Claimed By Silver

Chapter Eight: The Truth I Wasn't Ready For

Freya’s POV

He doesn't answer me right away. He just stands there by the window, silver eyes fixed on some point past my shoulder, and for a long moment I think he's going to do what he's done every other time — deflect, retreat, disappear before I get the answer I asked for.

"Sit down," he says instead.

"I don't want to sit down. I want you to talk."

"Freya." His voice has an edge to it I haven't heard before, something almost like fear, which is so foreign on him that it stops my protest cold. "Please. Sit down."

I sit. Some instinct tells me this matters, that whatever's about to happen deserves more than me standing in the middle of my living room in an oversized shirt, arms crossed like armour. I curl into the corner of my couch instead, knees drawn up, and watch him pace the width of my apartment the way I paced it twenty minutes ago, like the nervous energy has simply changed hands between us.

"Six years ago," he says, finally, not looking at me, "you weren't the one who was cursed. You want to understand what's been happening to you. That's where it starts."

"I'm listening."

He stops pacing. Braces both hands against the back of my armchair like he needs the furniture to hold him upright for what comes next. "There's a bond. Older than anything you'd find written down anywhere a human could access. It exists between certain wolves and the person their whole life is meant to orbit. It doesn't ask permission. It doesn't care whether the timing is convenient, or whether the person on the other end of it is even the same species. It just happens, the way weather happens, and once it does, there's no undoing it."

"Wolves," I repeat, and the word sits strange in my mouth, too small for whatever he actually means by it.

"Werewolves, if you want the word from your fairy tales." He says it flatly, like he's used to watching people's faces do exactly what mine is probably doing right now. "I'm not going to pretend that's easier to hear dressed up in gentler language. I'm not human, Freya. Haven't been for longer than you've been alive."

I should be more shocked than I am. That's the strange thing, sitting there processing it — some part of me has been circling this answer for weeks without letting myself land on it directly, ever since that forum thread, ever since Caleb's face went white in my gallery for no reason a normal man's fear could explain. The shock is real, but underneath it there's something closer to relief. An answer, finally, after six years of no answer at all.

"The bond found me the first time I saw you," he goes on, voice low, controlled in the particular way he gets when he's holding something back by force. "Six years before I ever spoke to you. I felt it hit me like something physically striking my chest, and it hasn't let up since. Not for one hour. That's not romantic language, Freya, whatever it might sound like. It's closer to a diagnosis."

"And the men," I say, my voice smaller than I want it to be. "Ethan. Marcus. The others."

Something in his jaw tightens. "I killed them."

The words land exactly as bluntly as he says them, no cushioning, no attempt to soften what he's confessing. I've suspected it for weeks — known it, really, somewhere under the parts of myself still trying to explain it away — but hearing him say it plainly, without a flicker of hesitation or shame, is different from suspecting.

"Why."

"Because the bond doesn't tolerate rivals. It never has. Any man who got close enough to matter became a threat I couldn't leave standing, and I didn't." He finally looks at me directly, silver eyes steady, giving me nothing to hide behind. "I'm not going to apologize for it. I could tell you I regret it, tell you some story about how it haunts me, and it would be a lie. I'd do it again tonight if you gave me a reason."

The honesty of it should terrify me more than it does. I sit with that for a moment, turning it over, waiting for the fear to arrive properly instead of the strange, complicated thing actually sitting in my chest — something closer to being seen than being threatened, which makes no sense at all given what he's just admitted to.

"That's not the part I don't understand," I say slowly. "I mean — it is, but there's something worse in what you're not saying. You told me the bond would kill me. Before you pulled away. What did you mean?"

He's quiet for a long moment. When he finally speaks, something in his voice has changed — less controlled, more raw, like this next part costs him something the confession of murder didn't.

"Completing a bond means marking a mate properly. Not with a blade." His eyes flick, briefly, to my shoulder, to the shirt covering the scar he put there himself. "With teeth. A bite that changes what you are, ties your life to mine in a way that can't be undone. For wolves mated to wolves, it's the greatest gift our kind has. For wolves mated to humans—" He stops. Starts again, quieter. "Human bodies aren't built to carry what the bond demands of them. I've seen it happen. My brother's intended. She died three days after he marked her. Her heart simply couldn't hold what he'd put inside her."

The room goes very still. I think of the alley, of his hands cataloguing every place those men touched me, of the knife instead of teeth, and something that's been sitting unexplained in my chest for days finally clicks into place with a kind of horror I wasn't braced for.

"So the carving—"

"Was the only claim I could make that wouldn't kill you." His voice cracks, just slightly, the first real crack I've heard in it since the doorstep. "I wanted to bite you, Freya. Every part of me has wanted that since the day I first saw you. I used a blade instead because I would rather carve my name into your skin against your will than watch your heart stop the way hers did."

I don't know what to do with the tangle of feeling that rises in me — horror at the reasoning, and underneath it, treacherously, something that might actually be understanding. Not forgiveness. I'm not ready to call it that. But understanding, at least, of the shape of the impossible choice he's been making for years without ever once asking if I wanted it made for me.

"That's not your decision to make," I say, echoing the same words I threw at him in the gallery weeks ago, except this time they land differently, heavier, carrying the full weight of what they actually mean now that I understand the stakes.

"I know." He doesn't argue it. Doesn't defend himself the way I expect him to. "I've made every decision about you without your permission since the day the bond found me. I'm not proud of that. I'm also not going to pretend I'd do it differently, because the alternative is watching you die, and I've already buried one woman I was supposed to protect. I won't bury another."

"So what happens now?" My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. "You just — what, keep me at arm's length forever? Kill anyone who gets close, mark me with knives instead of anything real, and never actually let this become something either of us gets to choose?"

"I don't know." For the first time since he climbed through my window, something in his face looks genuinely lost, the certainty cracking wide open. "I've been operating on one plan for six years, and that plan was never built to survive you asking me to come inside and telling me you want me anyway. I don't have a version of this that keeps you safe and gives either of us what we actually want. I wish I did."

I sit with that for a long time, knees still drawn to my chest, watching a man who's killed nine people for me stand in my living room looking more uncertain than I've ever seen him, more human somehow than his own confession should allow.

"I'm not going anywhere," I say finally, and the words surprise me as much as they seem to surprise him. "I don't know what that means yet. I don't know if I forgive the knife, or the killing, or any of it. But I'm not going to pretend I don't want to understand this. All of it. Even the parts that terrify me."

Something moves across his face — not relief, not exactly, something rawer and more complicated than that. "You should be afraid of me."

"I am." I hold his gaze, steady despite the tremor still working through me. "That doesn't seem to be stopping anything, though. Does it."

He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. The look on his face says enough — something caught between wanting and grief, a man standing at the edge of a choice he's spent six years trying not to make, watching the ground shift under him regardless.

"I should go," he says finally, though he doesn't move toward the window right away.

"Sterling."

He stops.

"Come back tomorrow," I say. "Tell me the rest. All of it. I want to understand what I'm actually choosing, if I'm choosing anything at all."

He looks at me for a long moment, silver eyes unreadable in the low light, and for the first time since I've known him, something that might be hope moves behind them before he buries it the way he buries everything else.

"Tomorrow," he agrees, and then he's gone, out into the dark the way he always is, leaving me alone with a truth I asked for and don't yet know how to carry.