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"Watch," he had told me quietly. "This is what love costs."

My mother had looked across the snow and said my name.

Afterward, they told me ferals sometimes did that. They repeated familiar words. They called out names. It was reflex, they said. It meant nothing.

I had spent seven years trying to believe them.

Now the wolf pushed against me again, harder this time. It wanted me across the desk with my hands around my father's throat. It had wanted the same thing since I was seventeen, and for seven years I had denied it everything it wanted.

It had not been allowed my mother.

It had not been allowed my mate.

It had not even been allowed a rose.

She's ours, it said. We felt her break through the bond. She called for us. She wanted us.

The words hurt because some part of me believed them.

I forced the wolf back down and kept my breathing even.

"If I do it," I said, and my voice remained perfectly level because I had practiced that too, "the Severing, Delphine, all of it, then there is no cull order."

"Of course there isn't." My father opened his hands as though the answer should have been obvious. "Why would I cull a harmless Hollow? Once she is nothing to you, she becomes a much simpler matter." His smile returned. "Then I can decide what she's useful for."

I understood that sentence perfectly.

I had grown up watching what my father did with people once he decided they were useful.

Still, she would be alive.

She would not be safe, and she would not be free, but she would still be breathing.

The bargain would give me time, and time was the only advantage I had left. Time to find out what she was. Time to understand the bond. Time to find another way before my father decided what he wanted from her.

A Severing would destroy something between us that could never be restored. She would hate me afterward, and she would have every reason to.

But she would be alive to hate me.

That was the only calculation that mattered.

I also knew I could not tell her. If I explained any of this, she would fight. I had watched her walk across the Pit toward a feral bear with her hands open. She did not know how to stand aside when someone threatened the people she cared about.

If she resisted the Severing, my father would know I had warned her.

Then there would be no bargain at all.

I had made the same calculation on her first morning at the academy. I had smelled my father's people in the east wing, looked up at those windows, crossed the courtyard, and rejected her in front of everyone before he could discover that there was anything between us worth using.

It had failed.

I could admit that now.

I had been a fool to think humiliation alone could undo a bond like ours.

But this might still buy her time.

"All right," I said.