Instead, the mate bond thrummed in his chest like a second heartbeat, steady and insistent and impossible to ignore. If anything, the separation had sharpened his awareness of what was missing, like a phantom limb that ached with phantom pain.
The pattern continued for three days. Dawn brought the same restless energy, the same desperate need to move that sent him ranging across his territory like a wolf tracking prey that always remained just out of reach. He buried himself in clan logistics, reviewed security protocols, inspected supplycaches with obsessive thoroughness—anything that demanded command rather than reflection.
Each evening, he returned to his cabin drained and hollow, hoping exhaustion would grant him peace. Instead, he found only reminders of her presence. The faint trace of jasmine that clung to his sheets despite multiple washings. The way his kitchen looked empty without her barefoot figure moving through it. The silence that felt oppressive rather than comforting.
This will pass,he told himself each night, staring at the ceiling while his polar bear whined in the depths of his mind.All disruptions fade with time. All distractions lose their power.
But the mate bond didn’t weaken. It sharpened further.
By the fourth morning, Korrak lay in bed watching pale sunlight filter through his windows and finally stopped pretending this was temporary. The mate bond was not a fever that would break with enough willpower. It was a fundamental shift in his reality, as permanent and undeniable as the Arctic landscape itself.
She matters,he acknowledged silently, the admission settling in his chest with the weight of stone.Her safety isn’t abstract anymore. Whatever danger she’s hiding from—and there is danger, I can smell it on her like smoke—it’s my problem now.
The realization didn’t bring peace. It brought clarity. And clarity stripped away the comfortable lies he’d been telling himself.
Korrak rose from bed with purpose, his movements sharp and decisive. The polar bear stirred with satisfaction, recognizing the shift from denial to acceptance.
She needs guidance,he reasoned, pacing to the window to stare out at the frozen expanse.The Arctic doesn’t forgiveignorance. One mistake—exposure, getting lost, misreading weather patterns—and she’s dead.
The thought sent ice through his veins.
“Practical skills,” he muttered, his breath fogging the glass. “Fire safety. Ice recognition. Territory awareness. Basic survival protocols.”
The justification was thin, and he knew it. But it gave him what he needed—proximity without surrender. A way to be near her that didn’t require admitting the truth he wasn’t ready to voice.
Professional instruction. Nothing more.
Even as he told himself that, his polar bear huffed with dark amusement. The beast knew better. Every step closer to teaching her his world would be a step toward something irreversible, toward the bond his body and instincts had already claimed.
Korrak exhaled slowly, watching his breath cloud against the window as he prepared for the delicate balance he was about to attempt. Close enough to protect and guide her. Distant enough to maintain the illusion of control.
This isn’t impulsive,he decided, turning away from the window with predatory grace.This is inevitable.
SEVEN
WINSLET
The Arctic environment of Northland Bay had a way of stretching time until it felt both endless and fragile, like the thin layer of ice forming on the inside of the research outpost’s windows each morning. Winslet had learned that, along with a dozen other small, critical truths about survival in this frozen world.
She’d cataloged the groan of the generator before it needed fuel, memorized the exact pitch of the wind that meant a squall was coming, and could now lace her insulated boots with a speed that would have impressed her former city self. She’d acclimated to this place, whether she’d wanted to or not.
The hollow feeling in her chest was another matter.
After Korrak’s Jeep had disappeared into the white expanse four mornings ago, a silence descended that had nothing to do with the landscape. It was the silence of a door closing, of a connection snipped before it could properly form. She’d spent the first day coiled tight, jumping at every creak of the building, her eyes constantly flicking to the walkie-talkie charging on the main console. Ellie had watched her with sympathetic hazel eyes but said nothing.
He fed you. Sheltered you. Looked at you like you were the only fire in a world of ice. Then he vanished.
The humiliation of her own hope was a quiet, private burn. She hadn’t expected promises, but basic human courtesy? A check-in? Something to prove the charged intimacy of that night hadn’t been a product of wine and storm-locked isolation.
By the second day, the sting had cooled into a familiar numbness. This, she knew how to handle. Men who got close and then retreated when things became real. Bracken had been a master of the hot-and-cold torture, showering her with attention before withdrawing to punish some imagined slight. Korrak’s method was different—a clean, total severance—but the effect was the same. It left her off-balance and questioning her own judgment.
So she buried it. She buried it in the meticulous logs Ellie taught her to keep, in the satisfying heft of snow shovels, in learning to distinguish between seal tracks and fox prints outside the outpost door. She buried it in the surprising, easy friendship with Ellie, who was witty and kind and didn’t treat her like a fragile refugee. She even buried it during Kol’s visits to drop off supplies, laughing at his dry, irreverent jokes about Korrak’s “temporary case of stick-up-the-ass.”
“He’s really not so bad,” Kol had said, his gray eyes dancing as he handed her a crate of freeze-dried meals. “Just thinks feeling things is a structural weakness. Give him time. He’ll come around. Probably.”
The words were meant to be comforting, but they just underlined the absence. Korrak was making a choice. A choice to stay away from her.
On the morning of the fourth day, Winslet woke in her narrow bed and knew something had settled. The desperate, hopeful ache was gone. In its place was a steely kind of clarity.
