Chapter 8 WHAT THE BOND COSTS

Jenna

There is a particular kind of madness that comes from a small space.

I’d been in the vault long enough to know every inch of floor the chain allowed me. I’d licked the blood from my paws until they were raw, scratched at the links until I’d burned my own skin, and paced the perimeter so many times that my claws had started to mark the concrete. I’d smelled every damp corner, mapped every shadow, catalogued the exact distance between where I stood and the barred door.

Audrey had gone quiet. Not asleep — present, in that still, listening way of hers. Under self-imposed lockdown, she’d told me before she retreated.

Stupid.

I whined because there was nothing else to do. My fur was matted with dried blood along my neck and the chain had begun to do something I tried not to think about — the skin was closing around it, slowly, the way wounds do when they give up waiting for relief and decide to heal around whatever is in the way.

I ran at the door and the chain snapped me back. I bit the links and spat blood. I lay down. I got back up.

I did this for hours.

—

I heard him before the door at the top of the stairs opened.

He came down carrying a water bowl in one hand and raw deer meat in the other. The smell of the meat hit me so hard my claws involuntarily flexed against the floor. I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t slept. My body had its own opinion about both of those facts, and it expressed that opinion the moment the scent reached me.

I growled anyway. Blood and spit hit the ground between us.

He set the bowl just inside the cell, a foot past the reach of my chain, and straightened. Unhurried. Unmoved.

“Are you going to behave?” he asked. “Do I have your respect?

I lunged. My jaw closed on nothing — his fingers had moved back by exactly the margin I needed to reach them, which meant he’d calculated it, which meant he’d known I would lunge, which was somehow the most infuriating thing that had happened in two days of infuriating things.

His face didn’t change. He picked up the bowl and moved it to the far wall, beside the meat. Both of them watching me from a distance I couldn’t cross.

“Mate.” He stepped as close as the chain allowed. “Behave, and you eat. You drink. You get unchained. Continue like this, and you spend another night here.” His voice held no heat, no cruelty. Just the flat certainty of someone who has already decided how this ends.

I snapped at the air between us and scratched the floor.

Then he said my name.

“Jenna.”

Just that. Just my name in his voice, low and steady, and my entire body tried to betray me. I felt it move through my chest like a warm current — that pull, that unbearable pull that had nothing to do with sense and everything to do with what we were to each other.

I shook my head hard. Growled at myself as much as at him.

Stupid bond.

His eyes darkened. He drew a slow breath, and when he spoke again his voice had shifted — quieter, almost careful.

“Jenna. Let’s stop this. My pack is waiting to meet their Luna.”

I shook my head again and growled.

He sighed — the kind that carries something heavier than frustration — and turned toward the door.

That was when Audrey came back.

She shoved me to the back of my own mind with a force that left me breathless and took over so completely that I couldn’t even feel my own paws anymore. I could only watch.

She whined. Long, desperate, the kind of sound that has no dignity left in it. She called to him the way wolves have always called to the thing they cannot live without, and he stopped walking. His hand stilled on the doorframe. His shoulders rose once.

Then he walked out anyway.

She howled. She pulled against the chain until the silver cut deeper, howled until the sound bounced off the stone walls and came back changed. She did this for hours. I watched her from the back of my own consciousness, in the particular silence of someone who has nothing useful to say.

Eventually, she lay down.

Eventually, she let me back.

—

The meat smell was going to kill me before the chain did.

I spent the rest of the day engineering a solution. I circled, measured, angled myself along the limit of the chain. I lunged toward the bowl six, eight, twelve times and felt my claws skim the floor an inch short. On the thirteenth attempt, a single claw caught the bowl’s edge. Water lurched across the floor in a slow wave.

I licked every drop that reached me. My tongue was burning and I did not stop.

The meat remained where it was. Out of reach. Patient. Taunting me in the language of things that cannot be reasoned with.

I howled until morning came.

—

He walked in at first light with silver gloves already pulled onto his hands.

I barked. My legs folded under a wave of pain and I howled instead.

He crossed the cell slowly, hands raised in the way that means I come in peace, which was almost funny given the circumstances. He crouched in front of me and his jaw tightened when he saw my neck. The skin had grown up around the chain in the night — a thick, raw seam of it — and when he took hold of the links and began to ease them free, I learned a new register of pain entirely.

I roared. He hushed me.

“Shhh. I know.”

It took a long time. He worked carefully, more carefully than I wanted to give him credit for, peeling the chain away inch by inch while I whined and flinched and tried not to snap at his hands. When the last link came free I felt the absence of it like a released breath — and then I was on my feet, fur puffed, claws out, every inch of me pointed at him.

“Jenna.” His voice was a warning wrapped in exhaustion. “Stop. Let me take you to the pack doctor.”

I sprang at him.

I don’t know what I expected. I know what I got: his hand around my throat mid-air, the floor rushing up, his grip landing directly in the wound at my neck. The pain that came out of me was not a growl. It was not a roar. It was something broken and animal and honest, and I hated him for hearing it.

He pushed me down. I rose. He pushed me down again and the chain closed around my neck for the second time, and the silver found the raw skin beneath with no difficulty at all.

I couldn’t even form a howl. Just sound. Just pain and sound.

He stepped back. His eyes were no longer hazel.

“Don’t ever challenge an Alpha,” his wolf said, low and final. “You won’t like the consequences. — ”

He paused. His eyes dropped to my neck.

“— Mate.”

The door closed.

The word stayed.