Bonded to the wrong heart

Chapter 3 — Six Weeks

The study smelled like cedar and old paper, and Wren fixed her eyes on the treaty clause instead of on either father in the room, because looking at the words was easier than looking at the men who’d apparently known this could happen and never once mentioned it to her.

“You knew,” she said. “This clause exists because someone anticipated this.”

“It’s standard language.” Her father didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Every treaty marriage has a bonding contingency. It’s never been invoked.”

“It’s being invoked now.”

Kase’s father, a broader, harder-edged version of Kase himself, closed the folder on the desk before either of them could keep reading it. “No one is invoking anything tonight. We’re having a conversation.”

“You circled it in red.”

“I circled it,” her father said, “so we’d remember it exists. Not so we’d act on it.”

Wren looked at Kase, who’d been silent since they’d walked in, arms crossed, jaw tight in a way that told her he was having roughly the same conversation with himself that she was. Neither of their fathers had asked either of them a single question yet. They’d been standing here for ten minutes and this was, apparently, an adult problem being solved by adults, with the two people it actually happened to serving as furniture.

“I have a wedding in six weeks,” she said. “That’s not a contingency. That’s a date.”

“The wedding proceeds,” her father said, and something in his voice suggested this had already been decided before she’d walked in. “Both engagements proceed. The treaty stands as written, minus the contingency clause, which we are choosing not to invoke.”

“Choosing.” Kase spoke for the first time, flat. “Based on what?”

“Based on the fact that a treaty this pack has spent a decade building doesn’t get restructured because two twenty-something-year-olds had a reaction to each other in a crowded room.” Kase’s father said it without cruelty, more like a man stating a budget. “Bonds are not the only thing that matters here.”

Wren almost laughed. Almost. “You just said this has never happened before. How do you know what matters?”

“I know what matters to two packs who’ve spent the last decade not killing each other,” her father said. “That’s what matters. Right now, tonight, that’s the only thing that matters.”

The room went quiet in the particular way rooms went quiet when the adults in it had run out of patience for being questioned. Wren looked at Kase again. He was looking at the floor, and she understood, with a clarity that annoyed her, that he wasn’t going to argue either — not because he agreed, but because he’d clearly had a version of this conversation with authority his whole life and had learned exactly how far pushing got him.

“So what happens now,” she said, because someone needed to make them say it out loud.

“You stay away from each other.” Her father said it like a prescription, simple, final. “No contact. Whatever this is, it settles on its own or it doesn’t, but it does it without help. Both of you finish out your engagements. The wedding happens in six weeks as planned.”

“And if it doesn’t settle?”

Neither father answered that. Wren watched the silence do exactly the thing silence always did in rooms like this — tell her more than an answer would have.

“Fine,” Kase said, before she could push further. He said it flatly, like a door closing, and looked at her for one second before looking away. “No contact.”

She hated that he’d agreed first. It made refusing feel childish, even though nothing about tonight had made her feel like a child except the fact that she was standing in a room being told what to do by two men who wouldn’t look either of them fully in the eye.

“Fine,” she said too, because there wasn’t another option that didn’t make this worse.

Ethan was waiting outside when she finally left, sitting on the low stone wall by the study entrance like he’d been there the whole time, which he probably had.

“How bad,” he said, not a question, just an offer to skip the part where she pretended it was nothing.

“There’s a clause.” She sat down beside him, suddenly exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the late hour. “In the treaty. About what happens if a bond gets confirmed between us.”

Ethan didn’t flinch. She watched for it — the tightening around the eyes, the thing men were supposed to do when someone said the word bond in relation to their fiancée and a stranger — and it didn’t come. He just waited, the way he always waited, for the rest of it.

“They’re not invoking it,” she said. “The wedding’s still happening. Six weeks. No contact with him in the meantime.”

“Okay.” He said it slowly, testing the shape of it. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Relieved.” It came out faster than she meant it to. “I don’t want—” She stopped, tried again. “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want it. I want the wedding to happen exactly like we planned it.”

“I know.” He reached over, not for her hand this time, just resting his palm on the stone between them, close enough that she could close the distance if she wanted to. She did. “I’m not asking because I think you’re going to tell me something different. I’m asking because I want to actually know.”

She looked at him — really looked, the way she’d looked at him a hundred times before tonight and never once doubted what she saw — and found nothing there but patience and a question he genuinely wanted answered.

“It felt like something happened to me without my permission,” she said finally. “Like my body decided something before I got a vote. I hated it.”

Ethan nodded slowly, turning that over. “Does it feel like it’s stopped? Whatever it was?”

She thought about the pull in her chest, quieter now than it had been in the hall, but not gone. Not close to gone.

“No,” she admitted.

He didn’t look surprised, and he didn’t look hurt, either, which somehow made it worse. “Then I guess we find out what six weeks of no contact does.”

“Ethan—”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He said it simply, no drama in it, the same way he’d said it in the courtyard. “I just want you to keep telling me the truth. That’s the only thing I actually need from you right now.”

She nodded, and let herself lean into his shoulder, and told herself the ache under her ribs would fade the way everyone kept promising it would.

It didn’t.