Chapter 281

Chapter 281

Chapter 281

KAEL

I understood grief. I’d been carrying a version of it for months-quieter than hers would be, less acute, because my memories of our curse years were intact but complicated by everything that had come after. I remembered those three years. Remembered the partnership we’d built, way she’d known when to push and when to let me alone, the specific rhythm of living alongside someone long enough that their habits became part of the texture of your days. I remembered all of it.

the

What I hadn’t been able to do was mourn it properly. Because mourning would have meant admitting that what I’d lost mattered, which would have made everything with Aria more complicated than it already was, and complications were the last thing a new bond could

survive.

So I’d shoved it down. Redirected it. Told myself that Ivory and I were different people now, that the curse years were finished, that moving forward was the only reasonable response to irreversible change. Told myself that watching her move through the pack without recognition, treating me like any other Alpha she respected but didn’t know, wasn’t something I needed to have feelings about.

My wolf had never believed a word of it.

He’d been restless for months in ways I’d attributed to the new bond’s adjustment period, to the stress of running the pack, to everything except the truth. The truth was that every time I saw Ivory laughing at something Nina said, or bent over her workbench with that look of total absorption she got when a problem interested her, or demonstrating something in the training yard with clean movements that I’d watched a thousand times before-every time, something in me pulled toward her with the kind of muscle memory that three years of shared difficulty had built into my body whether I wanted it there or not.

I’d been faithful to Aria. That part was true and mattered to me. But faithfulness was a choice I’d had to make repeatedly, consciously, sometimes against significant internal resistance. It hadn’t been effortless. I hadn’t wanted it to be effortless because effortless would have meant the feelings weren’t real, and I needed to know I was a person who could hold to a commitment even when it cost me something.

D

The irony of that thought settled over me now with the specific weight of things that were funny only if you were very tired or very bitter. Aria, who I’d been faithfully choosing for months, had been visiting Damon. Had taken the trust I’d built brick by careful brick and done something with it that she’d known would break it, and then kept it hidden because she’d

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known I’d be hurt, and the hiding had made everything worse.

I understood why she’d gone. That was the thing I hadn’t been able to say when I’d confronted her, because saying it would have softened the anger I needed to hold onto until I’d processed everything else. I understood the pull of wanting answers from someone who’d rejected you. The need to hear the reasons, as if reasons would make the wound make sense, would transform cruelty into something navigable. I’d watched her carry the weight of Damon’s rejection since the night I’d first understood what she’d come from, and I knew—I’d always known-that closure wasn’t something she’d found, that she’d been hauling that incomplete grief alongside everything else she was trying to build.

Understanding it didn’t fix what she’d done. It didn’t undo the visit, didn’t change the fact that she’d hidden it, didn’t address the specific fear that had been festering since Sera had written that name on paper with the composed satisfaction of someone producing a weapon she’d been saving for exactly the right moment.

Because here was the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about: Damon had escaped.

Not just escaped-escaped after her visit. The sequence of events sat in my head like a puzzle I hadn’t wanted to assemble, and now that I’d started I couldn’t stop. Aria visited him in secret. Days later, he found a way out of what should have been a secure facility. I’d been told at the time that the escape route had involved specific information about patrol rotations that very few people should have had access to. I’d looked into it briefly and then gotten pulled away by other crises-there were always other crises-and the investigation had gone cold without resolution.

Now I was sitting in a healing tent, holding Ivory’s hand, and wondering.

I didn’t want to wonder. Wanted to believe the worst interpretation was wrong, that Aria had gone to Damon looking for closure and nothing more, that her visit and his escape were coincidence rather than cause and effect. Wanted to believe that the woman I’d bonded with, the woman my wolf had accepted regardless of his preferences, hadn’t handed our enemy the information he’d needed to walk out of a prison cell and then into an ambush that had come very close to killing me.

But the ambush. Gods, the ambush.

He’d known things about that convoy that he shouldn’t have known. The route. The timing. The specific composition of who was traveling. Information that had to have come from inside Shadowmere, from someone who’d known my schedule, who’d had access to the kind of operational detail that a prisoner in a neutral facility shouldn’t have been able to obtain unless someone had provided it.

And Aria had been there In the car beside me, when the attack happened and she had been, close enough that when Damon had appeared and extended his hand toward her, she’d begun

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to move to accept his hand, despite me telling her to stay down. I’d seen it-the subtle shift in her body, the half-step forward that had stopped only because the adrenalized wolves Ivory had sent had arrived and the tide of the fight had turned. I’d told myself afterward that it was instinct, that she’d been moving toward what was familiar in a moment of danger, that the pull toward Damon meant nothing significant.

I sat with Ivory’s hand in mine and asked myself, for the first time, whether I’d been wrong.

Had she known? Had she walked into that situation aware of what Damon was planning, and started toward him anyway, and only pulled back because Ivory’s intervention had made escape impossible?

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