Nicholas’s POV

The clock on the wall said two forty-seven.

I wasn’t looking at it. I just knew. I always knew what time it was in the middle of the night — something my body had learned a long time ago, when knowing was the difference between being ready and being caught off guard. Old habit. Useless now.

The desk was covered in papers.

Reports from the border packs. Intelligence from Clearwater. Updates on the Kossarov front, which hadn’t stopped moving just because I’d been unconscious for four days. Eighteen different things that all needed my attention and had been waiting, very patiently, for me to come back from the dead.

I hadn’t looked at most of them.

I was supposed to be working. I was sitting at my desk, pen in hand, files open in front of me — technically working. My eyes were on the page.

My head was somewhere else entirely.

*Why.*

*Why did she do it.*

I put the pen down before I broke it.

My wolf was awake. He’d been awake since the moment I’d opened my eyes three days ago and found the bed cold. He hadn’t settled since. He paced, constant and relentless, a low vibration behind my ribs that didn’t stop, didn’t quiet, didn’t give me a single moment where I could just *think* without him pushing at the edges of everything.

She left. She left. She left.

That was all he knew. That was all he could say about it. She was gone and the bond was pulling outward and wrong and there was nothing — nothing — where she should have been.

I stood up.

Sitting wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for three days and it wasn’t going to start working now. I moved to the window instead, same window I’d stood at the morning I’d woken up, and looked out at the city.

Two forty-seven in the morning. The city was quieter now but not quiet — it was never fully quiet. The lights were still going, someone was still moving down there, cars still cutting through the dark. It didn’t care. It just kept moving.

I pressed my hand flat against the glass.

The mate bond pulled. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Always outward. Always away. That thin, stretched wrong feeling that lived in my chest now and refused to leave. She was out there. I could feel it. Somewhere in that city or near it — she hadn’t gone far enough to lose it entirely, which meant she hadn’t been able to, or hadn’t wanted to.

*She didn’t want to lose it.*

I didn’t know why that mattered to me. It shouldn’t matter. It changed nothing. She’d still poisoned me. She’d still run.

But she’d also stayed. Four days. She hadn’t had to do that. She’d had every opportunity to leave while I was down. She could have been halfway across the continent by the time I woke up. Instead she’d sat here. Every night.

And then she’d woken me up. Deliberately. She’d used the ability she hadn’t even told me she had, the thing that had cost her, and she’d woken me up.

*Why would you do that?*

My wolf made a sound.

Not anger. Something rawer. Something that had no good word attached to it.

I knew exactly what it was. I’d been pretending not to for three days.

I missed her.

I’d stopped being the thing she was braced for.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I’d stopped being what she was afraid of. She’d still been afraid — I wasn’t stupid, I knew that — but it had changed. The quality of it had changed. And she’d looked at me sometimes with something in her face that wasn’t fear at all and I’d let myself —

I shoved away from the window.

*Stop.*

This was not useful. This was the middle of the night and I had eighteen things to read and a border situation that was going to become a war if I didn’t pay attention to it, and I was standing at a window thinking about the way her face had looked in the dark.

She poisoned you.

Right. Yes. That.

I went back to the desk. Picked up the pen. Stared at the border report.

The words didn’t go anywhere useful. My eyes moved across the page and the words made sense, technically, but they weren’t landing. My head kept going back.

*She healed you too.*

Andrei’s voice. From three days ago, sitting on that couch, saying it quietly like he was afraid of the reaction.

*She chose to wake you up. She just didn’t stay for it.*

I put the pen down again.

What kind of person poisons someone and then spends four days sitting at their bedside and then pulls them back from the edge and then runs?

What kind of person does all of that?

My wolf had an answer. He’d had an answer since day one, since the first moment I’d dragged her out of that auditorium and felt the bond snap into place — he’d known what she was, what she meant, what the right move was. He’d been trying to tell me for months.

I hadn’t listened. I’d been too busy being furious about everything else.

I pressed two fingers against the bridge of my nose.

She was pregnant.

That one hadn’t stopped landing either. It kept arriving in my head with the same blunt force every time, no matter how many times I’d already processed it. My child. Growing. Out there in a human city with no money and no pack and no protection, in a body that couldn’t heal, with a mate bond that was the only thing still connecting her to anything.

She had to know I’d feel it.

She had to know I’d come.

*So why did she go?*

The wolf made that sound again. The one with no good word.

Because she was terrified, some cold and honest part of me answered. Because she’d spent a year being destroyed by people who were supposed to protect her and she’d looked at me and seen more of the same. Because even after everything — even after the nights when it had been quiet and she’d let herself relax by a fraction and I’d let myself pretend that meant something — she still hadn’t trusted me enough to stay.

I hadn’t given her enough reason to stay.

That thought sat in my chest like a stone.

I’d given her every reason to run. Anger, walls, the constant threat of violence that lived in everything I did and said and was. I’d done exactly what every other person in her life had done — made myself into something she had to survive rather than something she could rest in. And then I’d been surprised.

My wolf stopped pacing.

Just for a second. Just long enough to go still in a way that felt like — not agreement, exactly. More like recognition. Like we’d finally arrived at the same place.

She was scared.

She was scared and she was alone and she was carrying my child in a city that didn’t know her and—

The bond lurched.

I straightened.

Not the usual thin pull of distance. Something different. Something sharp. The bond had been a quiet constant ache for three days — the specific ache of something stretched too far — and now it had gone tight in a different way. A wrong way.

I reached for her.

The bond answered with a spike that went straight through my chest.

Fear.

*Her* fear.

Real and immediate and *now*, not old, not residual, not the constant low-level terror she’d been carrying for a year. This was live. This was happening.

My wolf came fully awake.

He wasn’t pacing anymore.

He slammed forward.