Unclaimed Bonds

Chapter 4

Shattered

Lila’s study group ended earlier than expected.

The other girls had decided to call it a night after finishing the last set of practice questions for the upcoming chemistry exam. Someone suggested they all go for coffee, but Lila had declined with a polite smile, already thinking about the quiet house and the possibility of slipping into Kane’s room later the way she had done so many times before. She drove home with the windows cracked, the cool evening air brushing her face, the mate bond humming steadily under her skin like a warm, familiar current. For the first time in days she felt almost light. Three weeks of secret nights had settled something restless inside her. The fear of discovery was still there, but so was the deep, bone-level certainty that Kane was hers.

She came in through the side entrance, backpack over one shoulder, sneakers soft on the stone floor. The house was quiet. Too quiet. No television murmuring from the living room. No low voices from the kitchen. No distant sound of Kane’s father moving around in his study. The usual evening rhythm of the mansion was simply… absent.

Then she heard them.

Voices drifted from the guest wing—low, breathless, unmistakably intimate. A soft female laugh. A deeper male groan that Lila knew as well as her own heartbeat. The sound stopped her cold in the middle of the hallway. For a moment her mind refused to connect the pieces. It was impossible. Kane was supposed to be at evening training with the pack’s younger wolves. He had told her that morning he would be gone until at least ten.

Her feet carried her forward anyway.

The door to the guest bedroom stood halfway open. Golden light spilled into the hallway in a soft rectangle. Lila’s hand lifted as if to push it wider, then froze. Through the gap she could see the bed. Kane was naked, stretched out against the white sheets, head tipped back against the pillows. Sienna—her older stepsister, twenty-two and always smiling too sharply—straddled his hips, moving with slow, deliberate confidence. Her dark hair spilled down her back. Kane’s hands gripped her waist, fingers digging into soft skin the same way they had dug into Lila’s only the night before.

For one frozen, nightmarish second Lila’s mind simply refused to process what she was seeing. The image existed, but it made no sense. It was like looking at a photograph of something that could not possibly be real. Then the details sharpened—the flush on Kane’s throat, the way his hips lifted to meet Sienna’s, the soft, satisfied sound Sienna made as she leaned down to kiss him—and the mate bond ruptured.

Pain exploded behind Lila’s ribs, white-hot and absolute.

It felt like something vital had been ripped out of her chest with clawed hands. A broken sound tore from her throat before she could stop it—half sob, half animal cry. The bond that had thrummed so steadily between them for weeks snapped with a violence that dropped her to one knee. Her vision blurred. Her wolf screamed inside her skull, a raw, endless howl of betrayal and loss that drowned out everything else. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. The only thing that existed was the agony blooming outward from the center of her chest like a physical wound.

Kane’s head snapped up.

Horror flooded his face so completely it almost looked like grief. His hands left Sienna’s waist as if burned. “Lila—f**k—Lila, wait—”

She was already running.

Her wolf continued to scream the entire way to her room, a ragged, unbroken sound that scraped the inside of her skull raw. She slammed the door behind her, locked it with shaking fingers, and then simply stood there in the middle of the floor, arms wrapped tightly around her middle as if she could hold the pieces of herself together by force. Tears streamed down her face so fast she could taste salt. The broken bond felt like a live wire still sparking inside her chest—every pulse of it pure pain.

She packed blindly.

Clothes were shoved into her old duffel bag without folding. She grabbed her phone, her charger, the little cash she had saved from her summer job, the worn paperback she had been reading in secret. Her hands shook so badly she dropped her hairbrush twice. Somewhere downstairs she could hear Kane’s voice, loud and desperate, calling her name. Footsteps pounded up the main staircase. A fist hit her door hard enough to rattle the frame.

“Lila, open the door. Please. It’s not what it looked like—Sienna—just let me explain—”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. If she opened her mouth the only thing that would come out was a scream. Instead she zipped the bag shut, wiped her face with the sleeve of her sweater, and moved to the window. The guest room was on the second floor, but the old oak tree outside had thick branches that reached almost to the sill. She had noticed them her first night in the house and filed the information away without thinking. Now she used it.

Climbing down was clumsy and terrifying. Bark scraped her palms. One foot slipped and for a sickening second she thought she would fall. Then her sneakers hit the soft ground of the side garden and she was running again, bag bouncing against her hip, lungs burning, the broken bond still screaming with every step. Behind her she heard the bedroom door finally give way under Kane’s shoulder and his voice rising in panic when he realized the room was empty.

She reached her car—the old, reliable sedan her mother had given her on her eighteenth birthday—and threw the bag into the passenger seat. Her hands were shaking so hard she needed both of them to get the key into the ignition. The engine turned over on the second try. She didn’t look back as she pulled down the long driveway. If she looked back she would see Kane standing in the open doorway of the mansion, and she was not sure she would survive the sight.

She drove.

At first she had no destination. She simply needed distance—from the house, from the guest bedroom, from the image of Kane’s hands on someone else’s skin. The pain in her chest refused to ease. Every mile only seemed to stretch the broken bond thinner, making it hurt in a different, sharper way. Her wolf had stopped screaming and started pacing instead, restless and furious and heartbroken all at once. Tears kept coming in waves. She would think she had cried them all out, only for another sob to tear free when a memory surfaced—Kane’s mouth against her throat in the pool house, the way he had whispered “mate” like it was the only word that mattered, the careful way he had held her after.

By the time she reached the highway the grief had begun to harden into something colder.

Revenge, her wolf snarled, voice ragged but clear. Make him hurt the way we hurt. Make him feel it.

Lila’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. The idea settled into the hollow place where the mate bond used to live and began to grow roots. Kane had destroyed her in a single night. He had taken the one thing that had ever felt certain and shattered it without warning. She wanted him to understand that pain. She wanted him on his knees. She wanted him to know exactly what it felt like to lose something irreplaceable.

She thought of the neighboring territory. Silver Ridge. She had heard the name at pack gatherings, spoken with a mixture of respect and caution. Their Alpha was young, powerful, and—according to the quiet whispers—still unmated after years of waiting. Ronan Vale. She had seen him once, years earlier, at a regional meeting. He had been watching her even then. She remembered the weight of his gaze across a crowded clearing, steady and patient and somehow knowing.

Lila turned the car toward Silver Ridge territory with tears still drying on her cheeks and a new, cold purpose settling into her bones.

The broken bond still ached with every breath. Her wolf still paced and snarled and mourned. But underneath the pain something harder had begun to form—a decision, sharp and final.

Kane Blackwood had broken her.

She would make certain he never forgot it.