ThorneVale

Chapter Six

She didn't make it to the Ferro house.

She'd meant to. She'd left the diner with Ines's directions folded in her coat pocket, a rough sketch of a road that wound up past the northern fields to a large old property at the edge of pack land, and she'd made it perhaps half the distance before her legs simply stopped cooperating with the rest of her plan.

It happened fast, the way exhaustion had been threatening to for days finally arriving all at once. One moment she was walking along the tree lined road, counting her breaths to keep herself steady, and the next the world tilted sideways and the ground came up to meet her before she'd fully registered falling.

She didn't lose consciousness entirely. That was almost the worst part, lying in the cold dirt at the edge of the road with her vision swimming and her body refusing every instruction she gave it, aware enough to understand exactly how alone she was and how far from anyone who might notice.

She didn't know how long she lay there. Long enough for the cold to stop feeling like discomfort and start feeling like something closer to peace, which some distant, still functioning part of her mind recognized as a very bad sign.

The sound of running footsteps reached her before she saw anyone, fast and light, and then a face swam into her narrowed field of vision, dark haired, sharp featured, furious with worry in a way that Wren would later recognize as deeply, characteristically Del.

"Hey. Hey, stay with me." Del's hands were at her shoulders, careful and strong, checking her over with the kind of practiced efficiency that suggested this wasn't the first time she'd found someone in this state. "Can you hear me? You're okay. I've got you."

"Cold," Wren managed, which felt like an absurdly small thing to say given everything, but it was the only word that would come.

"I know. I know, we're going to fix that." Del got an arm under her, hauling her up with a strength that seemed disproportionate to her frame, and Wren had one disoriented moment of thinking, distantly, that the woman was stronger than any person had a right to be, before the thought slid away into the general fog crowding her mind. "You're going to hate this, but I need you to walk with me as much as you can. My car's not far."

Wren didn't remember most of the walk. She remembered fragments. Del's voice, steady and low, keeping up a stream of conversation that didn't require Wren to answer, the kind of talk meant to anchor a person rather than inform them. She remembered the warmth of a car heater turned up too high, and Del's jacket draped over her despite Del's protests that she didn't need it. She remembered arriving somewhere large and old, a house that smelled like woodsmoke and something herbal, and being half carried through a doorway into a warmth that felt, after days of unrelenting cold, almost unbearably good.

She came back to herself properly on a couch in front of a fire, wrapped in blankets that weren't her own, with a cup of something hot and slightly bitter pressed into her hands by a woman she'd met perhaps four minutes ago and already trusted more than she had any right to.

"Drink that. All of it, slowly." Del settled into the chair across from her, watching with an intensity that made Wren feel thoroughly examined. "You gave me a scare, you know. Another hour out there and I don't like to think about how that would have gone."

"I don't understand what's happening to me." Wren's voice came out cracked, raw in a way that had nothing to do with the cold anymore. "Ines said I needed to find the Ferro family. She said someone named Callum could fix this."

Something flickered across Del's face, complicated, part anger and part something gentler. "I'm Del. Callum's my brother." She said it carefully, like she was testing how Wren would react to the name.

"He's the one who rejected me. In front of everyone."

"Yeah." Del didn't try to soften it or explain it away, which Wren found she appreciated more than she expected to. "He did. And I'm furious with him about it, for what it's worth, though that's probably not much comfort to you right now."

"Why does that matter? Why does his rejection make me feel like I'm dying?"

Del was quiet for a moment, choosing her words with visible care. "Because when the bond activates and one side rejects it, the other side's body doesn't just get to move on cleanly. It's called the wane. It's a real, physical thing, and it gets worse the longer it goes unaddressed. I know that's an enormous amount to take in on top of everything else, and I know none of this makes sense yet. But you need to understand that what's happening to you isn't grief or the flu or anything ordinary. It's the bond, reacting to being cut off."

Wren stared at her, the fire crackling between them, the warmth finally starting to reach the deep cold that had settled into her bones over the last five days. "The bond," she repeated. "What bond. I don't even know your brother."

"I know. I know it doesn't make sense yet." Del leaned forward, elbows on her knees, her expression softening into something almost apologetic. "There's a lot I need to explain to you, and most of it is going to sound impossible. But right now, the most important thing you need to know is that you're safe here, and we're going to help you, whether or not my i***t brother has figured out yet how to do the right thing about any of this."

Wren wrapped both hands around the mug, feeling warmth finally seep back into fingers that had felt distant and useless for days, and looked at this stranger who had run to find her on the side of a road and carried her into a home Wren had never been meant to trust.

"Okay," she said, because it was the only word she had left in her that felt honest. "Explain it to me. All of it. I think I'm past the point where anything could sound too impossible to believe."