Irreversible
1118 Words
DAMIEN
Rhys found me at 11pm in my private gym, which meant it was serious.
He only came this late when it was something he couldn't say in the building's official spaces. When it was something he needed to say as my Beta, not my employee. There was a difference. I had spent twenty years learning where that line was, and Rhys had spent the same twenty years learning exactly when to cross it.
He stood in the doorway with his arms folded and watched me finish the last set before I said anything.
"Say it," I said.
"Doctor Harlan sent the updated bloodwork."
I set the weight down. Picked up a towel. "And?"
Rhys didn't move from the doorway. "The suppressant is metabolizing differently than it was six months ago. He thinks your body has been compensating. Building tolerance. Which means—"
"The dose needs to go up."
"No." Rhys's voice was flat. The specific flatness he used when he needed me to understand he wasn't going to let me redirect. "Damien. Going up is not an option anymore. There is no up. You are already at the outer boundary of what a wolf's system can tolerate. Harlan's words, not mine." He paused. "The word he used was irreversible."
I walked past him to the water station. Poured a glass.
"He used that word last time."
"He meant it last time too. You chose not to hear it." Rhys followed me into the room, which he rarely did. He was giving me less room than usual. Making himself harder to dismiss. "Damien. If you stay on this dosage for another six months, Harlan believes some of the suppression becomes permanent. Not the bond. The bond is still there, that doesn't go. But the capacity to feel it. The capacity to feel anything at that register." He stopped. Let the silence do the work. "He's not talking about muting the connection. He's talking about you losing the ability to receive it at all. Even if you wanted to."
I drank the water.
The room was quiet except for the ventilation system and, somewhere in the walls, the building settling.
"I understand the concern," I said.
"Do you." It wasn't a question.
"Rhys."
"Do you understand the concern, or are you filing it in the same place you filed it the last three times I had this conversation with you?" He crossed his arms tighter. "Because from where I'm standing, those two things look different and you've been choosing the second one."
I set the glass down carefully.
Here is what I understood that Rhys did not, or rather, here is what I understood that Rhys had decided to refuse to weigh the same way I did: I had seen what the bond did. Not as a concept. Not as a possibility. I had watched it happen in real time, up close, to the two people in the world I had loved most.
My father, building everything for thirty years. A company, a territory, a legacy. Strong in the way that made other men straighten when he walked into a room. And then his mate was taken from him. Not abandoned. Not rejected. Killed. And what happened to my father was not grief, or not only grief. What happened to my father was structural. Like watching a building lose a load-bearing wall. He didn't collapse all at once. He listed. And then he listed further. And within four years there was nothing left that resembled the man who had built all of that.
I was nine years old for the beginning of it. I was nineteen when it finished.
My mother spent her last three years trying to repair a bond that couldn't be repaired, because she had made the mistake of being a woman who loved too completely, trusted too openly, let the connection go all the way to the foundation of her. And when she lost the pack bond along with everything else, she had nothing left underneath.
I had stood at both of their graves by the time I was twenty.
I had understood by then that the bond was not a gift. It was a liability. A structural weakness built into the architecture of every wolf who was foolish enough to let it fully form. A wound waiting for the right moment.
I had decided, standing at my mother's graveside in the rain, that I was not going to be a man who could be hollowed out.
So I made arrangements.
And I had kept them.
For eight years.
"I hear you," I told Rhys.
"That is not the same as listening."
"Rhys." I picked up the suppressant vial from the bench where I'd left it. One dose. The last one for the day. I had been carrying it for six hours without taking it, which was unusual. Usually I didn't hesitate. "I appreciate what you're trying to do. I always have. But the decision is mine."
He watched me lift the vial.
"She is your mate, Damien."
I stopped.
He had never said it plainly before. We had danced around it with language about the bond fluctuating and the suppressant losing efficacy and my metrics being elevated, as though we were discussing a business problem with several moving parts. He had never just said the word out loud.
"I know what she is," I said.
"Then you know what this decision means." His voice was quiet now. Not accusation. Something closer to grief. "You know what you're choosing to give up, permanently, not just for now. You know that."
The vial was cold against my palm. A perfect, cold fact.
"She is better off without a bond to a man who doesn't intend to complete it," I said.
"And you?" Rhys said. "What are you better off as?"
I didn't answer.
I took the dose.
It moved through my system the way it always did. The warmth dimmed. The pull retreated. The glass thickened. And somewhere behind it, something that I had not yet learned the right name for pressed its palm flat against the barrier and stayed there.
I put the empty vial in my pocket.
"Get some sleep," I told Rhys.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"You're going to remember this night," he said. "When you're standing somewhere later and you can feel the bond but you can't reach it anymore. You're going to remember making this choice."
He left.
I stood in the empty gym for a long time afterward.
In my palm, where the cold vial had rested, there was a faint, circular mark.
I looked at it for a moment.
Then I closed my hand.
- Writer
