Chapter 4

The next morning, I woke to the sound of my bedroom door opening.

I didn't have to look to know who it was.

Not the heavy, deliberate tread of an alpha's footfall. Something lighter. More calculated. The particular click of heels on hardwood, and beneath it—jasmine perfume, thick and cloying, the kind that didn't ask permission when it entered a room.

Vivienne.

She stood at the foot of my bed with her arms crossed, watching me with a smile that had nothing warm in it. In the pale morning light filtering through the curtains, she looked exactly like what she was—a woman who had decided she'd already won and was here to collect.

I sat up slowly. I kept my face blank. My hands were steady. My heartbeat was steady. Everything inside me had gone cold and very still, the way a wolf goes still in deep cover—not frightened. Waiting.

She tilted her head, studying me the way predators study things they've already decided aren't dangerous.

"So," she said. "You finally figured it out."

I said nothing.

Her smile widened, and I watched her read my silence as shock. She'd come here expecting tears. Screaming. The particular unraveling of a newly-grieving female whose wound had just been torn back open. She'd dressed for that performance—silk robe, loose hair, the practiced dishevelment of a woman who knew exactly how she looked.

She wasn't going to get what she'd come for.

"I knew something was off yesterday," she said, stepping closer. "The way you looked at him before you left for your appointment." She paused, letting the implication settle. "Wolves always know, don't we? We can smell it on each other."

There it was. The subtle reminder—I'm a wolf too. I understand the bond language. I know what you felt when you scented him.

I kept my eyes on hers and gave her nothing.

Her composure flickered. Just once, just briefly—a crack in the lacquer.

She recovered quickly.

"You want to know why he chose me?" Her voice dropped into something intimate, almost gentle. Conspiratorial, the way mean things sometimes are. "He told me everything. How quiet you are. How being with you felt like—what did he call it?—maintaining pack duty. Like going through the motions of an obligation."

She laughed. Soft and deliberate.

"But with me? He loses himself completely. The control just—goes. You saw his eyes in that video, didn't you? The gold?" She tilted her head. "He's never gone gold for you. Not once. I asked him."

The words landed exactly where she'd aimed them.

I felt each one.

But I had stopped bleeding for Cain Ashford the moment I'd walked out of that healer's office. Whatever she was trying to reach in me—the part that still loved him, the part that would have fought for him once—she was pressing on a door that no longer opened from the outside.

I moved before I thought about it.

My palm connected with her cheek hard enough that the sound cracked off the walls like a branch snapping in cold weather. Her head whipped sideways. She stumbled, one hand shooting out to catch the bedpost, and when she turned back to me her eyes were wide and genuinely startled—the expression of someone who had miscalculated badly.

Then heavy footsteps in the corridor.

The door flew open.

"What the hell is going on in here?"

Roman. Cain. The same face, the same voice, filling the doorway with that instinctive alpha's authority—shoulders squared, eyes scanning the room, already cataloguing threat.

Vivienne's face transformed so fast it was almost impressive. The shock dissolved. In its place: trembling lip, wounded eyes, one hand pressed gingerly to her reddening cheek.

"I just came to check on her," she said softly. Broken. Perfect. "She's been so low lately, and I thought—I only wanted to help—"

His gaze cut to me. Hard and dark and furious.

"Seraphine." An alpha's tone—the kind that expected immediate accounting. "She's your family. What is wrong with you?"

I looked at him.

At the face I had memorized in a thousand different kinds of light. The face I had pressed my palm against the night he proposed, feeling his pulse jump beneath my hand. The face that had hovered over mine in the dark and said mine like it meant something permanent.

"Is she?" I asked quietly. "Is she really my family?"

Something moved behind his eyes. A ripple beneath still water—fast, involuntary, there and then smoothed over.

But Vivienne was already pulling at his arm, her voice fracturing on cue.

"Roman, please. Take me back. I don't feel well—the stress is so bad for me right now, you know what Maren said—"

And just like that, he was gone.

His hand found her waist. His attention folded entirely around her trembling performance. He steered her toward the door without looking back—without a single glance over his shoulder—and I stood in the emptying room and watched the last thread of something inside me go quiet and snap clean.

My phone buzzed from the nightstand.

Rowan: We're set. Midnight. The northern ridge.

I read it three times. Then I deleted it.

I crossed to the writing desk by the window—Helena's desk, the one with the Ashford pack seal embossed in the leather corner: a wolf swallowing its own tail, the old symbol for a pack that endures. I had always found it slightly ominous. Now it seemed apt.

I pulled out a sheet of the heavy cream notepaper and picked up a pen.

Cain,

I can't do this anymore.

Every day without you is a day I don't want to live. The pup was the only thing keeping me here—the only reason I kept breathing—but I've realized that's not enough.

I need to find you.

I'm sorry I wasn't stronger. I'm sorry I couldn't stay.

Wait for me. I'm coming.

All my love, always—

Seraphine

The words tasted like ash. Every sentence was a lie in the exact shape of the truth, built to land precisely where it would do the most damage. I had spent six years learning what moved him. I knew his fault lines as well as I knew my own.

I folded the letter and slid it into the nightstand drawer.

Let him find it. Let him read it in his own handwriting's absence and understand, with complete and terrible clarity, what his choices had cost.

I didn't pack.

There was nothing in Ashford Manor that belonged to me—nothing that had ever been mine. Every dress in the wardrobe had been approved by Helena. Every piece of jewelry had come from the pack vault, selected by Cain's mother to mark me as Ashford property. Even the room I slept in had belonged to the previous alpha's mate, and no one had thought to ask whether I wanted to redecorate.

Six years, and I had never once been given the vault combination.

I took my travel documents—kept in a slim case Rowan had pressed into my hands the week before the bonding ceremony, saying just in case, Sera, just in case—and my emergency card, and I walked out of the bedroom.

Cain was in the hall.

He looked tired. His shirt was untucked, his jaw unshaved, his eyes carrying the particular flatness of a man who had come from somewhere he couldn't explain and hadn't yet assembled a reason why.

"Seraphine." His voice softened the way it always did when he looked at me—automatically, like a reflex his body hadn't learned to override yet. "About this morning—I shouldn't have spoken to you like that. Vivienne's been fragile, and I let it—"

"I'm going out." I walked past him. "I need air."

"Now?" He turned, keeping pace. "It's nearly dark. Let me send Garrett with you—"

"I don't need an escort."

"The border patrols have been irregular since the—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "You shouldn't be alone after dark. It's not safe."

I almost laughed. The concern in his voice. The protective mate routine. As though he hadn't spent the last month lying through his teeth while the woman he'd smuggled into his family home smirked at me over breakfast.

"I'll be fine," I said. "Stay here. Take care of your sister-in-law."

I said it slowly. Precisely. Watching his face.

He held it together. Mostly. But his jaw tightened—just slightly, just briefly—the way it always did when he was working to control his tell.

"Don't be long." His voice was quieter now. "I'll have the kitchen make that mushroom dish you like."

I hate mushrooms. Every variety, every preparation. I had told him that across dozens of dinners, in pack halls and restaurants and the kitchen of this very house, and he had never once retained it.

But I knew exactly who did like mushrooms.

I didn't correct him. I nodded and kept walking, letting my shoulder brush his as I passed.

At the front door I stopped. Looked back once—at the corridor, the portraits, the stone walls of a house I had tried, for six years, to make feel like home.

Cain was still standing in the hall, watching me with an expression I had run out of patience to decode.

"Seraphine—"

I closed the door before he could finish.

The night air hit my face, cold and clean and carrying the scent of pine and open ground, and for the first time in weeks I could fill my lungs completely.

Rowan's plane was waiting on the northern ridge.

And Cain Ashford was about to learn what it felt like to lose someone who wasn't really gone.