The Bond Breaker

Chapter 4: Forced Proximity

Neither of them moved. The footsteps outside the door held for three long seconds, then retreated toward the stairs, unhurried, deliberate, exactly the pace of a woman who wanted them to know she'd been there without needing to prove it.

"She wants us rattled," Kade said. "Not caught."

"It's working," Wren admitted.

By morning, Corliss had already decided how the next two weeks would go. She announced it over breakfast Wren didn't touch: the severance would take longer than usual, given how deeply rooted the bond had turned out to be.

"Deeply rooted," Wren repeated, meeting her eyes across the table. "That's one way to put it."

"You said yourself these things take longer when they've been left to root too deep." Corliss's smile didn't reach anywhere near her eyes. "I trust your judgment, severer. That's what we're paying for."

An elegant trap. Wren had handed Corliss the lie herself, and now Corliss meant to use it to keep her exactly where she was, under watch, for as long as it took to decide what to do about a severer who knew too much.

"I'll need somewhere to work that isn't the ritual room," Wren said. "Somewhere I can study the bond's structure without an audience."

"The alpha's study," Corliss said, too quickly, as if she'd already decided this before Wren finished asking. "He won't mind sharing it with you."

Wren caught Kade's eye across the table. He didn't react at all, which told her he'd expected exactly this. Keep the severer close to the alpha. Watch them both.

The study smelled nothing like fear. Cedar, old paper, and faintly, underneath it, pine and copper, the same scent she'd caught on the porch, stronger here where he clearly spent most of his hours.

"She's not subtle," Wren said, once the door was shut and she'd checked the hallway was clear.

"She's never had to be. She's run this pack's paperwork since before I was born." Kade dropped into the chair behind the desk, watching her check the sightline from the window. "You think she knows you're onto her."

"I think she's testing how far she can push before I stop lying for her. Which means we don't have two weeks. We have however long it takes her to decide I'm more useful dead than confused."

"You say that very calmly."

"People have tried to kill me before. It stops being alarming around the third time." She turned and found him watching her with an expression she couldn't place. Not fear. Something closer to fascination.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing. Most people who come here to do something to me talk about me like I'm not in the room. You're the first one who talks about herself like she's the one in danger."

"I am the one in danger. You're just the reason."

That got the ghost of a real smile out of him, quick and startled, gone almost before it landed. She catalogued it anyway, the way she catalogued everything, and told herself it meant nothing.

It was already a lie almost as convincing as the one she'd told Corliss.

They spent the morning building a plan that looked, to anyone glancing through the door, like a bored alpha keeping a severer company. In reality, Wren mapped everything she knew about bond forging, the rare and costly kind, trying to work out how Corliss, or whoever had actually done the working, had fooled every wolf in the house except the two standing closest to it.

"Blood," she said finally, tapping a page filled with half formed theory. "A forged bond needs a sacrifice from someone with a real claim to you. Family, ideally."

Kade went still. "Declan's mother is my aunt."

"Which means she has exactly the claim this working would need. I need to know if anyone left this house around the time the bond first appeared. An errand, a trip, anything that would've given her access to something of yours. Hair, blood, a personal object."

"I wasn't paying attention. I was too busy being relieved I wouldn't lose my title."

"Then we find someone who was paying attention." Wren was already moving toward the door.

Kade caught her wrist before she reached it, not hard, just enough to stop her.

"Be careful who you ask," he said. "If Corliss finds out we're hunting proof before she's decided what to do about you, she won't wait to decide."

Wren looked down at his hand on her wrist, then up at his face.

"I've survived worse than an elder with something to hide," she said.

"That's not what worries me." His grip loosened but didn't let go. "What worries me is you're the first person in six weeks who's tried to protect me instead of using me. I don't know what to do with that."

Neither did she. For the first time in six years of practiced lines, she found herself with nothing to reach for.

The study door swung open without a knock. Corliss stood in the frame, eyes moving from Wren's wrist still caught in Kade's hand to the pages spread across the desk behind them.

"Interesting," she said. "I didn't realize bond theory required this much contact."