Page 101 of Before the Bond
Chapter 22
Caleb
It’s too soon.
I needed time. I needed to face the Voss pack before they could get to us. That wasn’t going to happen.
The bond had drained me for days. As I walked toward the silhouette of wolves in the trees, I fell for a third time. I tried to stand, but my legs didn’t answer.
The perimeter blurred at the edges. Sounds muffled into incoherent mumbles.
The wolf inside me was still. I didn’t know if it was even there anymore. Everything around me felt cold, as did my own body.
I didn’t even have energy to regret it. For my failure as a brother, a leader of the estate. For everything to do with Olivia.
I could feel the world grow dark, but there was no strength left in me to fight it. I closed my eyes. All I could do was accept everything I couldn’t do anymore.
“Caleb!”
I didn’t know if it was memory.
“Caleb!”
It felt so distant.
I was drifting. I was vaguely aware of something moving me. Of the sound of the grass brushing against me as someone sat beside me.
“I’m here…”
A soft hand laid itself against my chest.
I had forgotten what the bond felt like at full strength. Days of waning had made the absence feel like the natural state of things — the cold, the quiet, the wolf going still. I had started to mistake the emptiness for just the way things were.
Then it came back.
Not gradually. Not mercifully. All at once — a deep, resonant pulse that started where her hand pressed against me and moved outward through everything. My heart steadied. My vision cleared. The wolf came back as a roar.
I drew a breath that reached all the way down.
I felt whole again. Not restored. Not patched. Whole.
I finally opened my eyes.
A shadowy figure hovered over me. My wolf sight adjusted.
There in the moonlight, her tears streaming as she greeted me with a smile I thought I'd never see again… was Olivia.
I thought I was imagining things. I thought this was another trick of the bond dwindling. But the moment she spoke, I knew. She was here.
“I chose to,” she whispered back to me.
I held onto Olivia as tight as I could.
I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to hold onto her so tight that I would never lose her again. Never make the same mistakes that pushed her away from me.
But what Olivia said, what the bond communicated to me without words, was that it would be okay. It was alright that she was here. And it was alright for me to trust myself with her.
Once Donovan and the others reunited with us, I stood up. I didn’t bother to pick up the cane that had been holding meup. Beneath the returning strength, something stronger moved through me — clarity.
