Betrothed To The Ruthless Alpha

Chapter three:The bond between us

Raulph found me an hour later, in the small library off the east wing.

"Phiona cornered you," he said. Not a question.

"She's not happy you defended me."

"I know." He leaned against the doorframe. "I felt it too, if that's what you're wondering. At dinner. Whatever that was."

I set my book down. "What was it?"

"I don't know." He stepped into the room, careful, like he was choosing his words the way you'd choose footing on uneven ground. "I've never had anyone else's pain sit inside my own chest before. I didn't expect it to work like that. A second bond, on top of the first one you're still carrying."

So he'd felt it too. Not just guessed at what I was going through, but actually felt some version of it himself.

"What does it feel like?" I asked. "On your end."

He was quiet a moment, like he was deciding how honest to actually be. "Like something pulling at a wound I didn't know I had," he said finally. "I've never lost a mate. I don't know grief the way you do. But sitting across from you at dinner, feeling something in my own chest ease when I spoke up for you — that wasn't nothing. I don't have a tidy explanation for it."

"It eased," I said slowly, "when you stood up for me. Just for a second."

"It did for me too."

We stood there, the fire cracking softly, both of us working through something neither of us had words prepared for. This wasn't in the wedding vows. Nobody had warned either of us that a forced marriage might come with its own quiet, involuntary tether, separate from anything either of us had chosen.

"Raphael and I bonded when we were sixteen," I said, surprising myself with how easily it came out. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"You don't have to."

"I know. I want to." I wrapped my arms around myself, though the room wasn't cold. "It didn't feel like this. It felt easy. Like something settling into place instead of being forced into it. I keep waiting for this to feel like a betrayal of that. Some mornings it does."

"And other mornings?"

"Other mornings I don't know what to call it," I admitted. "That scares me more than the grief does, if I'm honest."

He didn't offer comfort, and I was grateful for that. Comfort would have felt like a lie neither of us could afford yet.

"I don't want this," I said finally. "Whatever this bond is trying to become. I already have one. Raphael's isn't gone, not really, it's just — waiting, maybe. Rotting, maybe. I don't know which. But I'm not interested in feeling anything for the man who put it there."

"I'm not asking you to feel anything." His voice was steady, but something in it had shifted from the guarded flatness of the wedding day. "I'm telling you what's happening because you deserve to know, not because I expect you to be grateful for it."

That was new. At the wedding, he'd given me nothing but he had a choice, so did he — cold justification, no honesty underneath it. This was different. Smaller, maybe, but real.

"What do we do with it?" I asked. "Phiona already knows it matters to you, whatever it is. She's going to use that."

"Let her try." Something hard settled into his jaw. "I'm not going to pretend indifference just to protect myself from my brother's wife. That's not who I want to be in this house."

"Who do you want to be?"

He didn't answer right away, and for once, I let the silence sit instead of pushing. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter.

"I don't know yet," he said. "I killed a man on the assumption that strength meant never hesitating. I'm starting to think that assumption might have been wrong. I don't know what that makes me, if it's true."

That was more than he'd given me all day, more than he'd given me since the moment I arrived at Silver Moon. Not an apology — I didn't think he had one in him, not yet, maybe not ever for Raphael specifically. But an opening. A door left ajar instead of locked.

"I still hate you," I said. "I want to be clear about that. This bond, whatever it's doing, doesn't erase what you did."

"I know."

"But I don't think you're only what you did that day. Not anymore. Not after tonight."

Something moved behind his eyes, something careful and unguarded at once. "That's more than I expected to hear from you today."

"Don't get used to it."

A ghost of something almost like a smile. "I won't."

I picked my book back up, though I had no real intention of reading it, and let the quiet settle between us — different from the silence at the wedding, different from the cold standoff in the hallway after dinner. This one had room in it. Room for whatever this bond was going to demand of us, room for Raphael's memory to keep aching without that ache being the only thing left in me, room for Raulph to be something other than the man who'd taken everything.

I didn't know yet what any of it meant. I only knew, watching him leave the library with something less guarded in his shoulders than when he'd arrived, that tonight had moved us somewhere neither of us had agreed to go.

We just hadn't figured out yet where that somewhere was.

I stayed in the library long after he'd gone, the fire burning down to embers, my book still unread in my lap. I thought about Raphael's promise, the one he'd made about waiting until after the war, and wondered, not for the first time, what he would think of me now — sitting in another man's house, feeling another man's absence ease something in my own chest, however small, however unwanted.

I didn't think he would hate me for it. That was almost worse, somehow, imagining his easy forgiveness instead of anger. Raphael had never been someone who held grudges, not even against people who deserved them. It would be so like him to tell me it was all right, that surviving mattered more than staying loyal to a grief that could crush me if I let it.

I wasn't ready to let myself off that easily, whatever he might have said. But I banked the fire before I left the library that night, and for the first time since the wedding, I didn't lie awake dreading the morning. I just felt tired, and strange, and cautiously, quietly less alone than I had been the day before.