22. Leo
LEO
My father is awake, and he won’t stop talking, and every word he says takes another floor out from under me.
We’ve moved him to the warded suite. He’s weak. Twelve years frozen in the dark will do that. But his eyes are sharp, and they keep finding mine across the room like he knows exactly which part of me to cut.
“The Circle doesn’t force bonds,” he says. “That’s the mistake everyone makes. They don’t force. They arrange. They put the right people in the right rooms and let nature do the rest.”
I’m standing by the window. I don’t turn around.
“They build the ground and let you fall into it. And the falling feels like fate. Because it is. Just... directed.”
Brynn is on the couch behind me. I can feel her there through the bond, warm and steady, the way she’s been steady this whole time while I’ve been coming apart in increments.
I should feel safe but I don’t.
I feel like a man who’s been told the floor he’s standing on was poured by someone who wanted him to stand exactly here.
She finds me later in the dark of the suite.
I haven’t slept. The mark on my collarbone hums against hers, that half-finished silver thing we never chose out loud, and the longer I stare at it the less I trust it.
“You’ve been quiet for three hours,” she says.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re spiraling. There’s a difference. I can feel it, Leo. It’s coming through the bond like static.”
That’s the problem. The bond. She can feel me. And I’ve started to hate how much I love that.
“The Circle ran this bloodline for decades,” I say. “Right under us. Right under him.”
“Your father was unconscious in a box for twelve years.”
“Before that they were already inside. He never saw it coming.”
She goes still. “Where are you going with this?”
I turn around.
“Someone moved you,” I say. “Deleted your assignment. Put you in the villa beside mine. We know that. You found it. You said it yourself. Someone put me in your path on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“And then we fell.”
The silence after that is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Don’t,” she says.
“You read the bond. You said it was clean.”
“It is clean.”
“You read it from inside it.” My voice is going flat, going cold, the old armor sliding up plate by plate because it’s the only thing I’ve ever trusted. “How does a fish check if the water’s poisoned? You’re standing in it, Brynn. You can’t see the edges of the thing you’re standing in.”
She stands up. The blanket slides off her shoulders and pools on the floor and she doesn’t notice.
“So that’s it.” Her voice shakes. “Twelve hours ago you chose me. With your eyes open, you said. No magic deciding. And now your dad wakes up and says one ominous sentence and suddenly I’m... what. A trap? A plant? Something the Circle grew in a jar and pointed at you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re insinuating it right now. You’re just making me say the words.”
My wolf is awake under my skin and it doesn’t like this.
It paces. It wants me to cross the room and put my hands on her and stop this, fix this, pull her in and breathe her until the fear goes quiet. That’s the whole problem. The thing inside me that wants her most is exactly the thing I can’t trust anymore.
Because what if they built it.
What if every animal instinct screaming at me to claim her is a leash someone else is holding.
“I can’t tell,” I say, and my voice cracks on it, “which feelings are mine.”
“They’re all yours.” She steps toward me. “Leo, look at me. Every single one of them is yours.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’m the one person alive who can.” Her eyes are bright and furious and wet. “It’s literally what I am. It’s the thing I almost died hiding. And you’d rather believe a man who’s been asleep for twelve years than believe me!”
I should reach for her.
The bond is dragging at me, both of us, the mark on my chest pulling toward the mark on hers like two halves of a broken thing trying to remember they were whole.
I take a step back instead.
It costs me everything. My wolf howls. The bond screams. Pulling away from her feels like pulling a knife out slowly, the way you’re not supposed to, the way that makes the bleeding worse.
She sees me do it. She sees me choose the distance.
And something in her face just... closes.
“There it is,” she whispers. “The wall. I wondered when I’d see it again.”
“Brynn...”
“No. You don’t get to say my name soft right now.
” A tear breaks loose and she doesn’t wipe it away.
“I told you everything. I told you what I am. I let you read me. I chose you in a vault while your dead father’s chamber was screaming, and the second it got hard, the second it got scary, you went looking for a reason it wasn’t real. ”
“It’s not about you.”
“No, it’s entirely about you.” Her laugh is awful.
“It’s always entirely about you. The burden.
The control. The big tragic Ice King who can’t let himself want anything because wanting is weakness.
” She wraps her arms around herself. “Your father didn’t break this.
You did. Just now. I watched you do it.”
My wolf surges so hard my vision splinters silver at the edges.
I feel my teeth lengthen. Feel my hands curl. My wolf doesn’t want this argument. It wants to end it the only way it knows how, with skin and heat and the mark finished and her name in my mouth, and I’m holding it back with everything I have and it’s not enough.
“You need to move,” I say. Low. Wrong. Not my voice.
She doesn’t move. Stubborn to the bone, even now, even bleeding.
“Make me.”
And Gods help me, I want to. The want is so strong it’s indistinguishable from rage.
I want to cross the room and pin her to the wall and stop both our mouths from making words.
The bond is a fist around my heart squeezing toward her and my wolf is howling to finish it, claim her, end this, and I can’t tell anymore where the love stops and the leash begins.
That’s the moment I understand I’m dangerous.
Not to the Circle. To her.
A Blood Shifter pulling away from his own mate destabilizes. Evander told me. Aggression climbs. Instinct goes violent.
And here I am, doing exactly that, while every cell in me strains toward the one person I’d never survive hurting.
“I have to go.”
I’m already at the door. My hand is shaking on the frame, claws scoring the wood, and I don’t look back because if I look back I won’t leave, and I have to leave, because the alternative is staying and finding out what I become when my wolf wins.
“Don’t you dare,” she says. “Don’t you dare do the noble self-destruction thing. We can figure this out together. That’s what the bond is, you absolute idiot, it’s not a cage.”
“It might be a cage.” I get the words out around teeth that aren’t mine. “And I won’t put you in it.”
“That’s not your call.”
“It’s the only call I’ve got left.”
She tries to follow.
She crosses the room fast, reaching for me, and her fingers close around my wrist, and the second she touches me the bond detonates white and hot and my wolf nearly takes me whole.
I tear free.
Gently. As gently as a thing like me can. But I see her flinch at the speed of it, at the strength, at how easily I could have broken the hand that’s only ever tried to hold mine.
“Stay away from me,” I say. “Until I know which parts are real. Stay away.”
“Leo, your wolf needs...”
“I know what my wolf needs.” I’m in the doorway now, half in the dark hall, and the silver is eating the last of the blue out of my eyes. “That’s the whole point.”
Her face. I’ll carry her face out of this room for the rest of my life. Devastated. Disbelieving. Already grieving the thing I’m killing with my own two hands.
“If you walk out that door,” she says, very quiet, “the bond won’t let you go far. You know that. It’ll hurt. Both of us.”
“Good,” I say. “Then at least the pain’s mine. At least I know that one’s real.”
And I leave.
The hall swallows me. Behind me I hear her say my name one more time, ragged, breaking, and the bond yanks so hard I nearly fold against the wall.
I keep walking.
My wolf rages. The mark on my chest burns like someone’s holding a brand to it, the distance already eating at us both, exactly like she said it would.
I don’t go back.
I take the stairs down, and down, past the suites, past the vault doors, into the parts of the resort the storm has emptied. Somewhere I can’t reach her. Somewhere she can’t reach me.
Somewhere I can’t hurt the one thing I was finally stupid enough to want.
The last door I pass seals behind me with a sound like a held breath.
And ahead, in the dark, something ancient that has been waiting seven hundred years feels a lone, unstable, half-bonded Alpha walk into its reach all by himself.
And it opens its eyes.