Chapter 3

The driver was waiting at the foot of the manor steps, just as Roman had promised.

I climbed into the back seat without a word. The door shut behind me with a sound like a vault sealing, and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach as Ashford territory blurred past the tinted windows—the dark pines, the frost-pale meadow, the ridge where the pack ran on full moons. All of it familiar. None of it mine.

The pack healer's cottage sat at the edge of the territory's northern boundary, where the old forest thinned and the land leveled out into something almost pastoral. Maren had served three generations of Ashfords. She didn't ask unnecessary questions. It was one of the things I had always liked about her.

Today I was grateful for it more than I could say.

She ran the standard checks in near silence—blood pressure, temperature, the careful listening she did with her hands pressed to my sides, reading the bond-resonance the way older wolves read weather.

Then the imaging stone.

Maren kept a scrying bowl for it, silver-veined obsidian filled with spring water, the kind of quiet magic that pack healers passed down through female lines. When she held the stone above the water and spoke the word, the surface went still and luminous.

And there it was.

A pulse. Small and absolute, flickering in that pale light like a candle in a cupped hand.

"Strong," Maren said simply. "Well-anchored. The bond-sickness hasn't touched it."

I stared at that tiny, stubborn light for a long time.

Cain's pup. The heir the Ashford pack had already begun whispering about in corridors and around dinner tables, the future that Helena kept mentioning with careful, calculated tenderness. A child whose father had faked his own death and left his pregnant mate to grieve alone while he warmed another woman's bed.

I thanked Maren. I collected the impression she'd transferred onto a small piece of vellum—the pack's equivalent of an ultrasound printout—folded it in half, and walked out into the cold morning air.

I made it to the treeline before I stopped.

I stood there with my back against the rough bark of a pine and cried until my ribs ached, until there was nothing left, until the forest around me had absorbed all of it and given nothing back. Wolves grieved like that sometimes—loudly, completely, all at once—and then they went silent and got to work.

When I came out of the trees, I told the driver I needed to walk. Clear my head. He could go back without me.

He hesitated. Roman's orders, probably, or Cain's—they amounted to the same thing now. But I held his gaze and waited, and eventually he looked away the way submissive wolves always do when a bonded female sets her jaw.

"Of course, ma'am."

I watched the car disappear around the bend. Then I walked to the village, found a public phone booth that still worked, and called the independent healer Rowan had flagged for me two weeks ago—a woman who operated outside pack structures, who didn't answer to alphas, who had no reason to carry news back to Ashford Manor.

I was sitting in her waiting room, filling out intake forms, when my phone buzzed.

A video message. From Vivienne.

I should not have opened it. I knew that even as my thumb moved. But something in me—the part that still hadn't fully accepted what I'd heard through that door, the part that kept looking for the version of events where none of this was real—needed to see.

The video was nearly thirty minutes long.

Cain was in it.

My Cain—the man who had always been so careful with me, so deliberate, so controlled, who had once told me that losing his temper felt like a failure of his duty as an alpha. The man who had pressed his forehead to my stomach and whispered about perfect timing.

He wasn't controlled in that video.

He wasn't careful.

I watched him move with a ferocity I had never once seen, a rawness I hadn't known he was capable of. Heard him use Vivienne's name in a voice that sounded nothing like the voice he used with me. Watched his eyes go lupine-gold at the edges—the involuntary shift that happened when a wolf lost themselves completely—and understood, with a clarity that landed somewhere below my sternum and stayed there, that I had never once made him lose control like that.

Because the person who could reach that part of him had never been me.

I don't know how long I sat there. At some point a warm hand touched my shoulder.

"Ms. Seraphine? We're ready for you."

The independent healer was a small woman with silver-streaked hair and eyes that had seen enough not to flinch at anything. She didn't comment on my face. She just waited.

I thought about the vellum in my pocket. The small, stubborn pulse.

I thought about the life I had imagined—Cain in the birthing room, Cain holding our pup for the first time, Cain being the father and the alpha and the mate I had believed, for six whole years, that he was built to be.

Then I thought about the video.

I pulled out my phone. One last chance—that was all I would give him. One chance to answer the call, to come, to say something that would reach across the wreckage of the last several months and make sense of it.

His number rang three times.

"Seraphine." His voice was rough. Distant. The voice of a man already somewhere else. "What is it? I'm kind of in the middle of something—"

"I need you to come." My voice cracked on the last word. "Please. I need to talk to you. It's important."

A pause. Muffled movement. And beneath it—Vivienne's voice, low and impatient—and the sound of bedding shifting.

"Can it wait? I'll be back later. We can deal with it then."

"Cain—"

"I said later." The impatience was sharp now, undisguised. "Go home. Get some rest. I'll handle it when I'm done."

Vivienne's voice again, closer this time.

The line went dead.

I sat very still, phone pressed to my ear, listening to the silence where my mate's voice had been.

Then I looked up at the healer.

"I'm ready," I said.

It was dark by the time the cab dropped me at the end of the Ashford drive.

The manor lights were on, spilling amber across the stone courtyard. Roman was waiting at the bottom of the front steps, his coat open despite the cold, his face arranged into an expression of flawless concern.

"Seraphine." He came forward immediately, hands reaching. "Where have you been? The driver said you wanted to walk—that was hours ago—"

I let him take my hands. I looked at his face.

At the face I had loved for six years. The jaw, the dark eyes, the particular way he held himself that I now understood was not Roman's posture at all but Cain's—Cain, wearing his dead brother like a second skin, standing in front of me with another woman's scent caught in the fabric of his shirt.

The bond-thread in my chest was very quiet.

I realized, with a kind of dull wonder, that I had stopped feeling it pull.

"I went for a walk," I said. "Lost track of time."

He exhaled—relief moving through him the way it always did—and pulled me into his arms, his chin dropping to the top of my head.

"You scared me half to death." His voice was low. Tender. Perfectly calibrated. "Cain would never forgive me if anything happened to you."

Cain. His own name, spoken in his own voice, in the third person, like a ghost he'd invented to stand between us.

I closed my eyes.

I let him hold me.

And I felt absolutely nothing at all.