FIVE
1357 Words
I woke up warm.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not cold. Not alone. Not staring at a ceiling that didn't belong to me while a man who didn't want me slept in another room.
Warm.
Kael's arm was draped over my waist. His chest pressed against my back. His breath was slow and even, ruffling the hair at the nape of my neck.
We were still on the dirt floor. Still in his jacket. Still tangled together like two people who'd forgotten how to be separate.
I should have felt satisfied.
I should have felt scared.
I felt neither.
Because something was wrong.
My neck hurt.
Not the bite that had healed already, same as my thumb, same as my elbow. Kael's saliva did that. Closed wounds. Erased evidence.
No, this was different. Deeper. Like someone had reached inside my chest and pulled something loose.
I touched my throat.
The skin was smooth. No scar. No mark.
But the bond, the mating bond I'd shared with Elias for five years, was gone.
Not weakened. Not fading.
Gone.
I sat up so fast I cracked my head against Kael's chin.
He grunted. Woke instantly the way wolves do, all at once, eyes open and aware. No groggy confusion. No soft morning moments.
"What?" he said.
"The bond," I said. "It's gone. I can't feel him anymore."
Kael went very still.
I'd learned to read him a little already. The stillness wasn't calm. It was the moment before something terrible happened.
"Let me see," he said.
He sat up. Took my face in his hands. Turned my head left, then right. His thumbs pressed against my jaw, my temples, the soft hollow of my throat.
His eyes went silver.
Then they went black.
"Kael. What did you do?"
He let go of me. Stood up. Walked to the fireplace and stood with his back to me, staring at the ashes.
"I didn't do anything," he said.
"Bullshit."
He turned. His face was strange—not angry. Not guilty. Something else. Something I couldn't name.
"When I bit you," he said slowly, "I wasn't just tasting you. I was... claiming you. I didn't mean to. It was instinct. The curse—it makes me hungry. Makes me take. I've never—"
"Claimed someone?"
"Wanted to claim someone."
I stood up. My legs were shaky. The dirt floor was cold under my bare feet—when had I lost my boots? I didn't remember.
"You're saying you accidentally stole me from Elias?"
"I'm saying the curse recognised something in you. Something that's never been recognised before."
"What?"
Kael walked toward me. Slow. Careful. Like I was a wounded animal.
"You're not wolf-less, Lena."
I blinked.
"Yes, I am. My wolf never came. The healers said"
"The healers were wrong."
He stopped in front of me. Close enough to touch. Close enough to kill.
"You're not wolf-less," he said again. "You're bound."
The word hit me like a physical blow.
Bound.
I knew what that meant. Every wolf knew. A bound wolf wasn't born—she was made. Someone had locked her wolf away. Chained it. Buried it so deep inside her that even the healers couldn't find it.
It was illegal.
It was monstrous.
It was something that happened to orphans. To runaways. To girls with no pack and no one looking for them.
To me.
"No," I said.
"Yes."
"Who?"
Kael's jaw tightened.
"I don't know. But the curse is a breaking thing. It breaks bonds. It breaks wolves. It breaks curses. When I bit you, I didn't just claim you. I cracked whatever was holding your wolf down."
I felt it then.
A flutter. Small. Distant. Like a heartbeat in the walls of a house you thought was empty.
My wolf.
She was there.
She'd always been there.
Someone had just locked her in the dark.
I threw up.
Not gracefully. Not quietly. I turned and vomited onto the dirt floor, bitter and violent and completely beyond my control. Kael didn't move. Didn't try to hold my hair back. Didn't say a word.
He just waited.
When I was done, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. My whole body was shaking.
"How long?" I asked.
"What?"
"How long have you known?"
Kael was quiet for a long moment.
"I suspected it the first time I tasted your blood," he said. "Your thumb. There was something there. Something underneath. But I wasn't sure until tonight. Until I bit you. Until I felt it break."
"And you didn't tell me?"
"Would you have believed me?"
I wanted to say yes. I wanted to scream at him. To hit him. To thank him. To run.
I did none of those things.
I sat down on the dirty mattress and put my head in my hands.
My wolf.
She was still there. Still fluttering and still trying. I could feel her now weak from years of imprisonment, confused, frightened. But alive.
She'd been alive this whole time.
While I called myself wolf-less.
While Elias called me easy.
While the packs passed me around like damaged goods.
Someone had done this to me. Someone had reached inside a child, a baby, maybe, I didn't even know when it happened and locked away the most essential part of who I was.
Someone had made me a ghost before I ever had a chance to be a person.
"Why?" I whispered. Not to Kael. To the universe. To whoever had ruined me before I could walk.
Kael knelt in front of me. His hands rested on my knees. Heavy. Warm.
"Because someone was afraid of you," he said.
"Of me?"
"Of what you would become."
I looked up. His silver eyes were burning.
"The curse," he said slowly, "is a hunger. It's been inside me for seven years, eating everything I was. But tonight when I bit you it didn't take. It gave."
"Gave what?"
"Clarity. The curse showed me something. A woman. An Alpha. She was old. Powerful. She had your face."
"My face?"
"Not you. Someone before you. Your grandmother, maybe. Your great-grandmother. Someone in your bloodline bound you because they knew what you'd be born with."
"Born with what?"
Kael reached up. Touched my cheek. His thumb traced the curve of my jaw.
"A wolf that can break curses," he said. "A wolf that can kill kings."
The cabin was silent.
The fire had died. The only light came from the moon through the boarded windows—thin silver slashes across the dirt floor.
Kael was still kneeling and still touching my face and still looking at me like I was something holy and terrible.
"You didn't come to my kitchen because you wanted me," I said slowly. "You came because you sensed what I was."
"I came because you were bleeding apple slices in a house where no one loved you," he said. "The rest... I figured out after."
"Do you expect me to believe that?"
"No. I expect you to be furious. I expect you to walk out that door and never look back. I expect you to hate me."
He leaned closer. His forehead pressed against mine.
"But I need you to know something first."
"What?"
"I didn't tell you to break my curse. I claimed you because when I tasted your blood, I remembered what it felt like to be alive. And I would rather die than go back to feeling nothing."
I stared into his eyes.
Silver. Burning. Terrified.
The monster was afraid of me.
Me.
The ghost. The wolf-less sacrifice. The woman who sliced apples, no one ate.
"Show me," I said.
"Show you what?"
"The curse. Show me what we're fighting."
Kael's breath caught.
"If I show you," he said, "you can't unsee it. And once you see it, the curse will see you. It will hunt you. It will try to break you the way it broke me."
"I've been broken before," I said. "I'm still here."
Kael closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, they weren't silver.
They were red.
And the cabin started to scream.
- Writer
