His Mistress Bound Me While He Rejected Our Bond

The mark on my neck had been humming for ninety-eight nights, and on the ninety-ninth, at some hour past midnight, it finally screamed.

I woke to it before I woke to anything else — a hot wire dragged under my skin, pulling toward the door. That was how the bond worked when it was starving. It didn't ache where he touched me. It ached where he didn't.

His footsteps came down the hall a moment later. Unhurried. Familiar enough that I didn't need to open my eyes to know the weight of his stride, or the door he'd pass without slowing — mine.

But I knew something else now, something my body had learned before my mind caught up: his scent had changed. Cedar and rain-soaked earth, that used to be only his, now carried something underneath it, threaded so deep it had stopped being separate. Vanilla and crushed jasmine. Vanessa's wolf, worn on his skin like a second coat.

I got up.

The corridor was cold under my bare feet. I stepped into his path before he reached the stairs, and he stopped short, jaw tightening, eyes sliding somewhere over my shoulder instead of at my face.

"Come inside," I said. Not a question. Not a plea. Just a door, held open.

"Tessa." My name, said like a warning.

"You've walked past that door ninety-nine times, Adrian."

His eyes finally found mine — and I watched something in them harden, right before his voice dropped into the register that wasn't a voice anymore. It was pressure. Alpha tone, aimed at his own mate.

"Enough."

The word landed on my chest like a hand shoving me back. My knees buckled half an inch before I caught the wall. Somewhere under my ribs, my wolf — thin, starved, quiet for months — flinched like something struck.

"It's a fractured bond," he said, fast, rehearsed, the way a man recites something he's said so many times it no longer costs him anything. "A condition. Rare. My wolf needs hers to stay stable, Tessa, you know this—"

"I don't know this." My voice came out steady even as my mark burned white-hot. "You've never shown me proof. You've only ever told me."

"A true Luna would understand sacrifice." He said it like a gift he was handing me, wrapped in scripture. Then he turned and walked, and the sound of his footsteps down the stairs was the loudest thing in the house.