Chapter 6
749 Words
Brian’s POV
The council chamber was empty now, the thick scent of tension still hanging in the air like smoke after battle. I stood alone, my back to the carved oak door, watching Lyra from across the room as she lingered by the window, her face turned to the dying light.
She looked beautiful in the shadows, her silhouette proud and regal, the kind of image a pack would follow into war. The kind of woman I was supposed to marry. Had planned to marry.
But everything changed the moment he arrived.
Gavin Nightwind.
The so-called heir to the Night Pack.
Fate. That cursed word had been hanging between us ever since. An invisible blade I couldn't push away or dull.
I stepped forward, the echo of my boots across the chamber sharp and deliberate. She didn’t turn. Didn’t speak.
“You’re avoiding me,” I said.
“I’ve been busy,” she answered, still not looking back.
“Busy with him,” I muttered.
Silence.
I stopped just a few feet behind her. The dying light caught the edge of her jaw, her profile too perfect, too distant. Once, she would have turned to me. Once, I would have stepped closer, and she would have leaned in. Now, there was a wall between us neither of us had built, but one she no longer seemed willing to tear down.
“You used to come to me first,” I said, voice low. “When something weighed on your mind. Now, I get silence. Distance. Secrets.”
Lyra stiffened, then slowly turned to face me. Her expression was unreadable—eyes sharp, guarded, but not cruel. Never cruel.
“It’s not about secrets,” she said. “It’s about something I can’t explain. Something I didn’t choose.”
“You mean him.”
She nodded.
“I didn’t ask for this bond, Brian. I didn’t expect it.”
“But now you want it,” I said, bitterness threading every syllable. “Now he’s all you see.”
She flinched, ever so slightly. “It’s more than sight. More than thought. It’s something... instinctive. Primal. My wolf recognized him before I could even think.”
I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “So years of loyalty, of trust, of building a future—tossed aside because of a scent and a heartbeat?”
“Don’t reduce it like that,” she said sharply. “You know I care about you. But this thing between me and Gavin—it’s not something I can ignore. No matter how much I want to.”
I stepped closer, until I could see the flecks of gold in her irises, the line of her mouth tight with restraint.
“What about us, Lyra?” I asked, quieter now. “What about everything we were supposed to be?”
She looked down for a moment. That silence hurt more than any slap.
“We were right for a time,” she whispered. “But maybe we were only ever meant to be a stepping stone to something else.”
“To him,” I growled.
She looked back up. “To the truth.”
I wanted to shake her. To remind her of the nights we stayed up planning a future. Of the first time I kissed her under the blood moon. Of the time she told me she’d fight fate for me if she had to.
“You said we were stronger than tradition. Stronger than fate.”
Her eyes glistened, but no tears fell. “I was wrong.”
The words knocked the air out of me. I stumbled back a step, then turned away before she could see the crack in my mask.
“So what now?” I asked. “I just walk away? Watch him take you like you were never mine to begin with?”
“No,” she said, “you fight for what you believe in. But you do it with honor. Not bitterness.”
“And if what I believe in is you?”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Then I hope you know when to let go.”
The silence after that was worse than shouting. Worse than violence.
I turned and walked out of the chamber, fists clenched at my sides.
But inside me, something darker stirred. Something that didn’t want to let go.
Something that would rather burn the bond to ash than bow to it.
- Writer
