She asked if I was marrying Lorraine. I said yes. The word scraped my throat raw.
She called me a coward. She was right.
She screamed at me to say something. Her voice cracking, the desk shaking under her hands, tears she was fighting so hard her whole body vibrated with it. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. The truth was right there, pushing against my teeth, and I swallowed it because I was exactly the coward she said I was.
She asked if any of it was real. She said please.
I looked at her. Her shoulders shaking, her knuckles white on the desk, the tears she was losing the fight against. The word “yes” was right there, pressing against my teeth so hard I could taste it. All of it was real. Every second. Every night on the porch, every morning in my kitchen, every time she read to me in the library. She was the most real thing that had ever happened to me.
“No,” I said.
I watched the word hit her. Watched her face crumble, her jaw clench, her eyes go bright with tears she was refusing to let fall. I had to look away because if I held her gaze for one more second I was going to take it back. A tear slid down my face after I turned. I don’t know if she saw it. I don’t know if it would have mattered.
I spoke the rejection. The formal words, the bond language that I’d learned as a child and swore I would never use. My father taught me the words when I was twelve, told me they were sacred, told me speaking them was the worst thing a shifter could do to his mate. He was right.
The instant they left my mouth the pain hit me so hard my vision went white. My knees buckled and I locked them. My chest felt like it split open from the inside, ribs cracking inward, my sternum caving under a force I couldn’t see. The pull that hadlived under my ribs for two years, the warm hum of her presence that followed me everywhere, went dead. Gone. Like someone reached into my chest and yanked the wire out.
I stood there bleeding internally while she doubled over at her desk going through the same thing. I could hear her gasping and I couldn’t go to her. Couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t tell her the truth. I just stood there with my fists at my sides and my jaw cracked shut while the woman I loved bent over in agony three feet away from me and I was the one who caused it.
My wolf went silent. Not angry, not howling. Silent. Like something in him died alongside the bond.
She gathered her things. The pink pens, the framed photo by her monitor, her charger. She dropped the charger twice, picked it up off the floor both times. I watched her do it, my hands twitching toward her, and I kept them at my sides.
She walked past me without looking. I caught her shampoo as she passed, vanilla and something warm, and the scent hit me so hard my vision swam.
“I wish you a miserable life,” she said.
The elevator doors closed. She was gone.
I stood on our floor. Her desk was still there. The peonies I’d sent that week were dying in their vase, petals dropping onto her keyboard. Her chair was pushed back at the angle she’d left it. One pink pen had rolled under the desk, missed in her rush. I stared at it until my vision blurred.
Luca called the next day. He’d heard through the pack grapevine, the way he always heard things.
“The engagement. Is it true?”
“Yes.”
A pause. “And Andrea?”
“She quit.”
The silence on his end lasted long enough that I checked the screen.
“I think you should...”
“Don’t.”
“Finn...”
“I said don’t.”
I hung up. Sat in my office in the dark until midnight. Then I drove to her house.
Her street was quiet. The porch light was on, warm yellow against the dark windows. I parked across the street, turned off the engine, sat there. Her windows were dark, all of them, and there was a stillness to the house that told me she was either asleep or not home.
I didn’t get out of the car. I just sat there across the street from the house where I used to lie on the porch beside her, listening to her read. The distance between my car and her front door was the exact measure of everything I’d thrown away.
My wolf was silent. Not sleeping, not resting. Gone. The place inside me where he used to live, the place that howled when I was near her and settled when she touched me, was empty. Quiet the way a room is quiet after someone leaves it.
