I try to sleep, but the bond will not let me, and it hums low at first beneath my ribs before it tightens into something sharper that makes my breath hitch against my will. I roll onto my side and pull the blanket higher, telling myself it is just stress and politics and the weight of funeral threats pressing against the packhouse walls, but the pull deepens instead of fading, and it hooks into me like something is reeling a line in.
I sit upright in the dark, heart already racing, and I press my palm flat against my chest as if I can physically steady what is not entirely mine. The bond surges again, and this time pain threads through it, hot and sudden and not located in my body but bleeding into it anyway.
“Ezra,” I whisper into the dark, and the name feels like instinct more than tho
