Claimed By Silver

Chapter Ten: What We're Supposed to Be

Freya’s POV

He comes back the next night the way he promised, and this time I don't wait until I know he's there — I'm already sitting on the couch with two cups of tea going cold on the coffee table when the window eases open, like some part of me trusted he'd keep his word before I had any real evidence he would.

"You made tea," he says, glancing at the cups, something almost amused crossing his face.

"I didn't know if you drink it. I made it anyway." I gesture at the armchair across from me, deliberately putting furniture between us this time, because last night ended somewhere I'm not ready to return to yet, not until I understand what I'm actually stepping into. "Sit. You said you'd tell me the rest."

He sits, folding himself into the chair like a man unused to the shape of ordinary furniture, silver eyes steady on me in the lamplight. "Ask me anything."

"The bond." I wrap both hands around my own cup, more for something to hold onto than for the warmth. "You said it found you the first time you saw me. I need you to actually explain what that means. Not in metaphor. In fact."

He's quiet for a moment, choosing words the way he seems to choose everything, carefully, like language is a weapon he doesn't want to misfire. "Wolves don't fall in love the way your stories describe it. Not usually. Most matches are chosen — pack alliances, compatibility, sometimes just proximity and affection allowed to grow the ordinary way, the same as it happens for humans. But every few generations, something else happens. A bond forms on its own, unchosen, between a wolf and one specific person, and there's no refusing it once it takes hold. It's not a feeling that develops slowly, the way affection usually does. It's already complete the moment it arrives, fully formed, no negotiation involved."

"Like being struck." I say.

"Exactly like that." Something flickers behind his eyes, an old memory surfacing. "I was crossing paths with you by accident, six years ago. You had coffee in one hand, your collar turned up against the wind. I felt it hit my chest like a fist, hard enough that I had to catch myself against a wall. My wolf came up under my skin so fast I nearly lost control of the shift right there on a public street, in daylight, surrounded by people who would have had no framework at all for what they were seeing. That's what a bond forming actually feels like. Not romantic. Violent, almost. Total."

"Why me?" The question comes out smaller than I mean it to, more vulnerable than I want to show him. "Why did it choose me at all? Out of everyone you've ever crossed paths with in however many years you've been alive?"

"I don't know." He says it plainly, no attempt to dress it up into something more comforting. "Nobody knows why the bond selects who it selects. There's no pattern the old texts have ever identified — not bloodline, not fate in any way that can be traced, not merit, whatever that would even mean here. It simply happens. You didn't do anything to deserve this, Freya, any more than I did anything to earn it. It's not a reward. It's closer to a verdict, handed down without appeal."

I sit with that for a while, watching steam curl off my tea, trying to fit the word verdict into everything that's happened to me over the last six years — the curse I believed in, the deaths I couldn't explain, all of it apparently just the visible edge of something ancient and indifferent that picked me at random and never asked if I wanted the honour of being chosen at all.

"How does it work, exactly?" I ask. "The pull. I've felt it — knowing you're outside without looking, wanting things I don't understand the shape of. Is that the bond, or is that just me?"

"Both, in a way that's hard to separate." He leans forward slightly, elbows on his knees, some of his usual stillness giving way to something more open. "The bond runs in both directions once it forms, even if only one side of the pair knows it exists at first. I've felt it pulling at me for six years — awareness of where you are, what you're feeling, sometimes even fragments of what you're dreaming, though I've never told you that until now because I didn't think you'd want to know I could feel that much of you without your permission."

My stomach does something complicated. "You've felt my dreams?"

"Not clearly. Impressions, mostly — emotional weather more than image or sound. I felt something shift in you two nights ago, something warmer than fear, and I didn't understand what it meant until you told me about the dream yourself." He watches my face carefully, gauging how badly that admission has landed. "I should have told you sooner. I'm telling you now because you asked for honesty, and this is part of it, however uncomfortable."

I take a long breath, trying to decide how much of my privacy has already quietly belonged to him without my consent, and how much of that discovery I have room to be angry about tonight on top of everything else.

"What else does the bond do," I ask instead, setting the anger aside for now, "that I don't know about yet?"

"It's already changing you, slowly. The healing you've probably noticed — the wound on your shoulder closing faster than it should. That's the bond's influence, not anything you did. It will likely continue, in small ways, the longer it stays active between us even without a formal mark. Nothing dramatic. Just — quieter changes. Preparing you, in whatever limited way an unfinished bond can prepare a human body for something it was never designed to carry."

"Prepare me for what happens if you actually mark me."

"Yes."

"You said last night that completing it would kill me," I say finally. "That your brother's mate died three days after he marked her. Has anyone — has any human — ever survived it? Ever, in all the time this bond has existed?"

He's quiet for long enough that I know the answer before he says it.

"Once," he says. "That I know of. A thousand years ago, near enough. The stories about her aren't reliable — passed down through generations of wolves who weren't there, embellished the way old stories always are, details shifting with every retelling — but the core of it holds up across every version I've ever heard. A wolf bonded to a human woman, same as this, and instead of losing her the way every other recorded case ended, she survived the mark. Lived a full human life afterward, aged and died naturally, decades later, beside him."

Something in my chest lifts despite myself, a small, treacherous flare of hope. "How?"

"No one knows. That's the honest answer, and I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. Some accounts say the moon goddess herself intervened, marked her as chosen the way some old stories describe — favoured, somehow, beyond the ordinary run of things. Some say she was simply an anomaly, a body built slightly differently than every other human who's ever carried a mark, and there was never any mechanism to it at all, just luck, the same blind luck that decides which humans survive a car crash that kills everyone else inside it. A single data point across a thousand years isn't a pattern, Freya. It's an exception. I'd be lying if I let you believe it was anything more reliable than that."

"But it happened. It's possible."

"It happened once, and I don't know why, and I have no way of finding out whether you'd be an exception too or whether you'd be the second Elena I've had to bury." His voice roughens on his brother's mate's name, old grief still raw under the careful control he wears like a second skin. "That's the truth you asked for. I won't soften it into something easier to hear, even though some part of me wants to, badly, if it would make any of this easier for you to sit with."

"I don't want it softened." I hold his gaze, steady despite the tremor still working through me. "I've spent six years being protected from truths other people decided I couldn't handle. I'd rather have the real odds than a comforting lie."

Something in his expression eases slightly, like that answer was the one he was hoping for without letting himself expect it.

"What are we supposed to be to each other, then?" I ask, quieter now, the question that's actually been sitting under every other question since he climbed through my window last night. "If the bond isn't a choice, and completing it might kill me, and not completing it means you spending the rest of my human life killing anyone who gets close to me — what is this? What am I to you, if not just something you're required to guard until I die of old age, cursed and alone the way I've always assumed I'd be?"

He doesn't answer right away, and when he does, his voice has lost some of its careful control, something more raw bleeding through the edges of it.

"You're the only thing in a very long life that's ever felt like more than duty," he says. "I've told myself for six years that this is obligation, that the bond simply assigned me a responsibility and I'm fulfilling it the way any wolf would. That was never entirely true. I don't watch you from across a street because I have to. I watch you because some part of me would rather be near you and starving than anywhere else, fed on anything else. That's not the language of guardianship, Freya. I know what that actually is, even if I've spent six years refusing to call it by its name."

"Say the name, then."

Something shifts in his face, old walls cracking that I don't think he's let crack in front of anyone in longer than I can imagine. "I love you. In whatever broken, dangerous, complicated shape a man like me is capable of loving anyone. I have since before I ever spoke to you, and I will for as long as either of us survives whatever this turns out to be. That's what you are to me. Not an obligation. Not a duty I've been assigned. The only thing I've ever wanted for myself instead of for the pack, for my brother, for anyone else's sake but my own."

The room goes very quiet. I sit there holding my cooling tea, looking at a man who has confessed to murder and confessed to love in the same twenty-four hours, and understand, with a kind of vertigo I don't fully know how to stand inside of, that I believe both confessions equally.

"I don't know what you are to me yet," I say honestly, because it's the only thing I can offer him that isn't a lie in either direction. "I know I'm not running. I know last night wasn't a mistake, whatever it looked like from the outside. But I need time to understand what choosing this actually means — the risk, the cost, all of it — before I say the same thing back to you and mean it the way you just meant it."

"That's fair." He says it simply, without argument, which surprises me more than almost anything else he's said tonight. "I've had six years to arrive at this. You've had two days. Take whatever time you need. I'm not going anywhere either, Freya. Whatever else changes, that part isn't negotiable."

We sit there together for a long while after that, tea gone cold in both our cups, the silence between us less fraught than it's been since the night on my doorstep — not resolved, not simple, but honest in a way nothing between us has been until tonight.

"Tell me about her," I say eventually. "The one who survived. If there's anything else you know."

And he does — quietly, carefully, giving me every fragment of a thousand-year-old story he has, names half-remembered and details worn smooth by centuries of retelling, and I listen to all of it like it might be the only map either of us gets to work from, however incomplete it turns out to be.