The flame caught. She watched it curl.
Her mouth moved. No sound at first. Then: “I miss you so much it makes me sick.”
Not to the page. To the forest, to the dark.
To us.
My wolf broke formation.
Not physically. I held position on the ridge, motionless, camouflaged. But behind my ribs, the wolf that had maintained operational discipline through four centuries of service, through wars and losses and the violence of enforcing a king’s will, tore my walls.
Mira was burning the record of the happiest months of her life.
Keeping those pages hurt worse than destroying them, and the woman who’d written about love and burned dinners had decided that erasing the evidence was easier than carrying it.
When she stood and brushed her knees, I expected her to walk back.
She didn’t.
Her body went rigid. Head tilted, not seeing but feeling. The bond pressed against its walls with directional awareness that human senses couldn’t override.
“Someone’s out here.”
Silence.
Her hand extended into the dark. Not reaching for a weapon but reaching for confirmation.
“Sol?”
My name in her mouth. Two letters that bypassed every protocol I had.
I opened my eyes. Just the eyes. Silver catching the barest edge of moonlight through the canopy. A flash. Half a second.
Her hand dropped as her breath stuttered. She stared at the exact spot where the silver had been, and her expression was crushed. It wasn’t relief or anger but raw, more vulnerable.
I closed my eyes. The forest was just forest.
She stood there. Seconds stretching. Her hand pressed against her sternum where the bond sat beneath the skin.
“If that was you,” she said, her voice fracturing, “you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to watch me fall apart and then disappear.”
I didn’t move.
“And if it wasn’t you, then I’m talking to a tree and I’ve officially lost it.”
The compound’s hum filled the gap. A guard’s radio crackled on the south wall.
Then she turned and walked back through the fence gap. Clipped it shut, crossed the courtyard without looking back.
Her window, second floor. The light stayed off. The curtain shifted once, then settled.
I remained on the ridge for a long time after she’d gone.
The journal entries lived in my ears. The shelf, the burned dinners, the entry about a woman who’d never been happy and found it in a cabin with three men who would destroy it.
Every calculation I’d run since the rejection recalculated in my chest. Not as a strategic error I could adjust. As a wound that data couldn’t quantify and precision couldn’t close.
When my body cooperated, I descended the ridge and knelt at the base of the pine, weakening my presence, the way I do when I want to turn invisible for others to track.
