Two
1992 Words
The Wildelands did not welcome strangers gently.
Thorne Blackwood moved through the undergrowth like smoke, his long strides silent despite the frost-crusted leaves crunching beneath Liora’s boots. She struggled to keep pace, every step sending fresh spikes of agony through her chest where the severed mate bond festered. Rejection pain was supposed to dull with distance, but hers only sharpened, as though Cassian’s howl still chased her through the trees.
Dawn had broken hours ago, painting the sky in bruised purples and angry reds, yet the forest remained dark beneath the canopy of ancient evergreens. The air tasted metallic—snow coming, and something else. Blood. Old and new.
“You’re bleeding,” Thorne said without turning.
Liora glanced down. Crimson seeped through the fabric of her dress where her nails had dug into her palms. She hadn’t noticed. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s everything,” he countered, voice low. “Rejected mates leak life until the bond is cauterized or reversed. You have maybe two days before your wolf starts eating you from the inside.”
She stopped walking. “Then why are we wasting time? You said you could teach me to sever it completely.”
Thorne finally faced her. Sunlight slanted through the branches, catching the silver in his hair and turning his pale eyes almost translucent. Up close, she saw the faint scars that crisscrossed his throat—claw marks, deep and deliberate. Alpha challenges. He had lost at least one.
“I said I could teach you to turn it into something else,” he corrected. “Severing leaves you half-alive. Reversing it… that’s power. Dangerous power. The kind that topples packs.”
Liora’s laugh came out bitter. “I don’t want power. I want the pain to stop.”
“You’ll get both,” he said simply. “Or neither. Your choice.”
Before she could answer, a tremor ran through the earth. Nyx snarled inside her mind, hackles rising. Thorne’s head snapped toward the south.
“They’re closer than I thought.”
Cassian.
Even saying his name in her thoughts made the bond flare, a white-hot wire pulling taut. She could feel him—rage, desperation, something darker—like a storm bearing down.
Thorne grabbed her wrist. “We need to move. There’s a safe den two miles north, warded against pack trackers. If we reach it before nightfall—”
A howl split the air, so close it rattled her bones.
Not Cassian’s voice. This one was higher, eager. Enforcers.
Thorne cursed under his breath. “They’ve flanked us.”
Branches exploded as three massive wolves burst into the clearing—Cassian’s elite guard, shifted into their war forms. Gray, black, and brindle fur bristling, eyes glowing with the thrill of the hunt. The gray one shifted mid-leap, landing in human form: broad, scarred, wearing the crimson armband of the alpha’s personal guard.
“Thorne Blackwood,” the warrior spat. “You’re harboring banished property. Step aside, rogue, and the Alpha might let you keep your head.”
Thorne’s smile was all teeth. “Tell Cassian Draven that if he wants her, he’ll have to come fetch her himself. I’m done bowing to murderers.”
The warrior snarled and shifted back. The three wolves circled, lips peeled back, saliva dripping onto the snow.
Liora’s heart thundered. She was exhausted, injured, barely able to stand. But Nyx surged forward, claws scraping for control.
Let me out, her wolf demanded. I’ll tear their throats.
Thorne stepped in front of her, shielding her body with his. “Stay behind me.”
“I’m not helpless,” she hissed.
“You’re half-dead,” he shot back. “Don’t waste what strength you have left.”
The wolves attacked.
It was chaos and beauty in the same breath.
Thorne shifted in a blur of silver fur and muscle, larger than any wolf she’d ever seen—even bigger than Cassian’s form. He met the gray wolf head-on, jaws clamping around its throat and slamming it into a tree with a sickening c***k. The black wolf went for his flank, but Thorne twisted, raking claws across its belly in a spray of blood.
Liora didn’t wait. Nyx took over.
She shifted without thinking, bones cracking and reforming in a rush of agony and ecstasy. Her wolf form burst free—smaller than the males, but sleek and lethal, fur the color of midnight fire. She launched at the brindle wolf as it tried to circle behind Thorne.
They collided in a tangle of fangs and fury. The brindle was twice her size, but Liora fought dirty—claws to the eyes, teeth to the tendon behind the foreleg. He yelped, stumbling. She pressed the advantage, sinking her jaws into his throat.
Hot blood flooded her tongue. She almost gagged, but Nyx held on, shaking until the body went limp.
When she released him, the clearing was silent except for panting.
Thorne stood over the remaining two wolves—one unconscious, one dead. Blood matted his silver coat, but his eyes burned with fierce approval as he looked at her.
Not so weak after all, his voice rumbled in her mind through the open pack link all shifted wolves shared in proximity.
Liora shifted back to human form, n***d and shaking, covered in blood that wasn’t all hers. The cold bit into her skin, but adrenaline kept her upright.
Thorne shifted too, unashamed of his own nudity, and tore a strip from the dead warrior’s abandoned cloak to wrap around her shoulders.
“We can’t stay,” he said. “Cassian will come himself now. And he’ll bring the entire guard.”
Liora stared at the bodies. She had killed. Her hands shook—not with regret, but with the intoxicating rush of survival.
“I’m not running forever,” she said quietly.
Thorne’s gaze softened, just a fraction. “You won’t have to. But first, you need to live long enough to make him bleed for what he did.”
He led her deeper into the Wildelands, over frozen streams and through hidden ravines until the sun began to sink. The den he spoke of was carved into the side of a cliff, concealed by hanging vines and ancient wards that prickled against her skin like static.
Inside, a fire already burned—someone else lived here. A woman emerged from the shadows: tall, lean, with cropped white-blonde hair and eyes the same icy blue as Thorne’s. Sister, maybe.
“This is Riven,” Thorne introduced. “My second. She’ll clean your wounds while I prepare the ritual.”
“Ritual?” Liora asked warily.
Riven’s mouth curved in a humorless smile. “To keep you alive. And to give you a fighting chance when your mate comes knocking.”
They stripped the blood-soaked cloak from her shoulders. Riven’s hands were gentle but efficient as she cleaned the gashes with herbal paste that burned like fire. Liora bit her lip until she tasted copper.
Thorne drew a circle on the stone floor with ash and crushed moonstone, chanting in a language older than any pack tongue. The air grew heavy, charged.
“What is this?” Liora whispered.
“A blood bond,” Thorne answered without pausing his work. “Not a mate bond. Something older. It will anchor your wolf to this land, to survival, instead of to him. It will dull the rejection pain—but it comes at a price.”
“What price?”
He met her eyes. “You’ll be tied to me. Not romantically. Not sexually. But my strength will bolster yours, and your pain will bleed into me when it becomes too much. In return, when you grow strong enough, you’ll lend me your power to reclaim what Cassian’s family stole from mine.”
Liora hesitated. Another bond. Another chain.
But the rejection clawed at her insides like a living thing, and she could feel Cassian drawing closer—his rage a beacon in the darkening night.
“Do it,” she said.
Thorne sliced his palm, then hers. Their blood mingled in the center of the circle. He pressed their hands together, chanting faster. Heat exploded through her veins—not pain, but raw, wild power. Nyx howled in ecstasy.
The bond snapped into place.
For the first time since the rejection, Liora could breathe.
Outside, snow began to fall in thick, silent sheets.
Hours later, she stood at the mouth of the den, wrapped in furs, watching the storm. The new bond with Thorne hummed quietly in her chest—steady, strong, nothing like the violent pull of the mate bond. It felt like borrowing armor.
Riven joined her. “He’s coming,” she said softly. “Cassian. Alone.”
Liora’s heart stuttered. “How do you know?”
“Because I know him.” Riven’s voice was bitter. “He’ll risk everything to drag you back. Pride won’t let him do anything else.”
As if summoned by the words, a lone figure emerged from the treeline below the cliff.
Cassian.
Even from this distance, she felt him—the full force of the mate bond roaring back to life now that he was near. He was in human form, bare-chested despite the blizzard, black hair whipping in the wind, golden eyes fixed on the den like a predator scenting prey.
He stopped at the base of the cliff and looked straight up at her.
“Liora,” he called, voice carrying impossibly clear through the storm. “Come down. We need to talk.”
Rage and pain and something treacherous—longing—warred inside her.
Thorne appeared at her side, hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “You don’t owe him anything.”
Cassian’s gaze flicked to Thorne’s hand, and a growl rumbled from his chest that shook snow from the branches.
“I said come down,” Cassian repeated, louder. “Or I come up and take you.”
Liora stepped forward to the edge.
“No,” she shouted back, voice steady despite the storm in her blood. “You rejected me. You banished me. You don’t get to change your mind now.”
His hands clenched. “I made a mistake.”
“The Goddess doesn’t make mistakes,” she fired back, throwing his own words in his face. “You said so yourself.”
Regret flashed across his features, raw and unguarded. “I was wrong. The bond—it’s killing me too. I can’t—” His voice cracked. “I can’t lose you.”
Liora laughed, cold and sharp. “You already did.”
Cassian took a step closer, snow crunching under his boots. “Then I’ll earn you back. Whatever it takes.”
Thorne’s grip tightened warningly.
Cassian’s eyes narrowed on him. “Get your hand off my mate, Blackwood, or I’ll rip it off.”
Thorne smiled, slow and dangerous. “She’s not yours anymore, Draven. And she never will be again.”
The air crackled with alpha power, two storms about to collide.
Liora felt the new bond with Thorne steady her, while the old one screamed for her to run to Cassian, to forgive, to submit.
She did neither.
Instead, she leaned over the edge and met Cassian’s gaze head-on.
“If you want me,” she said, voice carrying over the wind, “then come and try. But know this: next time blood spills, it won’t be mine.”
Cassian’s eyes blazed gold.
He shifted.
A massive black wolf launched up the cliff face, claws digging into ice and stone with impossible strength, storm raging around him.
Thorne shoved Liora behind him and shifted too, silver fur rippling as he braced for impact.
Snow and fury exploded as the two alphas collided mid-air.
And Liora, heart pounding with newly awakened fire, shifted to join the fight.
Because this time, she wasn’t running.
She was choosing.
- Writer
