"Keira." Her voice was careful now, gentle in a way that made my chest tight with something that might have been gratitude or might have been fear. The voice you used with someone who might shatter at the wrong word. "What's going on? What happened?"
I looked at my best friend — at her worried eyes and her practical concern and her complete ignorance of the nightmare my life had become in the span of twenty-four hours — and felt something crack inside my chest like ice breaking apart after a long winter.
"I need to tell you everything," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I intended, younger, like the twelve-year-old girl who'd sat beside her mother's deathbed and learned that love was just another word for loss. "And I need you to not freak out until I'm finished. Can you do that for me?"
"You're scaring me," Jeni said softly, her hand reaching across the table toward mine.
"I know," I admitted, taking a breath that shook on the way in and trembled on the way out. "I'm scaring myself."
Chapter Eight
KEIRA
Jeni reached across the table and took my hand.
Her fingers were cool and steady against my fever-hot skin, grounding me in a way I desperately needed. The silver rings she always wore pressed gently into my palm — three of them, stacked on her index finger, a gift from her grandmother she never took off, the metal slowly warming where it touched my overheated flesh. She didn't say anything for a long moment, just held on, her dark eyes searching my face with patient intensity, reading every microexpression like she was studying for an exam she couldn't afford to fail.
The café bustled around us, oblivious to the weight of what I was about to confess. The espresso machine hissed and gurgled behind the counter, releasing clouds of steam that curled toward the water-stained ceiling. Customers laughed at nearby tables — a group of college students sharing photos on their phones, an older couple reading newspapers in companionable silence. A barista called out drink orders in a cheerful voice that felt almostmocking given my circumstances, each name accompanied by the thunk of a cup hitting the pickup counter.
"Start at the beginning," Jeni said quietly, her thumb tracing small circles against the back of my hand, her voice soft as velvet but steady as stone. "Whatever that means to you."
I took a shuddering breath that rattled in my chest like loose stones. The beginning. She already knew about the mark — I'd shown her the five flowers just days ago, watched her face go pale when she counted them and realized what a pack bond meant. But she didn't know the rest. Didn't know why the sight of those flowers had sent ice through my veins instead of joy.
"You know about my mark," I said slowly, each word feeling like a stone I had to push uphill, my voice rough and scraped raw. "But you don't know why I'm so terrified of it. You don't know about my mother."
Jeni's brow furrowed, creating a small crease between her perfectly shaped eyebrows — her thinking face, her processing face. "You told me she died when you were twelve. Complications."
"I lied." The word came out flat, heavy with twelve years of secrets. "Or at least, I didn't tell you the whole truth."
Say it, my omega urged gently, her presence a warm pressure at the back of my mind.She needs to know. We've been carrying this alone for so long.
"My mother had a soulmate. Not my father — someone else. An alpha she was bonded to before she ever met my dad."
Jeni's eyes widened, her grip on my hand tightening reflexively. "But she married your father. They were together your whole childhood."
"Because she broke the bond," I said flatly, watching her face cycle through confusion, then dawning understanding, then horror, the color draining from her cheeks as the implicationscrashed over her, her hand coming up to cover her mouth like she was trying to hold back words too terrible to speak.
So I told her.
I told her about the alpha my mother had been bonded to — possessive, controlling, traditional in ways that made her feel like she was suffocating every time he looked at her with those alpha eyes that expected obedience. I told her how my mother had said the bond felt like drowning, like losing herself piece by piece to something she hadn't chosen and didn't want. I told her about my father, the beta who saw her potential and fell in love with her music instead of trying to cage her, who encouraged her piano career when her soulmate demanded she give it up. About the choice my mother made — real love over manufactured destiny, freedom over a gilded prison.
I told her about the breaking. The seventy percent mortality rate that made it essentially suicide. The omega elder in the countryside who still knew the old ways, who guided my mother through a ritual most people had forgotten because most people didn't survive attempting it. My mother's heart stopping twice during the severance, the doctors shocking her back both times. The three months in a coma while her body tried to recover from having part of its soul ripped away. The mark that had been destroyed, twisted into ugly scar tissue she kept hidden beneath high collars and scarves for the rest of her life.
And I told her what came after.
The slow fade that lasted twelve years, stealing pieces of my mother so gradually we didn't notice until there was almost nothing left. The weakness that crept in year by year — colds that turned into pneumonia, cuts that took weeks to heal, headaches that lasted for days. The way she couldn't play piano anymore because her hands shook too much to find the right keys. The way crowds exhausted her within minutes, leaving her pale and trembling. The last two years spent mostly in bed, fading awaybecause she'd torn out part of her own soul and left a hole that nothing — not my father's love, not mine, not all the medical treatments money could buy — could ever fill.
I told her about sitting beside my mother's hospital bed at twelve years old, holding her hand while the machines beeped slower and slower, while my father hid in the chapel because he blamed himself for asking her to break the bond in the first place. About watching the light fade from her eyes and knowing that love hadn't been enough to save her.
When I finished, the café noise seemed very far away, muffled and distant, like I was hearing it through water. Jeni's eyes were bright with unshed tears that caught the morning light and sparkled like diamonds, her hand still pressed against her mouth, her face pale beneath her careful makeup.
"That's why you were so terrified when you showed me the mark," she said slowly, her voice thick with emotion, understanding dawning across her features like sunrise over a dark landscape. "That's why you've been suppressing your omega all these years. Why you looked like you'd seen a ghost when you counted those five flowers."
"I watched my mother die because of a bond," I confirmed hollowly, my fingers white-knuckled around the water glass, the cold seeping into my bones but doing nothing to ease the fever burning beneath my skin. "She was the strongest person I've ever known. The most determined. And it still killed her."
"But she broke her bond," Jeni said carefully, her brow furrowing as she worked through the logic, her quick mind turning over the pieces like a puzzle she was determined to solve. "That's what killed her. The breaking, not the bonding. Right?"
I opened my mouth to argue — but she held up her hand, her silver rings catching the light and throwing tiny reflections onto the wall behind her.
