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My dad called Hank, the cyning, to ask what he knew about bond sickness, and Hank didn’t know much.

The shaman came and stood over us and said that if I didn’t go through this, it would linger, that contact with Damian would only prolong the process.

“You’re saying I’m supposed to let her suffer?” said Damian.

“You’re the cause of her suffering,” said the shaman to Damian, witheringly.

“But I didn’t mean to,” said Damian. “But I just lost it.”

Damian didn’t leave.

We discovered one thing that eased my nausea, but it required us to be sequestered in my room and for no one to come in. It was his cock in my mouth. It could be soft. It was when I first tried it. I don’t know why I did, but I just wanted something in my mouth, something to suck on, something to ease the feeling in the back of my throat, and I thought of it, a wicked sort of thought.

I started at his clothes, and he was confused, but he didn’t stop me. Obviously, he didn’t stop me.

Once he was soft and warm and tucked into my mouth, I felt good.

We spent a lot of time like that, my face buried in his crotch, his cock in my mouth, his hands sunk into my hair, both of our eyes closed.

Sometimes, when I’d call him because of the bond sickness, it would be the first thing he’d do, coming into whatever room I was in, shutting the door, shutting us away from any other prying eyes. His voice would be his deep, soothing alpha voice. “Here you go, omega, here’s what you need,” he’d say as he unzipped.

I’d take him into my mouth, and it would be relief right away, and he’d hiss in pain, because he was bonded to someone else, and it hurt him, but he always fed me his cock, no matter what discomfort it caused him.

And eventually, that was how he got hard enough to have sex with me again, through that.

In December, we would lie together in the darkness of my bedroom in the middle of the night and have hushed conversations.

“We can still do this,” he would say. “We can be together. I’ll formally reject her and I’ll bite you instead.” Back then, we didn’t know that the bites wouldn’t work, that he could bite me all over and it might scar and he might even really like tending them, and I might like it too, but it wouldn’t create any tie between us.

The rejection process was something that could be done after alphas bonded. A formal rejection was like a divorce.

It happened sometimes. Not often, really, because wolf packs were traditional sorts of people and they didn’t much hold with bond breaking. Bonds were meant to be for life. But sometimes, in certain cases, everyone agreed that two people really should not be mated anymore. And some wolves just didn’t deserve mates—wolves who harmed their mates, treated them without respect, that sort of thing.

We thought rejecting her would work, but it turned out that only alpha bites could be rejected in that way, that there was no way to reverse the physical tie of an alpha-omega bond.

My mouth was full of him. I just sighed around it, my cheek pillowed against his bare thigh.

His fingers moved against my skull, gently parting my hair. “It’ll be like we planned. Everything will be exactly like we planned.”

I believed it.

In March, when spring was coming back, I believed it.

The bond sickness was taking a toll on me at that point. I was in a lot of pain a lot of the time, and the only relief I had was when I was with Damian, and the best relief was when I was using his dick as a pacifier. Obviously, we couldn’t do that all the time, but we did it as much as we could.

He needed to go to work.

I needed to go to school.

And we had to spend at least some of our time in the presence of other people.

So, this meant that I spent a large part of the time cramping and nauseous. I didn’t eat much, and I lost a lot of weight.

It was kind of strange, because weight loss is a thing that everyone thinks is super great at first. Everyone tells you that you look so good and they all want to know what you’re doing differently, because they all want to lose weight. And then, one day, it changes. The words don’t change but the tone does.

It’s, “Wow, you’ve lost a lot of weight,” but it doesn’t sound excited for you or proud, it sounds disapproving and concerned.

By March, I was practically skeletal. My hair was falling out. I remember how cold I was all the time. Even as the air was warming up, if I sat outside in the spring sun, I would need to wrap up in blankets.