I stood alone in my apartment, watching the closed door, feeling the bond stretch as Caelan got farther and farther away.
It didn’t break. It wouldn’t break. But I could feel the distance growing, feel his presence fading from immediate to distant to barely-there.
He’d come back. He promised. I had to believe that.
I sank onto my couch, pulling my knees to my chest, and waited. The wolf in my mind whined, restless and anxious.Same, girl.
24
— • —
Riley
Days passed, and the waiting became unbearable.
I developed a routine, because routines were what you did when your life had been upended and you didn’t know what else to do. I woke up, made coffee, and stared at my phone waiting for a message that didn’t come. I wrote, or tried to write, but every hero in my stories started looking like Caelan, and every romantic tension felt hollow compared to what I was actually living.
I picked up shifts at a local bookstore to distract myself, because I couldn’t sit at my apartment any longer. Margaret from Chapter & Verse was happy to have someone who actually loved books. I shelved, I recommended, I smiled at customers and pretended my heart wasn’t breaking.
Came home. Ate food that tasted of nothing. Stared at my phone again. Slept badly, restlessly, reaching for a body that wasn’t there.
Pathetic? Yes. But awareness of my patheticness didn’t make it stop.
The bond was there. I could feel it, a constant, low hum in the back of my mind that told me he was alive, he was out there, he existed. But it was stretched thin, distant. The reception was terrible. I could feel his presence but not his emotions anymore, couldn’t sense his moods. Just a vague awareness that the other half of my soul was somewhere far away, fighting a war I couldn’t be part of.
I missed him. God, I missed him.
I missed the way he looked at me, that intensity in his gray eyes that made me feel seen in ways no one else ever had. I missed the way he touched me, reverent and possessive all at once. I missed the way he made terrible soup and watched me eat it with such earnest hope that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it was inedible.
I missed his voice, his laugh, the weight of his arm around my waist when I slept. The way he said my name, rolling the R slightly, making it sound exotic and precious. I missed him so much it was a physical wound. An aching hollow that nothing could fill.
The only times I felt better were when I was with my friends.
Sloane dragged me out for coffee. Margo insisted on wine nights. Jade came by with snacks and terrible reality TVrecommendations. They didn’t push me to talk about it, not at first, but they were there. Constant, steady. Reminding me that I existed outside of my relationship with Caelan, that I had a life here, people who loved me.
I’d been feeling sick, too. Not sick enough to be alarming, but sick enough to notice. Nausea in the mornings that made coffee unappealing. Fatigue that didn’t go away no matter how much I slept. A general sense of wrongness in my body, off-balance and strange.
I blamed it on stress. On the separation. On the fact that I was a wolf now and I didn’t fully understand what that meant for my body. The wolf inside me was restless too, pacing in the back of my mind, whining for her mate.
There was good news, at least. The lawsuit against Damien finally went through. He never showed up to the judgment, couldn’t probably, given that Caelan had wiped his memory and sent him wandering. The court ruled in my favor by default. I was finally getting my independence back. The contract was void. The 40% royalties were done. I owned my work again.
I should have been celebrating. Should have been thrilled. A year ago, this would have been the best day of my life. I would have thrown a party, gotten drunk with my friends, started planning my next book with the freedom to write whatever I wanted.
Now it just felt empty. A victory that didn’t matter because the person I wanted to celebrate with wasn’t here.
All in all, life was technically good. On paper, I was winning.
It just didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t what I wanted. I’d been surviving, not living. Going through the motions of a life that felt increasingly hollow.
Two weeks into the separation, I finally told my friends everything.
It happened at Sloane’s apartment, during what was supposed to be a normal wine night. But there was nothing normal about my life anymore, and the secrets were eating me alive.
“I need to tell you guys more,” I said, setting down my glass. “About what’s been happening. More than what you already know.”
Margo leaned forward. “Bigger than ‘I’m engaged to a werewolf prince from another dimension’? Because that was already pretty big.”
“Related to that.”
