ThorneVale

Chapter Seven

Del called him at half past six, and Callum knew from the first two words out of her mouth that whatever was coming next was going to be his fault.

"She collapsed on the ridge road," Del said, voice tight with an anger she wasn't bothering to hide. "I found her. She's stable now, but Cal, she's five days in and already this bad. You need to come see her."

He was in the truck before he'd fully processed agreeing to it, the drive to the family house passing in a blur of dark trees and his own circling thoughts, none of which settled into anything useful before he was pulling into the driveway and walking into a front room where Wren Sutter sat wrapped in blankets by the fire, pale and hollow eyed in a way that hit him harder than he'd braced for.

She looked up when he came in, and something crossed her face, too many things at once for him to read clearly. Anger. Wariness. And under it, unmistakable even through everything else, the same recognition that had hit him in the clearing five nights ago, the bond announcing itself again despite everything he'd done to sever it.

"You," she said, flat.

"Me." He stayed near the doorway, deliberately not closing the distance, though every instinct in him was pulling toward the couch, toward her, in a way that felt less like desire and more like gravity. "Del says you collapsed."

"Del says a lot of things, apparently, that you should have told me five days ago." Her voice was thin with exhaustion but the edge in it was sharp and entirely intact. "You could have explained. Instead you just said no in front of the whole town and walked away like I was a problem you'd solved."

"That's not what happened."

"It's exactly what happened. I was there." She pulled the blanket tighter, a small, defensive motion that Callum felt land somewhere under his ribs. "So explain it to me now, since apparently my body is going to keep falling apart until you do."

He looked at Del, who was watching him from the doorway to the kitchen with an expression that offered no rescue, arms crossed, clearly waiting to see whether he'd finally do the thing she'd been telling him to do for days. He looked back at Wren, at the particular fragile steadiness of someone holding themselves together through sheer stubbornness, and understood that whatever careful plan he'd built for managing this situation from a safe distance had just run entirely out of road.

"I need to explain some things you're not going to believe easily," he said, finally crossing the room, taking the chair across from her rather than the space beside her on the couch, a small distance that felt necessary even as it felt insufficient. "But first I need to help stabilize what's happening to you right now, or the rest of the explanation won't matter much."

"Stabilize how?"

"Proximity helps. Not completing the bond. Just being near enough that your body isn't reading the separation as total." He kept his voice level, clinical, because clinical was the only register he trusted himself to use without something more dangerous leaking through. "It won't fix it. But it should slow the wane enough that we have time to figure out a better solution."

Wren studied him for a long moment, exhaustion and suspicion warring visibly across her face. "A better solution than what. Than you actually accepting whatever this is?"

He didn't answer that directly, because the honest answer, the whole tangled truth of his mother and the Circle and every fear he'd built his entire adult life around, wasn't something he trusted himself to say out loud yet, not even to Del, let alone to a stranger whose body was currently paying the price for his silence.

"Let me help with what's happening now," he said instead. "The rest, I'll explain as much as I can. Just not all of it tonight."

Something in her expression closed slightly, a door not quite as final as the one he'd shut in the clearing but a door nonetheless, and he understood, with a clarity that felt like its own kind of cold, that he had just spent whatever trust his presence might have bought him on the first available excuse to withhold more.

"Fine," she said, quiet, tired. "Proximity. Whatever that means. But I want you to know I'm not going to just sit here grateful that you're finally bothering to notice I exist. You did this to me. Whatever your reasons are, you did this, and I'm allowed to be angry about it while I let you fix it."

"You're allowed to be angry," he agreed, and meant it more than she probably expected him to. "I'd be angry too."

They sat like that for a while, the fire between them, the distance between the chair and the couch feeling both entirely necessary and strangely, unbearably wide. Del eventually retreated to the kitchen, giving them a privacy neither of them had asked for and both of them, in different ways, badly needed.

Callum watched the color slowly returning to Wren's face as the evening wore on, the shaking in her hands easing, and told himself this was simple proximity doing its work, nothing more. He didn't let himself examine too closely the way some old, locked part of his chest had eased the moment he walked into the room and saw her, or the fact that some part of him had been counting the days since the rite with an attention he hadn't admitted to himself until just now.

He had rejected the bond to keep her safe. That part of the plan hadn't changed.

But sitting across from her in the firelight, watching her slowly come back to herself because his presence alone was apparently enough to pull her back from the edge of something dangerous, he understood that keeping his distance and keeping her alive were not, as it turned out, the same strategy at all.

That was a problem he didn't yet know how to solve.