Bound By Rejection

Chapter 4: Kael’s Visit

His scent hit her long before he stepped into view.

Woodsmoke. Steel. A hint of pine. The familiar, grounding, powerful scent she had once loved... the scent that meant warmth, safety, and a desire so profound it made her knees weak.

Now, that scent reeked of betrayal. It was the toxic perfume of a lie.

The scrape of his boots against the stone floor echoed down the corridor, heavy, measured, and utterly unhurried. One set of footsteps. No guards. No witnesses. Kael never brought an audience when he intended to make things personal, to twist the knife in private.

Lyra didn’t move from the corner of her cell. She was too exhausted to even lift her head. The silver cuffs had rubbed her wrists raw, leaving open, pulsing welts that throbbed with every heartbeat. Dried blood cracked like thin paint when she shifted her weight, her knees pressing against the damp, biting stone floor. She tucked her blistered fingers under her thighs, a desperate attempt to keep the involuntary trembling from betraying her weakness.

Even now, her wolf stirred faintly, dull, confused, and filled with a desperate, animalistic yearning. The mate bond buzzed to life like static electricity, a violent, unwanted charge flowing between them. It was a physical ache, pulling at her soul, demanding she submit to the source of her pain.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to shift and tear him apart. But the silver and the wolfsbane kept her chained in a human body, forced to endure the agonizing truth of his proximity without the relief of action.

The iron door groaned, then creaked open with a sound like a tortured spirit.

Torchlight flared in the hallway, casting Kael in a harsh, towering silhouette. His presence alone swallowed the small space like a thunderstorm. Broad-shouldered, cloaked in silence, he filled the cell’s threshold, making the entire world feel small and dangerous.

The door clanged shut behind him. The sound felt final, a coffin lid closing.

He stood just inside the door, watching her from the shadows. His expression was unreadable, the Alpha mask firmly in place: cool, emotionless, exuding absolute control. But Lyra, trained by years of love and intimacy, saw the tension in his stance. A subtle tightness in his shoulders that always preceded a battle. A rapid, subtle twitch in his jaw that meant he was fighting his own control.

He was bleeding, too. Just not visibly.

“You look like s**t, Lyra,” he said finally, his voice deep, rough, and entirely too familiar. It was the voice of the man who used to wake her up with whispered promises.

Lyra let out a breathless laugh, dry as bone. “A silver dungeon and betrayal will do that to a girl, Alpha.” She used the formal title like a curse. “It’s a lovely touch, by the way. Did you design the cell yourself, or did Raina suggest the aesthetic?”

Kael took a slow, deliberate step forward, crossing into the meager light of the cell. Lyra felt the spike of the mate bond, a flash of something possessive and dark that had nothing to do with love.

“Don’t push me,” he warned, his eyes, that cold, hard amber, finally locking onto hers.

“Push you?” Lyra felt a surge of genuine, satisfying contempt. “I’m chained, drugged, and rotting on your dungeon floor. What could I possibly push? Or are you simply worried I might break one of the toys you left here for me to play with?”

Kael stopped a few feet away. His gaze dropped from her face to the raw, weeping wounds on her wrists.

“You’re unstable,” he said, repeating the political lie from the trial. “You defied the Council. You attacked my Beta. You made a public mockery of our bond, Lyra. I had to contain the threat. I gave the Elders exactly what they wanted: a broken, mad Omega who lost control.”

“You gave them a lie,” she countered, her voice low and fierce. “The same lie you fed me for years. You were never afraid of my unstable bloodline, Kael. You were afraid of my power. You were afraid of a Luna who refused to be silent.”

His jaw clenched hard enough to crack a stone. “I protected the Pack. They would have killed you outright if I hadn’t given them this alternative.”

“The alternative is to violate my soul and maim my wolf by severing the bond by force,” Lyra spat. “Don’t pretend this is mercy. This is control. You cheated on me because you hate being bound to a woman you couldn’t break. You’re trying to destroy me without losing the political standing of having a fated mate.”

Kael flinched, a subtle, sharp movement that confirmed she had struck the nerve.

He took another step, closing the distance. Lyra could smell his scent strongly now, the comforting pine, undercut by a metallic, desperate desperation that was new.

He crouched down, ignoring her chains, ignoring the filth. He reached out and his fingers, those large, warm, calloused fingers that she knew better than her own face, brushed the dried blood from her cheek like she was something delicate.

The contact was a lightning strike.

Lyra didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Internally, her wolf went mad. It screamed, a guttural, wounded sound, begging for his touch, begging for the familiar comfort of its mate, completely overriding her rational mind. A wave of sick, perverse heat surged through her body, a primal response to her fated mate’s touch, amplified by the raw intimacy of the bond.

Stop it, you stupid animal, she commanded her wolf, fighting the sickening tide of desire and submission. He did this to us!

But her body stayed still, paralyzed by the overwhelming rush of feeling that the silver and wolfsbane had starved her of.

Kael’s thumb rested on her cheekbone. “You hate me,” he whispered, his voice dangerously quiet, thick with a painful, suffocating intensity.

She finally found the strength to move, wrenching her face away from his hand, breaking the contact that was both agony and antidote.

“I hate what you’ve become,” she said, her voice shaking with the effort. “I hate that the man I loved turned out to be a pathetic, jealous coward who needed wolfsbane and silver to face his own Luna.”

Kael’s hand dropped, and he stumbled back, pulling slightly away. Her words had struck deeper than any claw ever could.

“I tried to keep you safe,” he argued, his voice ragged. “I put you in here to protect you from the Elders. They wanted your fire neutralized. They would have burned you at the stake if I hadn’t offered this compromise.”

Lyra stared at him, unable to muster the strength for another verbal attack. The mate bond, now fully flared, was tearing at the edges of her consciousness.

“Is there no part of you left that remembers what we were?” he pleaded, his amber eyes searching hers, desperate for a sliver of the old Lyra.

She looked him dead in the eye, ignoring the agonizing pull of the bond. “There’s a part of me that remembers how you swore on your Alpha’s honor that you would never hurt me. And I remember seeing you with another woman on the desk where you swore to love me forever.”

His throat bobbed. The air between them was thick with unspent emotion.

“I still feel the bond,” he whispered, the admission a raw confession. “Even now. It’s… tearing me apart. It makes every day a living hell.”

Lyra managed a gruesome, bloody smile.

“Good,” she said. “Maybe you’ll finally understand what you did to me.”

He didn’t respond. He just stood there for a long moment, looking at her like she was a complex puzzle he couldn’t solve. A ghost that wouldn’t disappear. A reminder he couldn’t banish.

Then he turned toward the door.

“Don’t come back,” she commanded, her voice weak but absolute, as the iron creaked open. “Unless you’re here to say the words. To reject me and make this end.”

He paused. His hand rested on the iron latch.

“I can’t,” he said, his back to her. “Not yet. Not until I know you are truly safe from the Elders.”

“Then you’re a bigger coward than I thought, Alpha.”

He didn’t look back. The door slammed shut behind him. The sound of the deadbolt sliding into place was final.

The darkness returned. But this time, it didn’t feel like a tomb. It felt like armor.

Because if Kael still felt the bond, if he was still bleeding from it... if the agony of their un-severed link was tearing him apart, then she still had power. She was still connected to him.

Lyra slumped against the wall, gathering her meager strength.

He won't break the bond?

Then she would.

She would weaponize it. She would use the unholy tether between them to fight her way out of this hell. She would channel her hatred, her ambition, and her fire right through that agonizing link and let it destroy him from the inside out.

The war had just gone psychic.