"I love you, Caleb. I'm so sorry I hurt you. I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you." I said, and I did. His presence in my chest was stronger now, brighter, a thread of connection that I could feel as clearly as my own pulse.
"You already have," he said, pulling me closer, holding me against his chest as his knot slowly deflated inside me, his arms wrapping around me with tender possessiveness. "You came back. You stayed. You let me mark you, and you marked me back. That's all I ever wanted, Ava. Just you. Just this. Just us."
I pressed my face into his chest, breathing in his scent, letting the steady beat of his heart soothe the last of my guilt. The workshop was quiet around us, the fading light casting long shadows across the floor, the half-finished wooden animals watching from their shelves like silent witnesses.
"I'll never run again," I promised, the words muffled against his skin but no less sincere, my arms tightening around him. "I'll never leave you, Caleb. You're my home. You've always been my home. I was just too scared to see it."
"I know," he murmured, his hand stroking through my hair, gentle and rhythmic, his voice drowsy and content with theweight of satisfaction. "I knew you'd come back. I just… I needed you to choose it. To choose us. To choose me."
"I did," I said, tilting my head up to look at him, to let him see the truth in my eyes, the certainty that hadn't been there before. "I do. Every day, for the rest of my life, I'll choose you. I'll choose all of you." He smiled, the first real smile I'd seen from him since before I'd run, and it transformed his face, made him look younger, softer, like the weight of his grief had finally lifted. His pale eyes crinkled at the corners, warm and full of a peace I'd never seen in them before.
"Good," he said simply, the word carrying the weight of everything between us, and pressed a kiss to my forehead, soft and lingering. "Now rest. Tomorrow, you go to Ethan. He needs you too." I nodded against his chest, letting my eyes drift closed, letting the bond hum with contentment in my chest. Two down. Two to go. With each completed bond, each mutual marking, I felt more whole. More certain. More like myself than I'd ever been before.
This was where I belonged. With them, my Alphas. , my pack.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
AVA
The morning after Caleb, I woke to find Mason sitting on the edge of the nest, watching me with those dark, knowing eyes.
"Ethan's waiting," he said simply, his voice soft but carrying the weight of expectation. "He's been patient, but he needs his time with you too." I nodded, my body still pleasantly sore from the day before, the bond with Caleb humming warm and bright in my chest alongside Mason's steady presence. Two threads now, woven together with my own. Two down. Two to go.
"Ethan's different," he warned me, his dark eyes searching my face. "His punishment won't be like mine or Caleb's. He processes things differently. Just... be patient with him. Let him work through this his own way."
I swallowed hard, nodding. Of all the brothers, Ethan was the one I understood the least. The quiet one. The observer. The one who watched everything with those sharp green eyes and rarely let anyone see what he was thinking.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"His study." Mason's lips quirked in something that wasn't quite a smile. "Where else?" I went. The door was closed when I reached it, and I hesitated, my hand raised to knock.
Before I could, his voice came through the wood. "Come in, Ava."
I pushed open the door and stepped inside. The room was exactly as I'd imagined, organized chaos, every surface covered with books and papers and equipment. Ethan sat behind his desk, his green eyes fixed on a monitor, his glasses perched on his nose. He didn't look up when I entered, just gestured to a chair positioned in front of his desk.
"Sit," he said, his voice calm but tight. "Please." I sat, my hands folded in my lap, my heart pounding against my ribs. The chair was comfortable, but I couldn't relax. Whatever Ethan had planned, I could feel it building in the silence between us.
For a long moment, he didn't speak. Just kept staring at his monitor, his jaw tight, his fingers hovering over his keyboard without actually typing anything. I watched him, noting the tension in his shoulders, the way his throat worked as he swallowed, the dark circles under his eyes that spoke of sleepless nights.
Finally, he turned to face me, and the look in his green eyes made my breath catch. It wasn't anger. It wasn't even hurt, exactly. It was something rawer. Something more wounded. Like he was looking at someone who had shattered something precious.
"Do you have any idea what it was like?" he asked, his voice quiet but intense, his green eyes never leaving my face. "Watching you die?"
I opened my mouth to respond, but he held up a hand.
"I don't mean that as some kind of figure of speech," he continued, rising from his chair and moving to the window, his back to me. "I mean literally. I stood there watching your heartrate drop, watching your temperature crash, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it."
He turned back to his computer and pulled up something on the screen. "Come here. I want you to see this." I rose from my chair on unsteady legs and moved to stand beside him. On the monitor was a series of graphs, lines tracking upward and downward, numbers I didn't fully understand. But I saw my name at the top.
"This is what happened to your body while you were gone," Ethan said, his voice tight. He pointed to a line on the screen. "See this? That's your heart rate. It started climbing the moment you left — your body knew something was wrong even before your mind caught up."
His finger traced the line as it spiked and then began to fall erratically. "And here's where the bond sickness really kicked in. Your heart couldn't keep a steady rhythm. Your blood pressure tanked. Your temperature started dropping even before you got caught in that storm."
I stared at the data, my chest tightening. I'd felt it happening, the sickness, the cold that seemed to come from inside me. But seeing it laid out like this made it terrifyingly real. I knew that he could feel and smell things with the bond…but I didn’t know he could know this much from it.
"And this—" His voice cracked, and he had to stop for a moment, his hand trembling where it rested on the desk. "This is when we found you. Heart rate at thirty-two. Core temperature at eighty-nine degrees. You were in hypothermia on top of severe bond sickness, and Ava..." He turned to look at me, tears glistening in his eyes. "You should have been dead."
The words hit me like a physical blow.
