I felt him the moment he walked into the courtyard, before I ever let myself look up to confirm it.
The pull hit low in my stomach, unwelcome and immediate, a physical recognition my body still apparently insisted on making no matter how much of the last five years I’d spent training myself out of needing it.
I hated that it still worked.
I hated that some old, stubborn part of the bond between us had survived a public rejection, a beating on a stone floor, and five years of complete silence, still recognizing him across a crowded courtyard like nothing had changed at all.
“You felt that,” Bastian said quietly beside me, not quite a question.
“I felt nothing.” I kept my eyes forward, on the mediator arranging papers at the front of the hall, refusing to let myself track Darius’s movement across the room the way every instinct in my body wanted to.
“Your hands are shaking.”
I looked down and found he was right, my fingers curled slightly against the table’s edge, and I forced them flat, forced my breathing even, using the same discipline Damien had drilled into me for exactly this kind of moment.
Five years of training my body to hold a shift for fifteen minutes past exhaustion, and it still couldn’t fully override an old, worn instinct that had nothing to do with strength and everything to do with a bond I’d never chosen and had never fully managed to sever, no matter how thoroughly Darius had severed everything else.
“I’m fine,” I said, and made myself mean it by the time the session began.
I made it through most of the opening remarks without looking at him directly, though I felt his attention on me anyway, a weight I recognized even without turning my head to confirm it.
Bastian noticed too, murmuring something in my ear about the mediator’s terrible taste in ceremonial robes, an old habit of his, distracting me with nonsense whenever he sensed I needed it, and I let myself laugh quietly at the joke because laughing felt safer than sitting with everything else churning under my composure.
I didn’t look at Darius again until the recess, when I couldn’t avoid it any longer.
He was watching me from across the courtyard when I finally let myself meet his eyes, and something in his expression made my chest tighten in a way I resented immediately — not longing exactly, though longing was tangled up somewhere in it too, unwelcome and stubborn.
Mostly it was recognition.
He looked older, worn down in a way that read as something other than simple age, and some old, exhausted part of me that used to love him noticed that immediately, catalogued it, wondered what five years had cost him before I could stop myself from caring.
I made myself stop caring.
It took real, deliberate effort.
Killian moved to intercept him before Darius made it more than a few steps in my direction, and I watched the exchange from a distance, unable to hear the words but reading enough from posture alone to understand Killian was doing exactly what I’d have asked him to do if I’d had the composure to ask.
That was the strange, complicated truth of it — five years ago I would have needed someone to stand between us, would have folded the moment Darius said my name in that low, familiar voice.
Now I could have handled the conversation myself, could have told him exactly what I needed to tell him without flinching.
I let Killian handle it anyway, because I didn’t want to.
That was different from needing to, and I’d earned the right to know the difference.
“You didn’t go to him,” Lucian said, appearing at my other side once the recess properly began, his voice carrying the same quiet, careful assessment he always used when gauging how I was actually doing underneath whatever face I was presenting to the room.
“Why would I?”
“No reason. I’m just noting it.” Something almost approving crossed his face.
“Five years ago you might have.”
“Five years ago I was a different person.”
“You were the same person,” Lucian said, correcting me gently.
“You just didn’t know yet what you were capable of.”
I turned that over while I watched Darius retreat from his conversation with Killian, his shoulders carrying something I recognized as defeat even from this distance, and I felt an unwelcome flicker of something that wasn’t quite sympathy but lived somewhere close to it.
I didn’t want to feel that.
I examined it honestly instead of pushing it away, the way Damien had taught me to examine every uncomfortable feeling rather than burying it the way I used to.
What I wanted, if I was honest with myself, had nothing to do with revenge.
I’d spent enough of the first year at Dreadmoon turning over fantasies of Darius suffering the way I had, and none of them had ever actually satisfied the hollow place those fantasies were meant to fill.
Revenge wouldn’t undo the shove, or the beating, or the five months I’d spent flinching every time someone raised their voice near me.
It would only give me something new to carry.
I didn’t want reconciliation either, not really, not in any form that resembled what we used to have.
That version of us, the one who used to fall asleep tracing each other’s collarbones and promising nothing would ever come between them, had died on the floor of that hall the same night the bond ripped out of my chest.
I didn’t grieve her the way I used to.
What I wanted, watching him from across a courtyard full of packs who’d once have called me an omen, was simpler than either of those things and somehow harder to hold onto.
I wanted to never again be in a position where someone else got to decide whether I was worth keeping.
I wanted my worth to exist independent of any single person’s judgment of it, unconditional and entirely mine, the way I’d built it, piece by piece, over five years of training and grief and a family who’d chosen me before they had proof.
I already had that, mostly.
Standing here, feeling the old pull of the bond and refusing to let it dictate my next move, felt like proof of exactly how far I’d come.
“He said he wants to talk to you,” Killian told me later, once the session resumed and the delegations settled back into their places.
“Properly. Not here.”
“I heard.”
“You don’t have to see him.”
“I know I don’t.” I watched Darius across the hall, his attention fixed carefully on the mediator now instead of on me, some visible effort in the way he held himself that told me he was working just as hard as I was to appear unaffected.
“I’m not sure yet whether I want to or not. That’s different from being afraid to.”
Killian studied me for a long moment, something like pride settling into his expression.
“Take whatever time you need to decide. Nobody’s going to push you toward him. Not me, not Roman, not anyone in this family.”
“I know that too.” I said it with the same certainty I used to lack entirely, back when every decision about my own life had felt like something other people got to make for me.
“That’s the whole point, isn’t it. Nobody gets to push me toward anything anymore.”
I didn’t look at Darius again for the rest of the session, though I felt his attention return to me more than once, a familiar weight I no longer needed to flinch away from.
The mate pull hadn’t disappeared.
I doubted it ever fully would, some old, stubborn thread the bond had left behind even after everything Darius had done to sever the rest of it.
But feeling it and obeying it were two different things, and I’d spent five years learning exactly how to hold the difference between them, steady, in my own two hands.