He Rejected His Broken Luna. Now His Mad Wolves Beg for Her Touch

Chapter 9 – What Breaks and What Holds

White.

For a heartbeat—ten—an eternity—there is nothing else.

No trees. No cabin. No Roenan. Just a vast, ringing blank where the pack used to hum and my own name used to live.

I’m dead.

The thought flashes and burns out in the same instant.

Then, like sound rushing back into a room after an explosion, sensation slams in.

First: pain.

Not the sharp slice I feared, but a deep, throbbing bruise through the center of my chest, radiating out along ribs, spine, throat. The bond is still there. Not gone—shredded, raw, angry.

Second: scent.

Smoke. Pine. Wolf. Him.

“Lys.” Roenan’s voice sounds like it’s being dragged over gravel. “Lys, look at me.”

I peel my eyes open.

The world wavers, then steadies. The cabin, the clearing, the trees. Roenan in front of me, knees in the dirt, hands hovering uselessly in the air like he’s afraid that touching me will finish what the elders started.

I’m on my back. My fingers are twisted in his shirt; I must have grabbed him on the way down. I don’t remember falling.

“Talk to me,” he says. There’s terror in his eyes I’ve never seen before, not even when I was bleeding out on city asphalt. “Are you here?”

I swallow. It hurts. Everything hurts.

“Unfortunately,” I croak. “I was hoping the afterlife had better décor.”

A wild, broken laugh rips out of him. He bows his head, shoulders shaking once before he wrestles them under control.

“The bond?” I manage. “Did they—”

“No.” The word is a growl. “They didn’t. They tried to nick it. It snapped back. Hard.” His mouth twists. “On us.”

I reach inward, gingerly. The connection between us is no longer a clean line. It feels frayed, yes—but thicker somehow. Doubled over where it recoiled, like a rope that’s been shock-loaded and then tied fast.

“I feel you,” I whisper, stunned. “More than before. And less.”

His brows draw together. “Less?”

“Less… noise,” I say slowly, surprised by my own words. “The pack. They’re still there, but—muted. Not gone. Just… farther away.” I blink, realization dawning. “The preliminary rite hit them too. It pushed them back.”

Understanding dawns in his eyes, chased by fury. “Vessira wanted to prove how cleanly you could be cut free. Instead she just showed us we can blunt their weight on you without severing us.”

A laugh bubbles up in my chest, half-hysterical. “She tried to slice the knife, and dulled it instead.”

He exhales a shaky breath. “You’re not breaking, Lys. You’re… reweighted.” His hand finally finds my face, thumb brushing soot from my cheek. “You’re still mine.”

The word doesn’t land like a claim this time. It lands like a promise.

I cover his hand with mine.

“I’m not just yours,” I say. “I’m also theirs. And we just learned something they don’t want to know.”

His mouth curves, fierce and grim. “That we don’t have to choose between you and the pack,” he says. “We just have to change the way the bond works.”

My wolf stirs, aching but alert. She presses into the new shape of the connection, testing, learning.

For the first time since the alley, I feel something like possibility instead of only threat.

“They tried to show you how to cut me out,” I murmur. “Instead they handed us the first piece of how to keep me in.”

Roenan’s smile is sharp and wild.

“Then we’ll make them live with what they taught us,” he says. “Starting now.”