Chapter 20
Chapter 20:
If he had said these words ten years ago—in the first month, the first year, even the fifth—I would have crumbled. I know this about myself with the certainty of someone who has tested the tensile strength of their own devotion and found it embarrassingly high. I would have forgiven him. I would have stayed. I would have called it love and meant it, because back then I still believed that enough suffering could transmute into redemption, that if I just endured long enough, the alchemy would work and the pain would turn to gold.
But here’s what ten years teaches you: love that arrives after you’ve stopped needing it is not a gift. It’s an invoice for services already rendered. It’s a life raft thrown to someone who has already learned to swim.
I leaned into Alaric’s shoulder. Not for support—I could stand on my own, and we both knew it. For clarity. For the simple, declarative act of choosing.
“You’re too late, Thane p>
The words came out clean. No tremor. No crack.
“The first time I asked you to break the bond, I was terrified. The tenth time, I was desperate. The fiftieth time, I was numb. By the hundredth time—” I paused, letting the arithmetic settle. “By the hundredth time, there was nothing left. Each request took something with it on its way out, and you never noticed because you weren’t paying attention. You were too busy watching me suffer to notice that the thing you were punishing was dying p>
“I don’t love you anymore p>
The sentence was four words. It took ten years to write.
And even as I said it—even as I felt the truth of it in my teeth and my bones and the quiet, steady center of whatever I was becoming—something in my chest ached. Not love. Not anymore. But the memory of love, which lives in the body longer than the feeling itself, the way a scar outlasts the wound.
Thane shook his head. Took a step toward me. His hand reached out—
Alaric materialized between us like a wall with a pulse.
“One more step,” he said, and his voice was the temperature of deep water, “and this becomes a war between clans. You would be the one to start it. Your people would be the ones to pay for it.” A beat. “And we both know how that ends p>
The math was simple. The Silverveil Clan was larger, better-funded, and led by an Alpha who hadn’t spent the last month drinking himself into a stupor. A confrontation would be a bloodbath with a predetermined winner.
“If you refuse to release the bond,” Alaric continued, louder now, projecting for the audience, “I have other paths. The Alpha King. The Council of Elders. Treaty law. Don’t make me use them p>
Thane’s jaw clenched so hard I could see the muscles jump beneath his skin. He took another step—
And the clan elders appeared.
They materialized from the hallway the way elders always do: with perfect timing and strategic positioning, arriving at the exact moment when their intervention would cause the least embarrassment and the most leverage. One of them—an old wolf with white at his temples and the calculating eyes of a man who has survived multiple Alphas—gripped Thane’s arm and leaned close to his ear.
I didn’t hear what was whispered. I didn’t need to. The effect was immediate: Thane’s shoulders dropped. Not in surrender—in the forced, temporary stand-down of a man who has been reminded that the battlefield extends beyond this room and losing here means losing everywhere.
He turned. He walked toward the door. And just before crossing the threshold, he looked back at me—a single, burning glance that carried more than his words ever had.
I watched him go.
Ah, I thought. What a magnificent, exhausting, irredeemable mess.
That evening, Alaric returned with a guest.
She stood in the doorway with the hesitant posture of someone who has rehearsed this moment a thousand times and still doesn’t feel ready. She was beautiful—not the sharp, weaponized beauty of the women Thane collected, but something warmer. Softer. The kind of face that belongs in a kitchen at sunrise, flour on her cheek, laughing at something a child said.
And her features were mine.
Not exactly—she was older, her jawline softer, her eyes a shade darker—but the resemblance was the kind that bypasses recognition and goes straight to instinct. The shape of the nose. The way the eyebrows arched. The specific curve of the upper lip.
I stared. She stared back.
“Are you Alaric’s girlfriend?” I asked, because my brain, confronted with a mystery it couldn’t solve, defaulted to the most mundane explanation available.