exactly what he was doing and was in no rush to finish.
I rolled off the bed and hit the floor on my knees. I lowered my head to the hardwood while my body betrayed me in every way it could, hard and aching for a woman somewhere east letting another man fuck her while I knelt there helpless.
The second climax broke through her with such force that I slammed my fist into the bedroom wall.
Plaster cracked. Pain bloomed across my knuckles.
It didn’t help. Nothing helped. I stayed on the floor with my hand bleeding and my body humming with Nora Keane’s satisfaction until the bond finally, mercifully, subsided into a low glow that was somehow worse than the pleasure.
She was content, free of the anger and grief that had come through the bond since the ceremony. She felt satisfied and held.
None of it was for me.
? ? ?
The door opened. Delia was in the hallway light wearing an old shirt of mine over bare legs, her hair messy from sleep, her blue eyes wide and already filling with the understanding I didn’t want her to have.
“I heard you hit the wall,” she said. Her gaze dropped to my bleeding knuckles, then lower, and her face changed.
I grabbed the sheet off the bed and pulled it across my lap, but the damage was done.
She’d seen. My body still showed what the bond had put me through.
The arousal and flush across my chest proved that Nora could reach me from wherever she was while Delia, standing only a few steps away, could not.
“It’s the bond,” I said. “It’s not—I didn’t want—”
“Don’t.” Her voice was flat and final. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest, and I watched her work through it. The hurt came first, a rawness around her mouth that made me want to reach for her. Then her jaw tightened, and her eyes hardened.
“She’s with someone,” Delia said with certainty.
“Yes.”
“And you felt it.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
Delia laughed. It was a short, ugly sound, nothing like her real laugh.
“You didn’t have a choice. That’s good, Rafe.
That’s really good. Because I’ve been in this house for four nights sleeping alone while your body won’t let you touch me, and she’s out there fucking someone else and your body just—” She gestured at the sheet in my lap. “Responded.”
“The bond did this. I didn’t choose it.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?
” She pushed off the doorframe and came into the room, stopping so close I could smell her shampoo and feel the heat off her skin.
My body should have wanted her as it had throughout our secret courtship.
I loved this woman. I’d chosen her over a bond the Goddess had confirmed.
And my cock stayed hard for Nora while Delia stood right here.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know you do.” The anger in her voice cracked, and underneath it I heard something worse: doubt. “But she’s getting everything I can’t have, and she’s not even trying.”
“Delia—”
“Who is he?” She cut me off. “Who’s touching her?”
“I don’t know.” I stood up, wrapping the sheet around my waist, and reached for her with my uninjured hand.
She let me take her fingers. Her grip was tight and cold.
“I don’t know where she is or who she’s with.
The bond doesn’t work like that. I just felt—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
I wasn’t ready to describe what I’d felt.
“You felt her come,” Delia said quietly. “While another man was inside her.”
I flinched. She pulled her hand away.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said. At the door she paused, not looking at me. “Fix this, Rafe. Find her and end it. Because I can handle you not being able to touch me yet. I can’t handle knowing she’s out there making you feel things I can’t.”
The door closed behind her. Blood dried on my knuckles while Nora’s contentment lingered in my chest, soft and intimate and meant for someone else.
? ? ?
I found Conrad in his study. He was dressed despite the hour, seated behind his desk in a pressed shirt with the lamp on and a map of the Upper Peninsula spread across the oak surface.
He looked up when I came in. His pale blue eyes moved from my face to my bandaged hand before he took in my disheveled state.
Whatever assessment he made, he kept it brief.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat.
“She’s in Pine Harbor.” He tapped the map east of our territory, where the Superior shoreline curved and the roads narrowed between forest and water. “Her truck was spotted by one of our freight contacts at a boatyard on the harbor. Karlsson Boatyard, run by a wolf named Wade Karlsson.”
The name meant nothing to me. “Who is he?”
“A stray. He built a small pack out of other strays. He has no treaty ties or formal alliances with Iron River, Copper Point, or anyone else. The man repairs boats and takes in wolves who’ve run out of other places to go.
” Conrad’s tone made clear what he thought of that operation.
“If someone in Pine Harbor has involved himself with her, Karlsson is the likeliest candidate. He has no standing in our treaty business.”
“She’s sleeping with him,” I said.
Conrad studied me. “How do you know?”
“The bond.” I didn’t elaborate. The cracked plaster in my bedroom wall would tell him the rest if he cared to look.
“Then stop behaving like a jealous boy and compel her to answer.” Conrad leaned back in his chair.
His expression held only the calculating patience he brought to every problem.
“Nora Keane is a practical woman. Her father raised her with a sense of duty, and that doesn’t vanish because she’s angry.
This stray Alpha is a tantrum, not a future. She’ll return when it burns out.”
“You didn’t feel what I felt,” I said.
“And you are not going to sit in this house and brood about it.” Conrad’s voice hardened. “You are my heir. You will contact her, you will remind her what the open bond is doing to both of you, and you will arrange for her acceptance. I’ve given you more time than I should have.”
I stared at the map. Pine Harbor lay east. I could be there before dawn if I left now. I could walk into that boatyard, find Wade Karlsson, and—
And what? Drag Nora back by force? My wolf liked that idea. My wolf was also the reason I couldn’t touch Delia without vomiting, so his judgment was suspect.
“What if she doesn’t come back?” I asked.
Conrad gave little away, though his eyes sharpened. “She’ll come back. The bond will bring her. The longer it stays open, the more she’ll feel it.”
The bond contradicted him. Nora’s pleasure had been vivid and present, and the contentment around it carried no trace of obligation or desperation. She lay in some stray’s bed feeling peaceful while I knelt on my bedroom floor with blood on my hand and plaster dust beside me.
Instead of drawing Nora home, the bond showed me what I’d given up.
I didn’t say that to Conrad. He would have called it self-pity, and maybe he’d have been right.
“Call her,” Conrad said. “Tonight. Tell her the bond needs to be settled. If she won’t answer, you’ll go to her.”
I went back upstairs with my phone in my hand. In my room, with the cracked wall and the twisted sheets, I pulled up Nora’s contact. The last entries were the two unanswered calls from the night she left.
I called her.
It rang until the call went to voicemail. Her recorded voice was flat and practical, a voice for parts orders and appointment confirmations, not conversation. I hung up without leaving a message.
I called again and got her voicemail. I called a third time with the same result.
I lowered myself to the edge of the bed with the phone against my thigh. Nora had fallen asleep, safe and relaxed in the aftermath of good sex, and I wanted to put my phone through the same wall my fist had hit.
Instead I opened a text. I wrote an angry version, deleted it, and tried one that sounded like pleading. The next attempt was so stiff and formal it could have come from Conrad. I erased that too while my wolf fought me for control.
I typed: Nora, we need to talk about the bond. Call me back.
Then I stared at it. We need to talk about the bond. As if the bond were a business matter. As if another man hadn’t just made her shake apart while I felt it.
I deleted the message and started over.
I felt what happened tonight. I know you’re in Pine Harbor. The bond isn’t going away, and neither is this. Call me.
My thumb hovered over the send button. The anger in those words was too visible. She’d read it and feel justified in ignoring me, and some part of me knew she’d be right.
I deleted it.
Final version: Nora. I know this needs to be resolved. Please come back to Copper Point so we can talk about the bond. Call when you’re ready.
I sent it before I could change my mind again and resented the request as soon as it went through. Her read receipts were off. I had no indication she would ever see it.
I set the phone on the nightstand and lay back on the ruined sheets. The bond hummed in my chest, carrying Nora’s deep sleep. I ached for Delia, who was sleeping alone down the hall because my body had rejected her.
Through the wall I could hear the clock in the hallway. Rain had started, drumming against the Copper Point windows in sheets driven sideways by wind off the ridgeline.
In Pine Harbor, a stray Alpha fixed boats and collected other people’s damaged wolves. Nora would respect a man like that: practical, quiet, competent. He might give her a job and a room, then keep his distance until she came to him.
She’d come to him. I’d felt that in the bond. Her willing choice came through clearly, and the satisfaction that followed belonged to a woman who wanted exactly what she was getting.
I’d told Delia and Conrad and both assembled packs that I chose Delia over my fated bond.
I’d said it out loud in front of the fire and the elders and the cold September moon, and I’d meant it.
But I’d also expected Nora to accept the rejection, go back to her garage, grieve for a while, and move on.
Her duty was supposed to matter more than her anger.
Instead, Nora was building something in Pine Harbor, and the bond was making me watch.
I pressed my palm against the plaster crack in the wall. My knuckles throbbed. Through the bond, Nora slept on, safe and unreachable. I imagined her asleep beside another man while my wolf strained toward her and found no answer.