I press back against the wall. "Don't touch me." My voice is barely a whisper. "If you touch me I won't be able to do this."
His hand hovers. His face does something I'll see when I close my eyes for the rest of my life. Then it drops.
"This isn't over," he says. His voice is rough. "I need you to hear that. This isn't over, Miles."
I don't respond. He stands there for another few seconds, looking at me pressed against the wall with my arms around myself, and then he turns and walks down the stairs. His footsteps echo — one flight, two — and the door opens and closes and the stairwell is empty and quiet and the air starts to thin out, his scent dissolving in the cold.
I slide down the wall. The step is cold through my pants.
It's the same step. I realize this with a dull, distant precision. The same step where Ray sat when he called Devon. When Devon said the word pre-bonding and Ray sat here and processed the fact that his body was choosing a mate. He sat right here. In this spot.
The step is cold. He hasn't been here in days and whatever warmth he left is long gone, and the only heat in this stairwell just walked out the door because I told it to leave.
The pre-bond hits first. Not gradually — a wave. The agitation spikes from a hum to a scream in the time it takes his scent to fully fade, and my skin is wrong and the temperature is wrong and everything is reaching, reaching, reaching for something that isn't here anymore. My palms press flat on the concrete, looking for warmth that doesn't exist. My chest is tight. My breathing is shallow. This is what Devon warned Ray about. Withdrawal. Mourning a mate it chose but can't keep.
I wrap my arms around my knees. I press my forehead against them. I sit in the stairwell where the bond was named and broken in the same building and I do not cry.
The partnership is on my desk. The announcement goes out next month. I will be the youngest partner in the firm's history. I will have everything I've worked for since I was sixteen years old.
You didn't let him answer.
The thought is quiet. It comes from the part of me that kissed him back. The part that grabbed his shirt and said yes before the rest of me took over.
He said this isn't over. He said give me a second. He was trying to speak and you pushed him out.
I press my forehead harder against my knees.
You don't know what he would have said.
I do. I know. Everyone says the same thing. The gentle version of goodbye. The careful, kind, I'm-sorry-but.
He said this isn't over.
I sit on the cold step and I feel the pre-bond howl and I think about his expression when I said the word barren and when I said the word love and I think about the fact that I said love in the same breath as broken and he didn't flinch at either one.
He said this isn't over.
I don't believe him. I can't afford to believe him.
But I heard him say it. And the part of me that kissed him back holds onto those four words like the last warm thing in a cold room.
[END CHAPTER 18]
Ray
Idon't remember driving here.
I remember the stairwell door closing behind me. I remember standing in the hallway on the other side of it and everything being wrong — temperature wrong, skin wrong, everything too loud and too bright and my hands shaking against my thighs. I remember walking to the parking garage. I remember sitting in my car for a while. And then I'm here, in front of Devon's building, and I don't remember the drive.
The pre-bond withdrawal is a real thing. Devon warned me. It's physical — not just sadness, not just missing someone, but my body's regulatory system losing the signal it's been calibrating to for weeks. My hands won't stop shaking. I'm cold even though it's not cold. There's an ache behind my sternum that feels like something is reaching out of my chest toward a person who isn't here.
I text Devon. Can I come up?
He doesn't ask why. Door's open.
Devon takes one look at me and doesn't say anything. He just steps aside and lets me in and then his hand is on the back of my neck — the big-brother grip, the one that says I've got you without words — and he steers me to the couch and pushes me down onto it.
"Alex is putting Gabriel down," he says. "You want water or something stronger?"