I push toward it the way you push toward something you can almost touch, the way the dream made it feel possible — extending a reach that doesn’t have a name toward the frequency I know is his.
For a second, nothing.
Then it catches.
My breath goes.
It’s faint — a thread, thin and real, pulling taut between us across five miles of trees. Him. Alive and present and reaching back before he understands what he’s reaching toward, RJ answering a pull he can feel but can’t place.
The ghost warmth in my body surges.
"RJ," I whisper. Into the dark. "It's okay. I'm here."
The bond sharpens.
And then it detonates.
Rage slams into me so hard I can't breathe — not focused, not controlled, wild and tearing and searching in every direction at once. The feeling underneath it isn't words but it might as well be: where are you where are you where are you. He can feel me but he can't find me. No scent. No body. No anchor. Just a presence on the other end of something he doesn't have language for and can't locate, and it's making him worse, the rage turning inward and outward and everywhere at once—
The connection snaps.
Jagged. The echo of it tears through my chest and leaves nothing behind except silence and the knowledge of what I just felt him spiral into.
I curl over my knees.
"Oh God." Into my hands. "Oh God, I made it worse."
My eyes are wet. I press my palm flat against my mouth and breathe through it and feel the absence where the thread was — the emptiness that almost connected and didn't and left him worse for the attempt.
His scent is completely gone now.
My lips have stopped tingling.
The warmth in my body is just the blanket and nothing else and RJ is five miles away in a room I can't reach and I just reached anyway and made it worse and I knew, I knew how he responds to things he can't locate, I know what it does to him when something is there and then isn't, and I reached anyway because the dream felt real and his scent was still on my skin and I thought—
I thought—
The door opens.
I don't look up. The bond shifts — steady, grounded, familiar. Dalton. He comes to where I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and crouches in front of me and doesn't touch me yet. Just waits. Giving me the second to choose it.
I don't pull back.
His hand comes to the back of my neck. Firm. Still. The bond settles around the contact and I breathe.
"What happened," he says.
"I tried to reach him," I say. My voice is wrong. "Through the bond. It's not a bond yet but I thought if I pushed toward it—"
"And."
"It worked. For a second it worked and then he couldn't find me and he—" I stop. Breathe. "He was already bad and I made it worse. I felt him spiral and then it snapped and I don't know what's happening to him right now and I can't—" My throat closes. "I can't get to him."
Dalton's grip on my neck tightens slightly. Anchoring.
"You didn't break him," he says.
I make a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "It felt like I did."
