THE MATE I LEFT BEHIND

CHAPTER FIVE

Kaelan's POV

I've relived the night Selene disappeared nine thousand times in five years.

I never imagined I'd relive it standing in a hallway striped with blood, watching Marcus Thorne, a man I'd trusted with my father's secrets, with my own back in a fight hold a syringe like a peace offering.

While the woman I'd buried in my chest for five years stood alive three feet away.

"Drop it," I said, the wolf riding close under my voice.

He didn't even flinch at the command.

That alone told me more than anything he'd said.

A beta who'd spent six years snapping to attention at the sound of my authority now stood there weighing me like an obstacle instead of an Alpha.

Whatever loyalty he'd faked, he'd shed it completely the moment the mask came off.

I searched his face for some trace of the man I'd known the one who'd taught me to track a wounded deer through fresh snow when I was twelve, who'd stood at my father's shoulder during the worst winter this pack had ever survived.

And found nothing. Whoever Marcus had actually been this whole time, that boyhood memory belonged to a stranger wearing his face.

Marcus smiled.

The same patient smile he'd worn at pack meetings for six years. "You don't want to do anything rash, Alpha. Not with your mate this close to the needle."

Mate.

Something in my chest went feral. He knew.

"You did this," I said. "Five years ago. Three nights ago. And you sent that thing at us tonight, while the entire building sat helpless in the dark you cut yourself."

"I did what was necessary."

His calm cracked.

"You have no idea what this pack could have been if you weren't so busy being noble about a bond you barely understood. Your father would have expanded our territory. Built alliances the Dravens would fear for a generation.”

His eyes hardened.

“And you wanted to marry a girl from a minor bloodline and call it fate."

"She is my fate."

"Fate doesn't pay debts."

Marcus's mask slipped fully.

"I tried removing the problem quietly before the binding. She solved half of it herself by running. Imagine my surprise when I smelled a corpse walking my own hallway three days ago."

Selene's face went bone-white, but her spine never bent. "You poisoned him twice. Nearly killed your own Alpha for a trade deal."

"I nearly killed him for this pack's survival."

"I ran to protect him. You're the one who nearly got him killed. Twice. While smiling at family dinners the whole time."

"Careful, Doctor,"

Marcus titled his head, something almost admiring in the gesture.

"You're better at this than I gave you credit for five years ago. I underestimated you once. I don't intend to repeat the mistake.”

His eyes narrowed.

“It's the only reason you're still breathing right now, if we're being honest with each other."

"You should be more worried about what you underestimated tonight," Selene shot back.

I could hear the tremor under the bravado, the fear she was working hard to keep out of her voice.

Ivy, beside me, had gone rigid with fury matching mine, both of us realizing at the same second that the man we'd trusted with six years of secrets had been quietly hunting our Alpha the entire time.

"Put it down, Marcus.”

My voice dropped.

“This ends tonight."

"Agreed,"

Something in the easy certainty of his voice should have warned me faster than it did.

The calm of a man who had already run this exact scenario a dozen times in his head and accounted for every version of how it could end, including this one.

He didn't lunge at me.

He lunged at Selene.

I don't remember deciding to move.

I remember the needle catching light as it arced toward her, and remember throwing myself between them with a wound already torn open and bleeding.

The needle punched into my shoulder instead of hers.

Marcus's face flickered with shock.

He hadn't expected me to still move that fast.

"No," Selene screamed, and the sound cracked something open in my chest that had nothing to do with the fresh drug already tearing through my blood.

My legs buckled before I registered them going.

Marcus bolted for the stairwell.

Ivy already shifting mid-stride to chase him, claws catching the tile with a sound like breaking ice.

Selene caught me before I hit the floor, her hands pressed hard against my chest, her face terrified, streaked with tears I hadn't seen since we were teenagers.

The last thing I heard, before the world went black at the edges, was her voice.

Splitting wide open, screaming my name like she was the one drowning.

Somewhere far off, at the very bottom of the dark pulling me under, I felt the poison shift gears inside me.

It was no longer content to simply weaken, now moving with purpose toward something I couldn't name yet, something that felt less like dying and more like being slowly, deliberately unmade.

And underneath even that, fainter than a heartbeat, I felt the bond flare once, hard, like it was trying to drag me back up through the dark by sheer force of will alone.

Selene's terror pouring through it in a way I hadn't felt in five years.

Undeniable proof that whatever she was to me, whatever the river had never actually taken, it was still very much alive on both ends.