His jaw works, a muscle ticking beneath the skin. For a moment I think he won’t answer. Then: “You were phasing.”
“Phasing?”
“In and out of reality.” His voice is flat. Clinical. The voice he uses when he’s holding something back. “One second solid, the next... not. Your pulse would stop for seconds at a time. Then start again. Stop. Start.” He pauses, and something fractures in his expression before he locks it down. “Like you were deciding which side to stay on.”
A chill races down my spine, settling deep in my bones. “How long did that last?”
“Four hours.”
Four hours. Four hours of my body caught between worlds. Four hours of him sitting here, watching, waiting, counting the seconds between my heartbeats, not knowing if the next one would come. Not knowing if I’d come back whole. Or at all.
“And now?” I force myself to ask.
Something flickers behind his eyes—too fast to catch. “You’ve been solid for six hours.”
I glance around the room, noticing for the first time the faint shimmer of protective magic woven into the walls, the ceiling, the window frame. Lyanna’s work. Complex. Layered. The kind of warding that takes hours to build.
“Your bed again,” I say quietly. Not a question.
“Lyanna worked on you here. The wards are stronger in this cabin.”
“And you’ve been in that chair the whole time.”
His jaw tightens. “Someone had to monitor the wards.”
“That’s not why you stayed.”
His eyes flash amber, wolf bleeding through. He doesn’t answer.
“Dane—“
“You almost didn’t come back.” The words are wrenched from him, each one dragged through something raw and broken. “I watched you fade. Watched your body go translucent. Watchedyou stop breathing and start again and stop again and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it except hold you down when the convulsions hit.”
My chest tightens.
“And the whole time,” he continues, voice dropping lower, rougher, “I kept thinking—she’s choosing to leave. She’s choosing the Fade over this. Over the pack. Over—“
He cuts himself off.
“Over what?” I whisper.
He turns, and the rawness in his expression steals my breath. This isn’t the controlled Alpha. This isn’t the soldier who shows nothing. This is Dane cracked open, bleeding out emotions he’s kept locked down for weeks.
“You went into the Fade alone.” Each word lands like a blow. “No backup. No extraction plan. You told no one.”
“I had a plan.”
“A shit one.” He crosses back toward me, stops at the edge of the bed. Close enough that I can see the amber still flickering in his irises. “You walked into a death trap with a maybe and a prayer. What were you trying to prove?”
“Nothing.” I meet his glare head-on. “I was trying to end this before someone else gets hurt.”
“By sacrificing yourself?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
His laugh is harsh, humorless, sharp as broken glass. “That’s not how this works, Nova.”
“Then tell me how it works, Dane.” I shove the blankets aside, swing my legs over the edge of the bed. My body protests violently, but I don’t care. “Because from where I’m sitting, we’re all just waiting to die while Faelan tears holes in reality. Someone has to do something. Someone has to take the risk.”
