My voice holds. I’m surprised by that.
“I found her. I was on patrol. Heard the blast, came running. She was on the ground, about thirty yards from the camp. The stray was gone. Fled. And Maren was—” I stop. Breathe. “She was alive… what was left of her. Her eyes were open. She looked at me, and she tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear it. I held her, and I told her she’d be fine, the way you tell people they’ll be fine when you know they won’t. And then she was gone. And I was nineteen years old, holding my sister on a ridge, and the world ended.”
The silence between us stretches. Neither of us fills it. Six inches between her fingers and mine. The bond pulses in the space between, not pulling, not demanding. Just present. Acknowledging the distance and the closeness simultaneously.
“I’m sorry,” Willow says. Not the way people say it at funerals. The way someone says it who knows what it means to hold a person while they die.
I don’t tell her what came after. She already knows—the program, the relocations, the decade of compliance that turneda dead girl into a system. She knows because she came to Cedar Falls to prove it, and she did.
“You know the rest,” I say.
“Yes.”
Willow is quiet. She’s looking at the horizon, her hands on the fence rail beside mine. The six inches haven’t changed. But the quality of the space has. It’s charged now, alive with the bond that connects us regardless of what either of us wants.
“Brenna told me something,” she says. “In the truck. After the facility.”
“What?”
“That what’s been happening between us… The pull, the connection—” She stops. Starts over. “My magic has been changing since Cedar Falls. Strengthening. Reaching for things it shouldn’t be able to reach. Wards holding longer than they should. My mind connecting to wolves outside my bloodline…” She pauses. “No… that’s not entirely true.” She turns to face me. “Connecting to you.”
I think about the east wing. The warm line through the dampening. The word I let myself believe for the first time while I was carrying children through a burning building:mate.
“I felt it too,” I say. “In the facility. When the shielding cut the signal, I thought—” I don’t finish. I don’t need to. She was there. She felt the same severance from the other side.
“Brenna says it’s a mate bond,” she says simply. No fanfare. Just a statement of fact. “Our wolves have known since the Railhead. We’ve been fighting it. And it survived everything we threw at it.”
“I know.”
She takes in a slow breath. “Maybe it’s time to stop fighting it.”
The words send a shock through me that brings my wolf to the fore, fur bristling beneath my skin. I lock it down.
“Is that what you want?” The question comes out before I can shape it into something less raw. “This. Me. After everything?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. She looks tired and fierce and nothing like a woman who’s about to offer forgiveness.
“What I want doesn’t matter,” she says. “What matters is what I choose. And I’m not there yet, Conner. I can’t look at you and not see what happened to those wolves. I know about the bond now, and I know my wolf chose you, and I know what I felt when your signal went dark.” She holds my eyes. “But knowing those things doesn’t undo what you did. And I won’t pretend it does.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“I’m asking you not to walk away. I know what that costs you. I know what I’m asking you to carry—the bond, the anger, me—alongside everything else. And I know I don’t have the right to ask for anything.” I look at the fence rail. At my hands. At the six inches of warm wood between us. “But I’m asking anyway. Because the alternative is watching you leave, and I don’t think I can survive that twice.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“I’m not walking away,” she says. “But I’m not running toward you either. Not yet. You need to understand that.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Because the bond is going to push. My wolf is going to push. And I’m going to need time that neither of them wants to give me.”
“Take whatever time you need. I’ll be here.”
“You’ll be here.” It comes out blunt. “In a territory that isn’t yours, surrounded by wolves who’d kill you as soon as look at you, waiting for a woman who might never forgive you.”
“Yes.”