Never Free

Ch. 13 The Watching Game

She was hauling laundry again, arms full of frost-stiffened fabric and overstuffed baskets. She leaned into the cold like it didn’t touch her anymore. Her hands were red. Cracked. Blistered in the way they only got after weeks of punishment. Byron could see them from where he was standing..

He stood in the doorway of the storage shed, a tangle of rope in his hands that didn’t need sorting. The reasons why he had entered the storage shed escaped his head when he saw her.

He watched her move through the courtyard and up the laundry room stairs without a single word. Her wrist was still wrapped from the last time she’d slipped on those same steps.

She didn’t ask for help. She hadn’t for weeks.

Not from anyone.

Not from me, he thought.

He hadn’t spoken to her since the kiss.

Not because he was angry. Not because he blamed her.

But because he didn’t know how to forget what he saw—Brandon leaning in, Xochi standing still, the quiet tension in her shoulders. He couldn’t understand how it could’ve happened. He was sure she hated Brandon, but there she was… kissing him.

He was sure that she would’ve at least pushed him away.

“Or maybe she did… and I just wasn’t there to see it,” he whispered to himself, dropping the tangled rope in a crate and stalking back through the buildings.

He didn’t know what the kiss had meant. He only knew it made his head hurt.

So he stayed distant. And hated himself for it.

He avoided his house. If Xochi made his head hurt, his mother made his blood run cold.

Amber had been more careful lately. Her words were all praise when Brandon was in the room—Alpha this, leadership that, your Mate, your future. Her voice was sweet. Her smile never slipped.

But Byron had started watching her the same way he watched Brandon.

Amber didn’t need to scream to be dangerous.

She just needed silence. And obedience.

And Xochi had stopped fighting out loud.

That was what worried him most.

He turned the corner and found that his treacherous body had led him back towards the laundry room as if all the roads led back to her. He let out a big sigh and was about to turn away when he saw it again—Xochi stumbling with a laundry basket, almost slipping on the frozen steps again. She caught herself before the basket hit the ground. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t complain.

Byron took a step forward, then froze.

Brandon was just down the path, speaking with Elder Roma and Damien Kelly. In full view.

If I help, he thought, Brandon will notice. And eventually Amber will know. Helping her would cost her, and he couldn’t do that to her.

He glimpsed her hands again as she grabbed the laundry basket. And if I don’t, he asked himself.

She righted the basket and moved on like she didn’t even know he was there.

Like he had already disappeared, and something in his chest bled.

That night, he left something for her on her bed. A small tin of salve. A sweet muffin from the kitchen. One of her old pencils. And the scarf Mira had given him last winter—soft and warm, still smelling faintly of cedar.

He said nothing. Wrote nothing. Just wrapped it all in a folded cloth and placed it on her bed, so it would be there when she got to her room.

Then he found a place down the hall in the shadows and waited.

A few minutes later, she came quietly up the stairs. She looked tired, her shoulders hunched slightly under her coat. As soon as she opened the door, she spotted the bundle, froze for a moment, and then picked it up without a sound.

She didn’t smile.

She just held it in both hands like it might disappear if she let go too soon.

Then she slowly closed her bedroom door.

Byron lay awake in bed later, staring at the ceiling. The wind scratched gently against the windowsill, and the moon cast long, pale shadows across his room.

Everyone said Xochi belonged to Brandon, that she was his Mate. This had been whispered since they were kids, passed around like a prophecy.

But every time Brandon touched her, every time she flinched, Byron felt it like a bruise inside his chest.

It doesn’t feel right to him. She looked miserable with him, as if she were holding her breath through every moment.

He knew that that’s not what a bond looks like. That’s not what it should feel like.

And then, the thought came—so quiet, it felt like it had always been there.

What if she’s mine?

He sucked in a breath and rolled onto his side, pulling the blanket tighter around him.

No. He couldn’t allow himself to be stupid. He couldn’t allow himself to want something he couldn’t have.

But the question stayed, curling behind his ribs like a second heartbeat, refusing to leave.