Page 231 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Then the bond tore. No warning. No slow pull. It ripped through me from shoulder to spine, from throat to hip, from the deepest place inside my chest where Ian had been warm even when everything else was terrible.

I dropped and my knees hit the pavement. The scream tore out of me before I knew it was mine. The world went white, then black at the edges. I heard Tessa shout my name. My father cursed. My mother started sobbing again.

Sava was on the ground beside me. “Cassie.”

I clutched at my shoulder. The mark burned under my sweater. Not hot. Worse. Empty. Something was being pulled out of it by the roots, and every root was attached to something alive.

Ian.

He was ripping at the final pieces. He was breaking it. He was breaking us.

No.

He was breaking himself.

The understanding came through the pain so clearly it almost felt calm. Ian had not planned to follow. He had never planned to follow. The look in his eyes when he told me to run had been goodbye with teeth around it.

That tragic, self-sacrificing, emotionally constipated bastard.

He thought this would save me.

I could feel him in pieces. Blood. Rage. A dark, brutal focus. The bond thinned again, and underneath it I felt the shape of his choice. He was carving himself away from me because a dead man could not be used as a leash.

“Ian,” I gasped.

Sava’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “Breathe.”

“He’s doing it.”

“I know.”

“He’s breaking it!”

“I know.”

The second I heard it in her voice, I understood she had known before now.

I lifted my head. “You knew.”

Sava’s face looked carved out of grief and rain. “I knew what he intended.”

“And you let me leave!”

“I was trying to keep you alive.”

“I am going back!”

“No!”

The word came from my father. It cracked across the service road, raw and panicked and still somehow carrying every ounce of fatherly authority he seemed to believe worked on adult women during supernatural emergencies.

I looked at him from my hands and knees.

He had climbed halfway out of the SUV. His face was pale beneath the blood at his mouth. “No. Cassie, no. Get in the car.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. You are hurt. You are bleeding. There are monsters back there.”