Marked *Chapter 5*
628 Words
CALLUM
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The door closed behind him and Callum couldn't breathe.
Solomon was waiting by the truck. He straightened when he saw Callum's face.
"Alpha —"
"Go back to the compound. I'm running."
"It's fifteen miles. Through uncleared territory. After an attack."
"I know."
"I should come with you."
"No." Too sharp. Too raw. "I need to run. Alone. I'll be there within the hour."
Solomon didn't argue. He nodded once, slow — not happy about it, but not his call to make.
Callum didn't wait for the truck to pull away. He was already moving, past the parking lot, past the streetlights, into the dark tree line at the edge of town.
The shift took him before he'd made it twenty feet into the woods.
Bones cracking. Muscles tearing loose and reforming. For once, the pain was almost welcome — something physical to match the wreckage inside him.
Then he was wolf.
And every part of him was screaming to turn around.
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He ran north. The compound was north. That was where he needed to be.
But his body wanted south. Back to the clinic. Back to her.
Fifteen miles. He could cover it in twenty minutes if he pushed. Twenty minutes of fighting himself. Twenty minutes of his chest getting tighter with every stride, the distance between them pulling at something behind his ribs like a hook, like a wound, like —
He pushed harder. Faster. Paws tearing into the forest floor.
She was scared. He could feel it through the bond — this new thing lodged in his chest, pulsing with her heartbeat. She was scared and confused and angry, and he was running in the wrong direction.
But what was he supposed to do? Go back? Show up with his eyes still bleeding gold, barely in control, wanting things she hadn't agreed to? She didn't know him. She didn't choose him. She'd looked at him like he was a stranger and that's exactly what he was.
The bond didn't care. The bond said she was his and he was hers and nothing else mattered.
The bond was wrong.
No — the bond wasn't wrong. It was just... incomplete. It was the start of something, not the thing itself. And she hadn't agreed to any of it.
He didn't have time to be sick over a woman he'd met ten minutes ago. His pack was in crisis. People were counting on him.
Except he was. Sick with it. The further he ran, the worse it got — a physical ache spreading through his chest, his gut, his throat. His body rejecting the distance. Punishing him for leaving.
He'd waited years for this. Years of watching other wolves find their mates, wondering when it would be his turn, trusting that the bond would bring her to him when it was time.
And now it had. Now she was real. Brown eyes and blood-soaked scrubs and a voice that demanded he look at her.
And he was running away.
A sound tore out of him — not a howl, not quite. Something rougher. The sound of a man losing an argument with himself.
He kept running.
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The compound lights appeared through the trees.
He slowed. Shifted back at the perimeter. Naked, human, freezing — he barely noticed. One of the patrol wolves startled at his sudden appearance. Callum didn't stop.
Clothes. He needed clothes. And then he needed to be Alpha again.
Six dead. Eight wounded. A traitor. Connor in the cells.
And somewhere behind him, driving toward the compound, a woman named —
He stopped walking.
He didn't know her name.
He'd found his mate. The woman he'd been waiting for his entire life. And he'd walked out without even asking her name.
- Writer
