I should have knocked.

That thought came to me later — much later, when I was sitting on the floor of my room with my back against the door and my hands pressed flat against the cold wood, trying to remember how to breathe. I should have knocked. I should have waited. I should have done a hundred things differently.

But I didn't knock. I just opened the door.

The fresh change of clothes was folded over my arm — Kingsley's gray training shirt, the one he'd asked me to bring up before the afternoon session. A small thing. An errand. The kind of thing I'd been doing for months without being asked twice, without complaint, because that was what I did. That was what I had always done.

The office smelled like her before I even registered what I was seeing. That sharp, sweet perfume Stella Ortiz wore like a second skin — jasmine and something darker underneath, something that always made my wolf go quiet and low in my chest. I noticed the scent first. Then I noticed everything else.

They were at his desk.

I won't describe it in detail. I don't need to. What I will say is that Kingsley's hands were in her hair and her blouse was half-undone and neither of them heard me come in. Not at first.

But Stella saw me.

She looked right at me over his shoulder. Didn't flinch. Didn't pull away. Just held my gaze with those dark, steady eyes and let the corner of her mouth curve up — slow, deliberate, satisfied — like she had been waiting for exactly this moment. Like she had arranged it.

Maybe she had.

Kingsley turned when he felt her shift. He looked at me the way you look at something that has wandered into the wrong room. Not guilt. Not shame. Just cold, flat irritation.

He didn't move away from her.

The clothes slipped off my arm. I didn't pick them up.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for something inside me to go very still — the part of me that had been holding on, that had been telling itself things would change, that the man who had pressed his forehead to mine five years ago and sworn on his life to protect me was still somewhere inside the Alpha staring back at me now. That part went quiet. And in the quiet, something else came forward. Something that had been waiting a long time.

"I want to reject the bond," I said.

My voice came out steadier than I expected. Stella's smile didn't waver.

Kingsley's expression shifted — not toward remorse, not toward anything I could have called human. His jaw tightened. His eyes went flat in a different way, the way they did right before he reached for his authority like a weapon.

"Excuse me?"

The Alpha tone hit me before I finished processing the words. It rolled out of him in a wave — heavy, suffocating, the kind of pressure that doesn't just push you down but makes your own wolf turn against you. My knees buckled. I caught myself on the doorframe, but only barely, and then I was on the floor anyway, one hand braced against the wood, the scar on my palm burning the way it always did when I was under stress.

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.

"Your wolf can barely hold a shift," he said, looking down at me from behind his desk, Stella still half-draped against him like she belonged there. "And you think you're in a position to make demands? This is what you do when you want attention, Mackenzie. You make a scene."

Stella touched his arm. A small gesture. Gentle. Proprietary.

"Let her go, King," she said softly, like she was being generous. "She's upset."

The pressure lifted just enough for me to breathe. I got to my feet. I didn't look at either of them again.

I walked back to my room. I locked the door. I sat down on the floor.

For a while I just pressed my hands against the wood and let myself feel it — all of it, the full weight of what I had just watched, what he had just done, what I had just understood with a clarity I couldn't unfeel. The mate bond ached in my chest like a bruise being pressed. My wolf was silent. Not gone — just done.

We were both done.

I reached for the mind link before I'd fully decided to. My mother's presence came through immediately, warm and steady and unsurprised, like she had been waiting by an open door.

I need to leave, I told her. I need to leave now.

A pause. Then: I know, baby. I've already started making calls.

I closed my eyes and pressed my thumb against the scar on my palm.

Somewhere in Los Angeles, a man I had never met was about to get on a plane to Seattle.

I just had to stay alive long enough for him to arrive.

The kitchen was loud that afternoon.

Steam rising from three different pots, the clatter of prep work, the low murmur of pack members moving around each other in the practiced rhythm of communal meal prep. I had been assigned to the soup station — a demotion in everything but name, since I used to run training drills at this hour. Now I stirred broth and kept my eyes down and told myself it didn't matter.

My wolf had been quiet since the office. Not the wounded quiet of before, when she would go small and still under the weight of the mate bond's ache. This was different. This was the quiet of something that had already decided.

I was reaching for the ladle when I felt her.

Stella moved through the kitchen the way she moved through every room — like she owned the air in it. I heard her before I saw her, that jasmine-and-something-darker perfume cutting through the smell of broth and woodsmoke. I didn't turn around. I kept stirring.

"Here, let me help with that."

Her voice was warm. Helpful. The kind of warm that has teeth underneath it.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You've been on your feet for hours." She was already beside me, reaching past me toward the heavy iron pot on the back burner — the one I hadn't touched yet because it was still at a full boil. "Let me get that."

"Stella—"

The pot tipped.

Not slowly. Not accidentally. It went over in one clean, deliberate arc, and the boiling water came down directly onto my right hand.

The sound I made wasn't a scream. It was something worse — a short, broken thing that came out of me before I could stop it, and then I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, my hand pulled to my chest, the pain so immediate and total that for a moment I couldn't see anything at all. Just white. Just the burning. Just the scar on my palm screaming alongside every nerve in my hand like they were all remembering the same thing at once.

The kitchen erupted around me. Voices. Movement. Someone calling for water.

And then Stella was kneeling beside me.

She put her hand on my back. Gentle. Concerned. Her face, when I managed to focus on it through the blur of pain, was arranged into something that looked almost like distress.

"Oh, Mackenzie," she breathed. "I'm so sorry, I didn't—"

I felt it before I understood what was happening. A quick, sharp tug at the back of my neck. The chain pulled taut, then snapped.

My father's necklace.

I reached for it on instinct, my burned hand moving before my brain caught up, and the pain that shot up my arm nearly took me under again. By the time I could breathe, Stella was already straightening up, her hand at her side, her expression perfectly composed.

The necklace was gone.

I looked up at her. She looked down at me. And for just one second — one single, unguarded second — I saw it. The satisfaction. The same look she'd given me over Kingsley's shoulder in the office. Calm. Deliberate. Done.

Then the kitchen doors swung open.

Kingsley filled the doorway the way he always did — like the room had been waiting for him to arrive and could now organize itself accordingly. His eyes swept the scene: the overturned pot, the water spreading across the floor, me on my knees, Stella standing over me with her hand pressed to her mouth.

Stella's composure cracked on cue. Her voice came out shaking.

"She bumped into me," she said. "I was trying to help and she just — the pot went over and I nearly—" She pressed her fingers harder against her lips. "I could have been badly burned, King."

I opened my mouth.

The Alpha tone hit me like a wall.

It didn't come with volume. It never did with Kingsley — that was the thing people who hadn't felt it didn't understand. It wasn't loud. It was heavy. It pressed down on my wolf like a hand on the back of her neck, and my wolf, already quiet, already decided, went flat and still beneath it.

"Don't." His voice was ice. He wasn't even looking at me fully — his eyes were on Stella, checking her over, and I was somewhere in his peripheral vision. An inconvenience. A mess on the floor. "Clean this up."

"Kingsley, she took—"

"I said clean it up, Mackenzie." Now he looked at me. That flat, cold look I had stopped being surprised by. "Or is that too much to ask from someone who can't even carry a pot without causing a scene?"

Somewhere behind him, I heard someone in the kitchen go very quiet.

I looked down at my burned hand. The skin was already starting to blister, red and raw against the older scar tissue. My father's necklace was in Stella's pocket. My wolf was silent. My mate was staring at me like I was something he was tired of stepping around.

I picked up the mop.

I didn't say another word.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, behind the pain and the humiliation and the hollow ache where the bond used to feel like something worth holding onto, a single thought surfaced and stayed.

Everett Harris, get on that plane.

The bandage kept slipping.

I'd been at it for ten minutes, sitting on the edge of my bed with the roll of gauze in my lap and my burned hand held out in front of me like it belonged to someone else. The blisters had risen fully now — three of them, fat and tight across my knuckles, the skin around them an angry, mottled red that faded into the older scar tissue at my palm. Every time I tried to wrap it, my fingers wouldn't cooperate. Too stiff. Too swollen. The gauze would catch and I'd have to start over, and each time I started over the pain reset itself like it had somewhere to be.

I was so focused on the bandage that it took me a full minute to register what was missing.

My hand went to my throat.

Nothing.

I sat very still. Then I was on my feet, checking the nightstand, the floor, the folds of my shirt — already knowing. Already knowing exactly where it was and exactly who had it. The knowing sat in my stomach like a stone.

I found Stella in the east corridor, near the back stairwell. She was alone, which meant she had been waiting.

She turned when she heard me coming, and the smile she gave me was different from the ones she wore in front of Kingsley. No warmth in it. No performance. Just the real thing underneath, finally allowed out.

"Looking for something?" she said.

"Give it back."

She tilted her head. "Give what back?"

"Stella."

She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and held it up — my father's necklace, the bullet shell catching the dim corridor light, the chain dangling from her fingers like it was nothing. Like it was a piece of junk she'd found on the floor.

"This?" She turned it slowly. "It's not much to look at."

"It was my father's."

"I know." She said it simply, without cruelty, which was somehow worse. "That's why I took it."

I took a step toward her. She didn't move back.

"You should be careful," she said, her voice dropping to something quieter, more deliberate. "That hand looks bad. You wouldn't want to make it worse." Her eyes moved to my bandaged hand and stayed there for a moment before coming back to my face. "You know what I think, Mackenzie? I think you've been here too long. I think you've gotten comfortable. And I think it's time for you to understand that everything you have in this pack — your rank, your room, your little routines — all of it exists because Kingsley allows it. And Kingsley listens to me."

She tucked the necklace back into her pocket.

"I'm going to take it all," she said pleasantly. "Slowly. So you feel every piece of it. And when there's nothing left, you'll leave on your own, or you won't leave at all." She smiled again — that real smile, the one with no warmth in it. "Either way works for me."

She walked past me without another word. Her perfume lingered in the corridor long after she was gone.

I stood there for a moment. Then I went back to my room and finished wrapping my hand.

---

I heard he'd arrived under the cover of a trade discussion — something about territorial boundaries and supply routes, the kind of administrative errand that Betas handled without much fanfare. I didn't know what he looked like. I only knew his name, and that my mother trusted him, and that he was here.

He found me near the tree line at the edge of the eastern woods, just after dark. I'd gone out for air — or that's what I told myself. Really I think some part of me already knew.

He was taller than I expected. Quiet in the way that some people are quiet — not because they have nothing to say, but because they've learned that most situations don't require them to fill the silence. He looked at my bandaged hand once, briefly, and didn't comment on it.

"Your mother sends these," he said, and held out a small cloth pouch. Inside were three sealed jars — high-grade healing salve, the kind my mother made herself, the kind that smelled faintly of pine and something medicinal I'd never been able to name. "She said to use the one with the blue lid first."

I took the pouch. My throat felt tight.

"She also said to tell you," he continued, his voice low and even, "that you've waited long enough."

I looked up at him. He met my eyes without pressure, without expectation — just steady, like he had all the time in the world and no agenda attached to any of it.

"Three days," he said. "Can you hold on for three more days?"

I thought about the necklace in Stella's pocket. I thought about the corridor, and the smile, and everything she'd promised to take.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded once. "Then I'll be here."

He slipped back into the tree line without another word, and I stood at the edge of the woods with the pouch in my good hand and the night air cold against my face, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, the thing in my chest that had been bracing itself went very slightly, carefully still.

Three days.