Chosen by the Alpha Who Destroyed My Pack

Chapter 7 – The Bond Gone Quiet

Kalen stared at the ceiling like it had personally betrayed him.

He lay on his back on the far cot, one arm flung over his eyes, the other hand fisted in the blanket. The monitors at his side beeped with infuriating calm. No torn flesh, no bruising. On paper, he was fine.

On paper, Sylvi’s old life had looked fine, too.

“Another one of yours?” she asked quietly, hovering at the foot of the bed.

“Mine enough,” Ilyss said. “He’s twenty-two. Solid fighter. Bonded three years ago to a sweet thing named Lisse. Yesterday he walked into the yard and told her he couldn’t hear her anymore.”

Sylvi’s stomach knotted. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Ilyss’s mouth pressed thin. “No fever. No blow to the head. No fight. The line just… went dead.”

“You know I can hear you,” Kalen said flatly, lifting his arm enough to squint at them. His eyes were ringed in red, not from tears—those had probably dried hours ago—but from lack of sleep. “I’m not deaf. Just broken.”

“You’re not broken,” Ilyss snapped, automatic and fierce.

“Feels that way,” he muttered.

Sylvi came closer, letting him see her approach. Wolves didn’t like surprises when they already felt flayed.

“I’m Sylvi,” she said. “I was with Jorek last night.”

“Yeah.” His gaze flicked over her, skeptical and tired. “The touch one.”

“Apparently that’s my brand now.” She tried for a hint of wryness. “Ilyss says you volunteered to let me take a look.”

“Ilyss said I was volunteering,” he corrected. “I decided arguing with her wasn’t worth the bruises.”

Ilyss sniffed. “You say that like I don’t know how to pull a punch.”

Kalen’s mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile. It vanished as quickly as it came. “If you can fix it, fix it,” he said to Sylvi. “If you can’t, at least be honest enough to say so.”

Honesty. Right. That old friend.

“I don’t know yet what I can do,” Sylvi said. “But I can tell you what I feel. No sugarcoating.”

He nodded once. “Fine.”

“Lisse?” Sylvi asked Ilyss quietly.

“In the women’s wing,” Ilyss said. “We separated them when the panic hit. She’s… not screaming anymore.”

That was something. Barely.

Sylvi pulled a stool closer to Kalen’s bed and sat, resting her hands on her thighs for a moment, grounding herself. Her nerves still hummed from the past twenty-four hours, but this was what she’d agreed to. What she was good at, whether she wanted to be or not.

“Okay,” she said softly. “I’m going to touch you. Just your hand, at first. I’m not going to dive in unless you say I can.”

“You can,” he said immediately, jaw clenched. “I need—” His voice cracked. “I need to know if she’s gone or if someone stole her.”

The words hit somewhere deep in her own wreckage. Someone stole her.

Sylvi swallowed. “All right. Deep breath.”

She reached out and wrapped her fingers gently around his wrist, over the steady thrum of his pulse.

The pain that lived in his body was ordinary: muscle strain, old training bruises, a bad tumble from years ago that had left his left knee a little weaker. Background noise.

She pushed past that, deeper, to where the bond should hum: that faint, constant thread of warmth linking wolf to wolf.

For a moment she felt nothing.

Then, like rubbing fingers over scar tissue, she found it—a place where something should have been and wasn’t. A hollow.

Her own wolf bristled, whining low. The absence felt wrong, not like death. Death left echoes: grief, a clean cut, a thread snapped but remembered. This was… scorched. As if someone had burned the rope and scraped away the ash.

Easy, she told herself. Don’t chase it. Listen.

As she let her awareness hover there, a faint, sickly vibration tickled her senses. Not from Kalen. From the mark itself. Like a burned edge that still smoldered.

Someone had been here. Recently.

Sylvi’s head swam. Her grip on his wrist tightened.

“You see something?” Kalen whispered.

“Yes,” she said, voice hoarse. “And you’re right. It wasn’t you.”

Relief and fury crashed through him so hard she almost lost her balance.

“Then where is she?” Kalen demanded. “Why can’t I feel her?”

“Because whatever did this didn’t just cut the cord,” Sylvi said slowly. “It… cauterized it. Erased the path between you.” She followed the deadened line further, carefully, feeling for any trace that led outward.

There. Barely. The faintest smear of that same cold wrongness she’d touched in Jorek.

Like a fingerprint.

Someone else’s magic, overlaying the place where his bond used to be.

Sylvi sucked in a breath.

The room tilted. For a heartbeat, her vision went dark at the edges. Behind her eyes, a forest flashed—different trees, different sky—and a sense of watching slid along her spine.

No.

She yanked herself free, tearing her hand back. The afterimage of that cold touch clung to her skin.

Kalen’s fingers closed around her wrist, panic flaring. “What? What did you see?”

Ilyss was already at her shoulder, steadying her. “Sylvi.”

“I’m fine,” Sylvi lied, breathing hard. She forced her gaze back to Kalen. “Listen to me. Lisse isn’t dead. If she were, what I felt would be… cleaner. This is messier. Violent. Someone interfered with your bond from the outside and tried to scrub their tracks.”

“Can you find her?” His voice broke on the last word.

Sylvi hesitated, the taste of that alien presence still bitter on her tongue. Whoever they were, they’d reached through Kalen’s most private connection without blinking. And when she brushed their work, they’d felt her.

If you chase that thread, they’ll pull back.

“I don’t know yet,” she said, truth heavy as stone. “If I push harder, I might draw whoever did this straight to us. To you. To her.”

Kalen stared at her like she’d slammed a door in his face.

“So that’s it?” he whispered. “We just… sit here? While she’s out there with—”

“No,” Sylvi said sharply. “That’s not it. It means we move carefully. We find patterns. We compare what I felt in you to what’s in Jorek, to what’s happening in other packs.”

He swallowed, throat working. “While I lie here with half my soul missing.”

His pain, raw and jagged, tugged at her like a tide. Sylvi’s gift strained toward him, wanting to numb, to soothe.

She held it back.

“I can take the edge off,” she said quietly. “The worst of the emptiness. But if I drown all of it, you won’t be able to tell me when something changes. We need you awake, Kalen. Angry. Paying attention.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, they shone but no tears fell.

“Fine,” he rasped. “Then take just enough that I don’t rip my own skin off.”

She nodded and laid her hand over his again, gentler this time, skimming only the rawest places, smoothing the sharpest spikes of grief.

Enough to let him breathe. Not enough to let herself forget what it felt like.

When she finally pulled back, her own bones ached.

Ilyss guided her a step away. “Well?”

Sylvi stared at the far wall, seeing only that scorched, unnatural emptiness.

“Someone is cutting bonds,” she said. “On purpose. Clean and ugly. And they know how to hide.”

She felt, rather than saw, Corren in the doorway, drawn by the shift in the room’s air.

“Can you stop them?” he asked.

Sylvi met his eyes, the echo of that foreign gaze still crawling along her nerves.

“Maybe,” she said. “But not if we pretend this is just sickness. This is a knife. And somewhere out there, someone is sharpening it.”