Nova's POV:
"You should have told me," I said.
Maren didn't apologize. She looked at me with those colorless eyes and said nothing for a long moment and I respected that more than I would have respected an excuse, which was the only reason I didn't walk out of the building without another word.
"How long were you going to wait," I said.
"Until I found another option."
"And if you hadn't found one before my wolf woke."
She held my gaze. "I was hoping the timeline would give me enough room."
"You were hoping." I set Selene's card on the table between us face up, the handwriting visible. "Eleven years, Maren. You found me when I was eleven years old and spent eleven years building toward this and your plan was hope."
"My plan," she said carefully, "is standing in front of me right now holding a card from the woman who cursed him and not falling apart. Which is more than I expected from someone who learned what the supernatural world was approximately four hours ago."
I picked the card back up.
I looked at the handwriting. The bond completing will kill him, not you.
Selene had given me this information deliberately. She wanted me to know. Which meant she believed that knowing would make me choose the sever. That a woman who had known Caius for three hours would rather walk away than risk killing him.
She was not wrong to calculate that.
She was wrong about which direction it pushed me.
"There has to be a way to break the curse without completing the bond," I said.
"I have looked for eleven years."
"You've been looking alone," I said. "For a problem that requires a Void Moon wolf to solve. Which means you've been looking from the outside of the only perspective that might have answers." I looked at her. "Take me to him."
Maren went completely still.
"Nova."
"Not to complete the bond. Not tonight. I understand what that does." I kept my voice level because level was the only register that was going to be convincing right now. "But I am a Void Moon wolf who is waking up whether anyone likes it or not. My wolf already pulled his location out of the incomplete bond tonight. In three weeks she takes over completely. The only thing that changes between now and then is whether I spend that time on the outside looking in or standing next to the problem trying to understand it."
"Caius will not allow you near him."
"Caius sent me an apology through a bond he publicly declared closed," I said. "He is not as decided as he wants everyone to believe."
Maren looked at me for a long time.
The hall was empty now. The candles above had dimmed to almost nothing, the last of the gold light moving across the stone floor in slow pulses. Outside the windows the parking lot was dark and quiet and Selene was gone and somewhere north of us through the incomplete bond there was a steady, controlled pressure that I was learning to read the way you learned to read weather.
He was awake. He was aware. He had felt my fear and sent me two words he probably hadn't meant to send and was now sitting with the knowledge that I had received them.
He was waiting to see what I did next.
I called the number on Aldric's card.
He picked up on the second ring.
"She knows," I said. "About the completion. About what it does to him."
A pause. "How."
"Selene told me directly. She left a card." I kept my voice even. "Aldric. I need to come to the compound."
The silence that followed lasted long enough that I counted my own heartbeats. Seven of them.
"He won't agree to that," Aldric said.
"Tell him I know the bond completion kills him and I'm coming anyway. Not to complete it. To help find another way." I paused. "Tell him exactly that. Word for word."
Another silence. Shorter this time.
"Give me ten minutes," Aldric said.
He ended the call.
Maren was watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on her before. Not the fear from when Selene appeared. Not the careful measurement she had used in the parking lot. Something quieter and more personal.
"You understand what you're walking into," she said.
"A compound full of wolves who watched their Sovereign publicly reject his fated mate tonight." I put my phone in my pocket. "Yes."
"And the bond. Being close to him accelerates your wolf's waking timeline. Proximity strengthens the incomplete bond. The closer you are, the faster she wakes."
"I know."
"Then you understand that going to him might reduce your window from three weeks to considerably less."
"I know that too."
She looked at me. "Why."
I thought about it honestly.
"Because he's been alone with this for two years," I said. "Because he lost two people he loved and decided that distance was the only tool he had and has been using it on himself as much as anyone else." I looked at the door. "And because Selene has been three steps ahead of everyone for two years and she is three steps ahead of this too and the only move she hasn't planned for is the one nobody expected."
"Which is."
"Me not being afraid of what I know."
My collarbone burned silver and warm and through the bond came something different from anything that had come before. Not exhaustion. Not the controlled managed weight of a man keeping everything at distance.
Awareness. Specific and sudden, like a door being opened in a previously sealed room.
He had felt me decide.
Aldric called back in eight minutes.
"Gate access is approved," he said. He sounded like a man who had just had a conversation that surprised him. "He said—" A pause. "He said don't bring Maren."
I looked at Maren.
She raised both hands slightly. "I'll find my own way in later."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," I told Aldric.
The drive was quiet. A car Aldric sent, a driver who said nothing, the city moving past the windows and then the city thinning out and then trees and a road that climbed and the directional pull in my chest getting stronger and more specific with every mile north.
By the time the compound gates opened I could feel his heartbeat.
Not metaphorically. Through the bond, steady and fast and not as controlled as it had been all night.
He was nervous.
Caius, the Blood Sovereign, the most powerful werewolf alive, was nervous about me walking through his gate.
The car stopped in a stone courtyard. Aldric was waiting, his expression carefully neutral.
I got out.
The compound was vast and dark and smelled like pine and old stone and the same electric charge from the hall but stronger here, concentrated, the source of it somewhere in the building ahead of me.
"He's inside," Aldric said. "Second floor. East wing." He paused. "Nova. He doesn't know I told you about the completion. He doesn't know any of what you know."
I stopped walking.
"He thinks I'm here because of the incomplete bond driving me toward him," I said. "He doesn't know I chose this."
"Yes."
I thought about that. About walking into a room with a man who had rejected me publicly and sent me an accidental apology and was currently nervous behind a controlled face and did not know that I was here with full information and still here anyway.
"Don't tell him yet," I said.
Aldric looked at me. "Why."
"Because I want to see who he is when he thinks I don't know the cost." I held Aldric's gaze. "I want to see if he tells me himself."
I walked toward the building.
Behind me Aldric said something very quiet that might have been a laugh or might have been something more serious.
The door opened before I reached it.
Caius was standing in the doorway.
He looked at me the way he had looked at me in the hall, with that raw, unguarded thing behind his silver eyes that he kept almost controlling, and the bond between us pulled taut and warm and present and his jaw was tight and his hands were still at his sides and he said nothing for four full seconds.
Then: "You shouldn't be here."
"I know," I said.
"The bond drove you. It's not a choice, it's biological."
"I know," I said again.
He looked at me.
"Then why do you look like it was," he said quietly.
I met his silver eyes and held them.
"Because it was," I said.
Something broke open behind his expression. Brief and enormous and locked back down almost instantly but not before I saw it completely.
He stepped back from the doorway.
He let me in.
And as I crossed the threshold the bond between us flared gold and hot and my wolf, three weeks from waking, lurched toward him like something magnetic and ancient and entirely beyond my control.
And from somewhere in the compound, a howl split the night.
Not Caius.
Someone who had been watching the gate.
Someone who had seen me arrive.
END OF CHAPTER 5