FIVE.
961 Words
Jayce POV
Iris opened her door before I even knocked, like she had been waiting for this exact moment.
“She’s not here, Jayce.”
“I know, I need to know where she went.”
“I can’t tell you that.” Her voice wavered, but her eyes didn’t. “I promised her.”
“Iris, please!”
“I said I can’t, Jayce.” She was crying now, but she didn’t move from the doorway.
“I love her too much to break that. I’m sorry. I am so sorry, but I won’t do it.”
I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shout until the walls came down.
Instead I just stood there, my wolf clawing at my ribs, and something in her face, the sheer wreckage of it made me stop pushing. Whatever she was protecting, she was protecting it at real cost to herself.
“Okay,” I said finally, hollow. “Okay. I won’t ask again.”
I turned and left her standing there, and I hadn’t made it twenty feet before Nolan came jogging up the path, breathless.
“Alpha’s son. One of the gate guards wants to talk to you. Says it’s about Damaris.”
The guard was young, one of the newer recruits, wringing his hands like he already regretted whatever he was about to say.
“She came through the west gate a 15 hours ago. I almost stopped her but she didn’t look right.”
“She didn't look right, How?.”
“Pale and unsteady on her feet, like she was fighting to stay upright. She was gripping the wheel with both hands before she even started the engine, like she didn’t trust her own hands to work.” He swallowed.
“I asked if she was alright. She said she was fine. But sir, I’ve done gate duty for two years. That wasn’t fine. That was someone forcing themselves to look fine.”
Something cold dropped through my chest. I didn’t go home. I went straight to Damaris’s side of our room, tore through drawers I hadn’t looked in for months, and found what I was terrified, a small wooden box tucked behind her folded sweaters, full of dried herbs, tinctures, a folded sheet of paper in Emmeline’s handwriting listing dosages, times, warnings. For fatigue and weakening. Administer twice daily. If symptoms worsen, dizziness, breathlessness, loss of consciousness —bring her to me immediately.
My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the box.
I went to Emmeline’s door with it still in my hands, and I didn’t have to say anything. She looked at the box, then at my face, and whatever resolve had held her silent before finally broke.
“She’s been like this for months,” Emmeline said quietly, no more evasions left in her.
“The bond’s been failing her, Jayce. Her body’s been paying the price for it not being completed. Without reciprocation soon, I told her weeks. Maybe months, if she’s strong.”
The room tilted.
“Weeks,” I repeated, like saying it back would make it survivable.
“She made me promise not to tell you. She didn’t want you staying out of guilt.”
I didn’t remember deciding to run. I just remember the cold air hitting my face and my father’s voice cutting through the pack hall as I burst in, elders scattering at whatever was written across my face.
“Jayce, what happened?”
“Damaris is dying.” My voice cracked clean in half. “Bond sickness. Months of it, and I didn’t see it, because I was too busy being cruel to her to notice she was disappearing in front of me.”
I told him everything. Rosie. The cabin. The words Damaris overheard. The note. The box of tinctures. Emmeline’s face.
“I never gave her the chance to be loved properly,” I said, and it was the first time I’d said the true thing under all of it.
“Not once. I took her loyalty and gave her scraps and told myself it was enough because she never complained.”
My father didn’t yell. That was worse.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?” His voice was low, lethal.
“That girl is one of the most promising Lunas this pack has seen in a generation, and you were careless with her. Not just unfaithful. Careless! With a life, Jayce. Not a title.”
“I know.”
“You don’t. Not yet.” He was already moving, already barking for warriors, for Brian, for every tracker in the hall. “We must find her tonight, not tomorrow.”
Rumor came back within the hour, her car pulled onto the shoulder of the old border road, engine cold, driver’s door shut and empty.
“There’s a trail off the road,” the scout said, chest heaving.
“Drag marks. Boot prints that aren’t hers. Leads straight toward the Ashgrave border.”
The pack we hadn’t been at peace with in six years.
“Is she?” I couldn’t finish it.
“We don’t know if she’s conscious,” the scout said. “We don’t know if she’s alive.”
My wolf howled loud enough to drown every other thought in my skull.
Eleven months of taking her for granted, and it had led her, dying alone on a roadside, and now maybe not alone at all, but taken, into territory where I had no claim and possibly no time left.
“Move!” my father roared, and the hall broke into motion around me.
I ran into the dark after them, praying to the moon goddess I had failed for eleven months straight that I wasn’t already too late.
- Writer
