Page 203 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Let her sleep one more night with less truth in her mouth.

Her fingers curled into my shirt. “Stay.”

“I will stay.”

“Promise.”

My throat closed. There were promises I could not make now. Not honestly. Not when tomorrow I meant to break the thing that let her find me.

So I gave her the only truth I could.

“I am here tonight.”

Cassie was too tired to hear the difference. Or maybe she heard it and could not fight me for it yet. Her eyes closed. Her breathing slowed. The tension between her brows eased when I lay beside her and let her forehead rest against my chest.

The binding tried to settle us together.

I held her anyway. I held her because the magic might be corrupt, but her body was real. Her breath was real. The bruises on her wrists were real. The way she had reached for me while half asleep was real. The fact that I loved her, even if love had grown inside poisoned soil, was real enough to kill me.

I didn’t want a life after this.

The truth came quietly.

No drama. No howl. No great noble declaration in the dark.

I simply could not picture waking in a world where Cassie lived free because I had cut myself out of her body and survived to become useful again. I could not go back to Ronan’s side, stand behind his shoulder, and wait for the next order. I could not return to being the pack weapon after learning that even the one place I thought I had been touched with tenderness had been built by enemies to control where I bit.

Maybe death should have frightened me.

It didn’t.

Tomorrow I would tear the binding open. I would use the last of myself to clear her path. I would kill Silas for putting her in the circle, for setting Evelyn in front of me, for turning Ronan’s love into a blade and Cassie’s courage into a chain. I would kill anyone who tried to stop her from leaving, council, guard, rival, friend.

Brother, if there was no other way.

Cassie slept against my chest, her hand over my heart as if she could keep it there by touch alone. I lowered my mouth to her hair.

“I am sorry,” I whispered.

She didn’t wake. That was mercy.

I watched Cassie and said goodbye without letting go.

Chapter 23:

The End of Secrecy

Ian

By morning, I knew how to keep the grief from the bond.

It was not gone. Nothing that deep could be removed cleanly. It lived under my ribs, under the mark, in the hollow place Evelyn had opened when she told me Cassie was where the leash landed. If I let it rise, Cassie felt it. Even asleep, drugged and injured, she had frowned when I pushed the binding too hard. Her fingers had tightened in my shirt. Her body had tried to answer pain she didn’t understand.

So I learned. I made my breathing even. I softened my hands. I let the wolf watch the door and gave Cassie only the calm surface of me, the part she could rest against without waking to the truth. That was the last thing I could give her before everything broke.

The morning came gray and wet, with rain tapping against the balcony doors and the resort wrapped in a fog thick enough to make the lake disappear. Somewhere beyond the glass, the full moon waited beneath the horizon. By nightfall, it would rise.

By nightfall, the council would have its answer. By nightfall, I would be dead or the world around me would be.