BLOOD BEFORE THE BOND

CHAPTER 3

Liora's POV

I made him say it twice.

Not because I hadn't heard him the first time. I heard him perfectly. I just needed a moment to make sure my face wasn't doing anything I would regret before I responded.

"It's better this way," Kaius said, standing in the doorway of my room like he hadn't just walked in and pulled the floor out from under me. His eyes kept sliding slightly to the left of my face, the way they did when he was saying something he had already decided and didn't want to be talked out of. “Selene needs to feel comfortable in her own home.”

“So I make her uncomfortable,” I said.

“That's not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

His jaw tightened. That particular silence meant he was choosing his words carefully, arranging them into the least damaging version of the truth. I had learned to read that silence months ago, back when it meant something completely different.

"I have a mate now," he said finally. “I'm not going to let anything compromise that. Not even–“ He stopped. Not finishing his word.

He didn't need to. I already knew exactly what word had been sitting at the end of that sentence.

Something cracked open in my chest, quiet and clean, the way ice splits before it gives way entirely. I thought about the dinners. The mornings. That night he sat on the edge of this bed while my hands shook around a cup of tea I couldn't hold properly, and told me quietly that I was safe now. That nobody would ever treat me that way again.

I wondered if he remembered saying that.

“Okay," I said.

He looked at me for a moment, like he was bracing for an argument that wasn't coming. When it didn't, he turned and walked out without another word, and the door clicked shut behind him, and I stood alone in the room that had been mine for seven months listening to his footsteps fade down the hallway.

I packed slowly.

There wasn't much. A few changes of clothes, the small things I had accumulated in the months since he brought me here. I folded everything with more care than it required, because moving carefully meant I didn't have to think too directly about what was happening.

At the back of the closet shelf I found a soft grey sweater Kaius had given me during the first cold month after I arrived. He had noticed I was shivering before I said anything and simply handed it to me without making it into a moment. I held it for a long time before folding it neatly and leaving it on the bed.

It wasn't mine to take.

I zipped my bag, took one last look around the room, and walked out without allowing myself a second one.

The walk down to the front entrance felt longer than it ever had going up. My footsteps sounded too loud against the floor. As I passed the living room, I heard voices near the fireplace. Kaius, Selene, and Elder Mauve low and unhurried. The sound of people making plans in a house that no longer had any room for me in it.

I kept my eyes forward.

“Leaving so soon?”

Elder Mauve's voice followed me without her having to raise it. I heard the satisfaction underneath it, smooth and barely concealed, the sound of someone watching a problem resolve itself neatly.

“This is for the best, Liora. You'll understand that one day.

I didn't slow down. I didn't respond. I walked straight through the front door and out into the cold evening air and let it close behind me.

Philip had arranged a cab without being asked. I noticed he had also slipped a folded piece of paper into the outside pocket of my bag at some point — an address written in his careful handwriting, a name beneath it, someone he said I could trust if things became difficult. I pressed my fingers against it through the fabric and didn't unfold it.

Not yet.

I gave the driver the only other address I had.

The breeder's quarters looked exactly as I remembered them.

Grey. Low-ceilinged. The particular kind of cold that lived in walls rather than in the air. I stood outside for a moment after the cab pulled away. My bag, heavy in my hand, before I made myself walk through the entrance.

The smell reached me before anything else — stale and close, cheap soap over something older and harder to name. Somewhere down one of the hallways, someone was crying quietly. The sound hadn't changed. Nothing here had changed at all.

“Liora.”

Wren was standing near one of the doorways with her arms wrapped around herself, thinner than I remembered, her face pale in a way that pulled at something in my chest. She had been my closest friend in the years before Kaius, the person who had taught me which staff members to avoid and which ones could be trusted, who had shared her blanket during the coldest months without being asked.

She crossed the distance between us quickly and pulled me into a hug that was tighter than I expected.

“I was so happy when you left," she said quietly, pulling back to look at my face. “I thought you were finally out. And now you're back."

"It's complicated," I said, which was the smallest possible version of the truth.

She didn't push. She just picked up one end of my bag and helped me carry it to the room that would apparently be mine again — narrow bed, thin blanket, a single window that let in more cold than light. The same room, or one indistinguishable from it. Like the last seven months had been something I dreamed and woke up from in exactly the same place.

I had just set my bag on the bed when the knock came.

A young girl stood in the doorway, her expression careful and a little too still, the look of someone delivering a message they already knew wasn't good news.

“The head lady wants to see you.”

Wren went quiet beside me. I felt her hand close briefly around my wrist — a warning, or something close to it. A summons from the head lady was never about something small. It was never something you walked away from unchanged.

I looked at the girl in the doorway.

“Tell her I'm on my way,” I said.