Ethan moved through the trees like a shadow, paws flying over the ground toward the eastern ridge, breath smoking in the air.
After Kelsey left the school parking lot, he should have gone home. He knew that.
The sane part of his mind knew that Kelsey was okay. She was with her family. She was safe.
The other part, the one pulled under her gravity, the one that had screamed in protest when he forced himself toward Lara earlier, snapped back like a spring stretched too far, then suddenly released.
His body moved before he even realized what he was doing. When his mind finally caught up, he was a wolf, running with a speed even his human form couldn't match.
Branches grazed his muzzle, thorns caught in his fur. He didn't stop.
A nagging voice at the back of his mind, the one that sounded suspiciously like Nell, told him he should have turned west, back toward Greystone land, back toward pack and duty and things that made sense.
Instead, he was here.
Again.
The wind shifted, bringing the faint scent, her scent, and he breathed it in like oxygen. That wonderful sweetness that made his lungs tighten and his teeth ache.
Every muscle wanted to lean toward it.
He stayed on his own side of the invisible line.
The ridge ran near the edge of Jack Blackwell's inner ring, the circle only lupines with permission could cross. Ethan hadn't crossed it last time. He wouldn't cross it now.
He just needed to know she was there. See her. Make sure she'd arrived home safely.
Just enough to quiet the noise in his skull.
He slowed where the trees thinned. From there, he saw slices of the yard between trunks. The old oak. The swing. The dark mass of the barn.
Careful not to be detected, he positioned his body upwind.
He saw them in the yard, three figures talking. Kelsey in the center, Jack and Elise on either side.
Ethan slipped into a patch of shadow thick enough to hide his large form, sank down, belly to the cold ground, and let the world come to him.
The barn doors stood chained. The scent of another lupine pushed out through every crack, heavy and wrong. Fur and dried blood.
It had to be Kelsey's father. Gabriel Blackwell. The one who was, like Ethan now, an alpha-in-waiting once. Before a bond with a human changed everything.
Ethan swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. Was that his own future he was looking at?
Hackles lifted along his spine.
Broken bond sickness was something he knew mostly from old stories.
Among lupines, it did damage, yes, but not like this. Not this ruin .
A lupine bond was reciprocal. Balanced. When one half died, the survivor was diminished, but they did not come apart at the seams.
With humans, the pull went one way too hard. When it broke, balance went with it.
He knew it in theory, but he had only seen it now.
Kelsey walked straight toward the barn, her gait slow but determined, shoulders squared in that too-human way of hers.
She stopped at the doors and laid her palm flat on the wood.
Ethan couldn't hear the first words. He saw the tilt of her shoulders as she spoke, the brief drop of her head, the way she refused to fold.
Jack and Elise stayed where they were, one to each side, holding distance.
Every instinct in him screamed this was wrong. No half-broken alpha should be locked in a barn with only thin wooden wall between him and something as delicate as Kelsey.
Instinct rose like a tidal wave.
Protect.
He almost stood, ready to move, every instinct screaming at him to put his body between her and danger. But he was still rational enough to know there was nothing he could do from here that wouldn't make it worse.
He told himself it was her father, that her grandparents stood guard if anything went sideways. She was protected.
So he forced himself to stay down and watched.
Kelsey leaned her forehead against the wood.
Bits of sound reached him now, torn up by the wind.
"…our old kitchen…"
"…burned the first waffle…"
"…Mom said health hazard…"
The words meant nothing by themselves. The cadence did.
Family. Before.
She talked about bad haircuts and camping trips.
He sensed movement inside the barn, but no sounds of hostility or threat.
Good. He calmed a bit. That was good.
Kelsey kept talking. And when she mentioned some guy named Mark, he sprang up and almost snarled before he caught himself. Every hair of his fur, every nerve in his body bristled in sudden impulse to track and tear. The reaction was so sudden and violent it made him stagger.
Through the haze he heard her say Gabriel had been right and she had been wrong.
He listened, and as her words unfolded, it hit him.
She wasn't just bloodkin. A Blackwell. A scent. A need. A problem.
A girl he was tied to.
No. She was a girl who burned waffles in stories and talked about paper scissors and camping trips in the presence of death.
She was more .
Fragile and brave, so incredibly, stupidly brave to stand in the face of danger and speak to it with such love and tenderness. An image of a violet appeared in his mind, small and unassuming, the sort of thing a careless stomp could crush, and yet it kept returning, year after year, rising its head through the thawing ground.
For the first time, the feeling that followed wasn't need to have her close.
It was something quieter. Something that simply wanted to sit beside her and watch her grow.
Something ugly uncoiled in his chest then—rage at everyone who'd ever hurt her, everyone who ever looked at her and saw only a bloodkin. A herald. A danger. A hazard.
He dug his claws deep into the cold, wet earth in a desperate attempt to hold himself steady.
His throat worked, raspy and dry.
Inside, wood groaned. The barn shuddered.
Impulse kicked again. Protect!
Ethan pushed halfway up before he remembered where he was. Remembered whose land he stood on. Remembered what would happen if he appeared out of the trees now, teeth bared, between an alpha and his blood.
He stayed down and watched Jack rush into the barn as Elise pulled Kelsey away.
The barn filled with snarls, crashes, whimpers, and thuds. He didn't know how long it lasted before the worst of the noise died down. The air shifted from violent to exhausted.
Jack came out later, sleeve torn, blood streaking his arm, and disappeared inside.
The barn remained silent and alone.
Ethan stayed until a light blinked on in the kitchen and the small silhouette of Kelsey's sister appeared in the window, drawing shapes in the fogged glass.
Only then did he slip back into denser trees and run, knowing that whichever path he took, all of them led toward the same abyss. Only thing was, as long as she was safe, the fall didn't matter. Because for the first time, the thought of falling didn't feel like the bond dragging him under. It felt like something he would choose anyway.
That should've scared him most of all.
It only quickened his pace instead.