Kaelen’s POV

I watched her sleep for twenty minutes.

Not from the bed. Not from across the room. From the chair in the deepest pocket of shadow near the curtained window, where the dim light couldn’t reach and my breathing wouldn’t carry.

She’d passed out from exhaustion. Not willingly—her body had simply surrendered before her mind did. I’d seen the exact moment it happened. The tension draining from her shoulders. The slow collapse of her spine into the mattress. Her bruised fingers loosening their grip on the sheet she’d been clutching like a lifeline.

Even unconscious, she wasn’t at peace.

Her brow creased. Her lips moved—soundless words shaped by whatever nightmare was playing behind her swollen eyelids. Her damaged hand twitched against the pillow a few times, then curled into a fist so tight her knuckles went white.

I didn’t move.

I sat in the dark and memorized every wound on her face. The split lip, crusted with dried blood. The bruise blooming purple beneath her left eye. The bandage on her jaw, peeling at the edges. The faint, yellowing marks that disappeared beneath her collar—older injuries layered beneath fresh ones, a map of violence written across skin I used to trace with my mouth in the dark.

My wolf paced inside my chest. Feral. Unhinged. It had been pacing for three years.

Her breathing hitched. A small, involuntary sound slipped from her throat—half whimper, half sob. She turned her face into the pillow and her silver hair spilled across it like moonlight on dark water.

I gripped the armrest of the chair until the wood groaned.

Twenty minutes. I counted every one. Not because I needed to. Because counting kept me from crossing the room. Kept me from gathering her broken body against my chest and holding her so tightly she’d never slip through my fingers again.

Counting kept me sane.

Barely.

Then she woke.

It wasn’t gradual. One second she was motionless—the next her eyes snapped open, her body jerking upright with the reflexes of someone trained to expect an attack in their sleep. Her chest heaved. Her gaze swept the room, wild and disoriented.

She didn’t see me.

She saw the door.

I watched her throw the covers aside. Watched her swing her legs over the edge of the bed, wincing as her ribs protested. Watched her bare feet hit the cold marble. She moved quickly—too quickly for someone with her injuries. Desperation was a powerful anesthetic.

She reached the door. Her hand closed around the handle. Twisted.

Locked.

She tried again. Harder. The metal rattled but held. Her breathing accelerated. I could hear her pulse from across the room—rapid, frantic, the heartbeat of a trapped animal.

A third time. Both hands now, wrenching the handle with everything she had. Her bandaged knuckles split open. Fresh blood smeared the brass.

"Going somewhere?"

She went rigid.

The sound that left her wasn’t a scream. It was something smaller—a fractured gasp, punched out of her lungs like she’d taken a blow to the sternum. She spun around, her back slamming against the locked door, and her eyes found me in the shadows.

I stood slowly. Let the dim light catch me as I rose. Let her see every inch of what three years had done.

"Kaelen."

My name in her mouth. I hadn’t heard it in so long that the sound of it nearly buckled something inside me. Nearly.

"Kaelen, please—I can explain. The last three years, I—it wasn’t what you think—"

"Not what I think." The words came out low. Barely controlled. The wolf inside my ribs was snarling now, clawing at the cage of my composure with jagged, desperate fury. "Tell me, Ela. What exactly should I think?"

I stepped closer. She pressed harder against the door.

"What should I think when a mother walks away from her son while he’s still crying for her?"

Her face crumbled. Those ice-blue eyes—flecked with the faint gold that marked our bond—filled with something so raw it almost made me stop.

Almost.

"What should I think when my mate chooses to let strangers beat her bloody in a cage—" my voice climbed, cracked, reformed into something ugly and guttural, "—rather than come home?"

"It wasn’t like that—"

"THEN WHAT WAS IT?"

The roar tore out of me. My wolf’s voice layered beneath my own—a sound that wasn’t entirely human. The windows trembled. The glass on the bedside table shuddered.

Ela flinched. Her entire body shrank against the door, her hands flying up in front of her chest—a reflexive, defensive gesture that she’d never made around me before. Never. Not once in all the time we’d been together.

She was afraid of me.

The realization hit like a blade between my ribs. My wolf howled. Not with satisfaction. With anguish.

But I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t gentle this. Three years of searching, three years of empty beds and unanswered prayers and a little boy sobbing against my chest—it had corroded something inside me. Eaten through the restraint. Left only this. This dark, ravenous, possessive thing that wore my skin and spoke with my voice but operated on instinct alone.

Tears spilled down her cheeks. Silent. Devastated. They rolled over the bruises, catching in the cut on her lip. She didn’t wipe them away. Her legs gave out—slowly, like a puppet whose strings were being cut one by one—and she slid down the door. Her back scraped along the wood. She hit the floor with a soft, defeated sound, her knees drawing up toward her chest.

A broken doll propped against a locked door.

I crouched.

Slowly. The way I’d done earlier. Eye level.

Her breath stuttered when my hand found her throat. I didn’t squeeze. Just held. My palm against her pulse. My fingers spanning the slender column of her neck. The heat of her skin seared through me.

"You are my mate." My voice was barely a rasp now. Scraped hollow. "My wife. The mother of my children."

She was trembling. I could feel it through my palm—a continuous, fine vibration, like a wire pulled too tight.

"I will search every dark corner. Every pit. Every shadow you try to hide in." My thumb stroked the edge of her jaw. Gentle. Contradicting everything else about this moment. "There is nowhere in this world you can go that I won’t find you."

I reached into my coat with my free hand.

The handcuffs caught the low light. Cold steel. Heavy links. I had always carried them. Since the first confirmed report of a silver-haired woman fighting in an underground ring near the border. I’d had them forged specifically—reinforced, wolf-resistant, etched with containment runes along the inner band.

For her.

Her eyes dropped to them. Widened.

"Kaelen—no—"

I caught her wrist. She struggled—a sharp, panicked jerk that sent fire through my grip. I held. The cuff closed around her left wrist with a clean, metallic click. Her breath caught.

I threaded the chain through the iron bracket bolted to the wall—a fixture I’d had installed before she was brought here—and snapped the second cuff into place.

Then I pulled.

One sharp, deliberate tug. The chain went taut. She gasped—a short, bitten-off sound as the steel bit into the soft skin of her inner wrist.

"Still mine, Ela."

I looked at her. The tears. The bruises. The blood on her knuckles. The chain connecting her to the wall. Something dark and terrible twisted inside my chest—something that was part satisfaction and part self-loathing and part a grief so enormous it had turned rancid.

I smiled.

It wasn’t kind. I knew that. It was the kind of smile that had nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with something fractured finally snapping into place.

"Still mine."

She opened her mouth. To protest. To beg. To explain again—those words she kept reaching for, that truth she kept trying to hand me through the storm.

I didn’t give her the chance.

My lips crashed into hers.