**Savannah’s POV**
I found my footing and stepped back.
The marble floor was solid under my heels, the ballroom noise reassembling itself around us as I put distance between myself and his chest.
I took his jacket from my shoulders, folded it once along the seam — the same way I folded everything, efficiently, without drama — and held it out to him.
“I can manage from here,” I said.
“Thank you for the gesture.”
He reached for the jacket.
And I saw it.
One second, less than one.
His eyes lost focus in a way that had nothing to do with the room or me — that specific, inward blankness that I recognized from a life I no longer had access to.
The look of someone receiving a message through a channel that bypassed ears entirely.
Pack mind-link.
I knew that expression the way I knew my own name.
I’d worn it myself for eighteen years, that slight drift of attention, the body present while part of the mind went elsewhere to answer a call that arrived without sound.
Diana used to reach for me like that.
At odd hours, mid-conversation, during training — a thread pulling gently through my consciousness, her voice finding mine without any of the ordinary mechanics of speech.
*Savannah.* Just that, sometimes.
Just my name, the way she said it when she wanted to know I was there.
That thread had been cut for six years.
The severance hadn’t been gradual.
That was the part people who still had their wolves never quite understood when I tried to explain it.
Not a slow dimming, not a fading.
One moment the connection existed — warm, constant, as natural as breathing — and the next there was a silence so complete it had physical weight.
Both ends of the line snapping back at once, nothing left in between.
Vivienne’s poison had done that in under an hour.
Celeste was reaching for him through the link right now.
Calling him back to wherever she was standing in that ballroom with her ruined blue gown and her precisely manufactured tears, reminding him with the specific intimacy of a mental connection that he had somewhere else to be.
I looked toward the ballroom.
Finding him.
The cold stone in my chest settled one degree lower.
“Go back,” I said.
My voice came out steadier than I deserved.
“Someone’s waiting for you.”
“Savannah—”
“Good night, Declan.”
I turned and walked toward the main entrance before he could finish whatever he’d been about to say.
The corridor air was cooler than the ballroom, raising the skin on my bare shoulders, and I was grateful for the sensation.
Something real.
Something that had nothing to do with heartbeats or jacket warmth or the almost-kiss I was not thinking about.
I pushed through the front doors.
The moon was where it had been all evening, enormous and indifferent, spilling silver light across the stone steps and the drive below.
I stopped on the top step and stood there for a moment, face lifted, eyes closed, letting the night air move across my face.
Then the tears came.
Quiet.
No sound, no shaking, just warmth tracking down my face in the cold air.
I let them go.
Didn’t wipe them, didn’t fight them, just let them run their course in the dark where no one was watching and no one needed to know.
They weren’t for Declan.
That was the thing I needed to be clear about, even in the privacy of my own chest.
They weren’t for the terrace or the almost-kiss or the way his heartbeat had felt different from what I’d expected.
They were for Diana.
For the look on Declan’s face when the mind-link reached him — that effortless, available connection that every werewolf in that ballroom had access to without thinking about it, the same way people in both lungs don’t notice breathing.
For the way this world kept finding new ways to show me the exact shape of what had been taken from me.
An empty frequency where a voice used to be.
A silence that six years hadn’t made smaller.
I stood there until the tears stopped on their own.
Then I used the back of my hand to clear my face, bent down, unbuckled both silver heels and pulled them off.
Held them in one hand. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The stone step was cold against the soles of my feet, then the drive, then the path — each surface slightly different, all of them real, all of them present.
That was enough.
That was always enough, eventually.
The training base was twenty minutes on foot.
The dress had a tear up one side.
My feet would manage the path.
I’d walked longer distances in worse conditions with less reason to arrive.
I was three minutes down the drive when headlights came up behind me, slow, not approaching with any urgency.
A Range Rover, dark, engine quiet.
The window came down.
Jack Maxwell’s face in the low light looked different from earlier — the practiced ease was still there, but underneath it something that hadn’t been there before.
Something that looked, against my better judgment, like an actual person who had reconsidered something.
“I’m going past the training compound,” he said.
No performance in it, no angle I could immediately identify.
“I owe you an apology for earlier.
This could be part of it.”
I stood there in bare feet on a gravel path, holding silver heels in one hand, with a torn dress and a face that was probably still showing the evidence of the last ten minutes.
I looked at him.
Looked at the dark road ahead.
Calculated the distance, the terrain, the probability that the gravel was going to get significantly less comfortable.
“To the gate,” I said.
“Nowhere else.”
The corner of his mouth moved.
“Understood.”
I opened the door and got in, settling back against the seat.
The leather was warm.
Through the windshield, the drive unspooled ahead of us, the pine trees on either side dark and familiar, and the moon kept pace with us on the left, running alongside through the gaps in the branches, silver and constant and unhurried.
It followed us for a long time down that road.