Page 15 of Curvy Sold Mate

“That’s comforting.”

“I wasn’t aiming for comfort. I was aiming for accuracy.” Caitlynn rolled her sleeves past her elbows and settled onto the stool beside the table. Her green eyes carried the focus Olivia recognized from ritual. “The shard has three anchor points in your forearm. I need to map all of them before I can plan an extraction sequence. If I miss one and pull, the others burrow deeper.”

“Deeper.”

“Into the bone, potentially. Or the nerve sheath.” Caitlynn met her eyes. “I won’t let that happen. But you need to hold still.”

Olivia lay back. The examination table was cold through the thin fabric of her shirt, and the overhead light was too bright, the institutional kind that made everyone look exhausted. She turned her forearm up and stared at the ceiling while Caitlynn’s fingertips hovered over the entry point.

The golden light gathered slowly. Olivia felt the heat of it first—gentle, diagnostic, Caitlynn’s magic reaching beneath her skin with a precision she could almost visualize, filaments of warmth tracing the shard’s root system through muscle and tissue. It didn’t hurt. It was worse than pain. It was intimate in a direction she hadn’t braced for—someone else’s awareness moving through her body, mapping the architecture of the thing lodged inside her, touching the empty space where her wolf should have been and finding nothing.

Her fingers curled against the table’s edge.

“Breathe,” Caitlynn murmured.

“I am breathing.”

“You’re holding your breath and calling it breathing. Those are different activities.” Caitlynn’s free hand found Olivia’s wrist, a steadying pressure.

Olivia breathed. The golden light shifted, intensified, probed deeper, and the shard pulsed in response—a sullen purple flare she felt in her teeth. Her body seized against it, every muscle locking in the involuntary protest of a system that recognized the foreign object and couldn’t expel it.

The absence of her wolf yawned open in the space the magic illuminated—a cavity where something vital had lived, scraped clean, the edges raw. She felt Caitlynn register it too, felt the moment her friend’s magic touched the void, and her fingertips stiffened against Olivia’s wrist.

“Liv.”

“I know.”

“It’s integrated with the surrounding tissue at all three points. The anchor filaments are threaded through your radial nerve pathway.” Caitlynn withdrew her hands. The golden light faded, and the room felt dimmer for its absence. “Full extraction will take three sessions, spaced a week apart. I need the tissue to heal between each one, or the nerve damage could be permanent.”

Three sessions. Three weeks. Twenty-one more days of this hollow, muffled existence—her body without its engine, her senses blunted, every room slightly too quiet.

She sat up. The movement made her head swim, and she gripped the table’s edge until the room stopped tilting.

“Three weeks,” she said.

“At minimum.”

“And until then I’m—what? Human?”

Caitlynn’s mouth thinned. She peeled off her gloves with the careful movements of a woman choosing her next words with the same precision she brought to magic. “You’re a wolf whose connection has been interrupted. The bond is still there. I could feel it underneath the shard’s interference. Your wolf hasn’t gone anywhere, Olivia. It’s been caged, and I’m going to uncage it, but it’s going to take time.”

“Time during which I sit in Viktor’s quarters and wait for someone to tell me what’s happening with my own body.”

“Time during which you sit wherever you like and do whatever you want, because the shard took your wolf, not your legs.” Caitlynn folded the leather roll of instruments with hands that were steady despite the strain the diagnostic had cost her—Olivia could see it in the slight tremor at her wrists, the tightness around her eyes. “You were in a security briefing this morning. Viktor mentioned it.”

“Viktor mentioned it?”

“In passing. To Kahn. In a tone that suggested he’d rather chew through his own patrol reports than admit he was impressed, which of course meant he was.” Caitlynn allowed herself half a smile. “You don’t need your wolf to be dangerous, Liv. You proved that long before Marcus Cole decided you were worth a ransom.”

The words were the right shape, aimed at the right wound, delivered with the careful force Caitlynn had learned to wield as deftly as her magic. Olivia could appreciate the construction of them—the logic, the warmth, the refusal to soften what didn’t need softening.

But the hollow in her chest didn’t fill. The place where her wolf had been for thirteen years sat empty and cold. No amount of correct words reached it, and the gap between knowing she was more than her wolf and feeling it stretched wider with every hour the silence held.

Olivia swung her legs off the table and stood. Steady, this time. She made sure of it.

“Same time next week?”

“Same time next week.” Caitlynn touched her arm—above the shard, where the skin was still just hers. “Olivia. Needing help with this doesn’t make you dependent. It makes you someone with a shard in her arm.”