Page 54 of Before the Bond
I reached the mountain road too late.
I found Olivia on the shoulder, half under the guardrail, covered in blood. The other wolves were gone. They hadn't realized that Olivia, even in her maimed state, still had the faintest of heartbeats. A thread of a pulse.
I will never forget the sound of it. How small it was. How close to nothing.
Among wolves, life force was not a metaphor. It was the current that ran beneath the skin — the thing that fueled the shift, that healed wounds faster than any human body should be able to, that made us harder to kill than we have any right to be. It was finite. It did not regenerate quickly. Giving it away was not a gesture, but a cost.
It moved through touch. Through blood if the bond was incomplete, which ours was. I pressed my hands to her wounds and I held on. I could feel my own pulse dimming at the edges as hers began, slowly, to strengthen. The bond acted as a channel between us, carrying what I gave and pulling it toward whatever in her was still fighting to stay.
I saved her, but the word "save" is something I only use liberally. Because what I did on that mountain road was pour my own life force into an incomplete bond and hold on until her pulse steadied under my hands. I pulled her back from the edge. I did not undo what put her there.
The distinction stayed.
She thought it was an animal attack. A piece of bad luck on a mountain road in Northern California.
She didn't know about the spy. She didn't know that those wolves were not wild animals. They were members of the Voss pack.
She didn’t know Maykhel ordered it to make sure I would be deprived of our bond. A bond that would strengthen me as an opponent, and who he knew mattered most to me.
That was the shape of the guilt I carried. It wasn’t what I did. It was what it cost her.
I caught Elias's scent on the second perimeter run.
It wasn't new. Donovan and I had been tracking traces of him along the boundary for weeks — always outside the line, always careful, the behavior of someone gathering information rather than making a move. We knew he was there. We knew what he was doing.
What I didn't know — what changed everything — was that Olivia had already met him.
Donovan told me after the fact. She'd come back through the east door one morning and he'd stopped her at the threshold. Asked if she'd run into anyone on the trail. She said a neighbor. Donovan recognized it immediately and said nothing — not to her, and not to me until later. By then, Elias had already made contact twice.
I should have told her then what that meant. I didn't.
What was new now was where the scent landed.
The marked areas closed tighter and tighter around the boundary. Not the outer perimeter anymore. Not the road. Ifollowed the trail more closely, and each point was nearer than the last.
I found the closest concentration of his scent near the inner edge of the estate grounds. In the distance, I could see Olivia's car.
The world closed in.
He wasn't watching the territory anymore. He was watching her specifically. And he'd been close enough to know exactly what she was to us.
They knew. They were aware that she was the mate they failed to kill seven years ago.
In many ways, I wondered why Donovan couldn’t have been alpha.
He knew when to be detached. He made decisions no matter how hard it turned other people against him.
That was on me. Because of my own shortcomings, Donovan was forced to harden into a man when I should have been the one guiding him.
I thought about that now, watching him enter the study.
He didn’t come in here often.
I informed him about Elias’s scent earlier, but we decided that a proper meeting with Jake and Stella would be more appropriate to discuss the full matter of the situation.
Donovan carried a mug of black coffee with him as he entered.
He paused in the doorway, waited for me to gesture at him closer, and then sat across from me.
