KAEL POV
Three days.
Kael has been rejecting the mate bond for three days, and he's already falling apart.
Sleep is impossible. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees her face at the altar. He sees the exact moment his rejection hit her. He sees the pain flash across her features before she locked it down and refused to break. His mind replays that moment over and over like a torture device he can't turn off.
And through the bond, he can feel her.
He can feel her confusion. She doesn't understand why he rejected her if the connection between them is this strong. She doesn't understand how someone can deny a fated mate bond and still be tormented by it.
He can feel her pain bleeding through the connection like an open wound.
She's learning to survive without him, and that knowledge is worse than anything physical pain could ever be.
On the fourth day, Kael finds himself walking toward her room for the eighth time.
His feet move without conscious thought. The bond is pulling him toward her like gravity. Every instinct he has is screaming at him to go to her, to claim her, to fix what he broke with that single word at the altar.
He makes it to the corridor outside her door before he forces himself to stop.
His hands are shaking.
His jaw is clenched so hard he tastes blood.
His wolf is clawing at his skin, demanding that he walk through that door and accept what the bond is telling him. The beast doesn't care about walls or philosophy or three hundred years of lessons about vulnerability being weakness.
The beast just wants its mate.
Kael turns around and forces himself to walk away.
By evening, he's walked toward her room and turned back fourteen times. He's lost count somewhere around noon.
Mira finds him in the war room, staring at maps that he's not actually seeing.
"You're being ridiculous," she says without preamble. She's standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, and her expression is somewhere between anger and something that looks like betrayal.
Kael doesn't respond.
"She's not worth this," Mira continues. "She's Silvercrest. She's everything we've fought against. You made the right choice rejecting her. So why do you look like you're dying from it?"
"Leave," Kael says quietly.
"No," Mira says. She steps into the room and closes the door behind her. "You're destroying yourself over a girl who doesn't matter. A girl your father would have executed without hesitation. You're becoming weak, and the pack is starting to notice."
Something in Kael snaps.
He moves with pure predator speed, and suddenly Mira is pinned against the wall with his hand around her throat. His eyes are gold. His voice is a growl that comes from his wolf.
"Say that again," he hisses. "Say one more word about my mate and I'll tear your throat out."
Mira's eyes widen. For a moment, she's genuinely afraid.
Then Kael releases her and steps back, horrified at himself.
He just called Eden his mate.
Out loud.
In front of someone else.
The admission hangs in the air between them like a physical thing.
Mira is staring at him with an expression that's no longer anger. It's loss. It's the moment she realizes that the man she's spent years trying to get the attention of has already chosen someone else, and there's nothing she can do about it.
"Get out," Kael says quietly.
Mira leaves without another word.
Thorne finds him later that night in the strategy room, still staring at the same maps he wasn't seeing earlier.
"You need to accept the bond," Thorne says without preamble.
"No," Kael responds flatly.
"Kael, you're killing yourself. I can see it. The whole pack can see it. You rejected a fated mate, and now the bond is poisoning both of you because you won't accept it and you won't release it. You're trapped in the worst possible position."
"I don't have a choice," Kael says. But even he doesn't believe it anymore.
"You made the choice already," Thorne says. "You rejected her at the altar. Now you need to either commit to that rejection and release the bond somehow, or you need to accept her and fix what you broke. But this middle ground where you're suffering and she's suffering and the entire pack is watching their Alpha fall apart? That's not sustainable."
Kael knows Thorne is right.
He just doesn't know how to fix it without admitting that everything he believed about love being a weapon was wrong. How to accept the bond without destroying the walls that have kept him alive for three hundred years.
By the sixth day, Kael hasn't slept properly in over a week.
He stops trying to hide how broken he is. He stops pretending during meetings that he's focused on strategy. He stops trying to walk away when he finds himself moving toward Eden's room.
He just gives in to the pull and then forces himself to stop at her door.
The last time he does it, he can smell her through the wood. He can feel her on the other side of the barrier, and the bond is screaming at him to open the door and claim her and make her understand that he didn't want to reject her. He had to.
His hand moves toward the handle.
Then he hears movement inside. Sienna is in there with her, and both of them are laughing about something. Real, genuine laughter that comes from a place of connection and friendship.
Eden is finding happiness without him.
She's learning to survive, to adapt, to thrive in a pack that rejected her. She's becoming invaluable to people who used to see her as the enemy. She's doing everything she's supposed to be doing.
And she's doing it alone because Kael was too afraid to accept her.
That night, Kael goes to the training grounds.
It's the middle of the night. The grounds are empty except for the dummies and the training weapons. Kael starts fighting without any kind of control or strategy. He just moves and hits and destroys.
He fights like he's battling the bond itself.
His hands connect with the training dummies with force that would break normal human bones. Blood starts dripping down his knuckles within minutes. Pain shoots up his arms with every punch, but it's nothing compared to the agony in his chest.
He shifts into his wolf form and tears through the training equipment like it's an enemy.
The beast is wild and desperate and absolutely uncontrolled. It's clawing and snarling and throwing itself against obstacles because the only thing it can think about is the mate it rejected.
Hours pass.
The sun is starting to rise when Kael finally collapses on the training grounds, completely exhausted.
His hands are bleeding. His muscles are screaming. His wolf form is covered in cuts and bruises. But the pain in the bond is still there, still burning, still reminding him with every breath that he made a catastrophic mistake.
That's when he smells her.
Fresh scent. Recent. She's been here. She watched him fight.
Kael's entire body goes rigid.
She saw him. She saw exactly how broken he is. She saw the extent of his suffering. She watched him destroy himself trying to escape the bond that ties him to her.
Through the mate bond, Kael feels a sudden surge of emotion from her side.
Not pity.
Not anger.
Understanding.
She knows now.
She knows that the rejection wasn't about her being unworthy or undesirable. The rejection was about his own fear and his own pain and his own inability to accept something good.
And somehow, that knowledge is the most terrifying thing that's happened to him since the ceremony.
Because if she understands, if she forgives, if she accepts him despite everything he's done, then he has no excuse left.
No reason to keep his walls up.
No way to protect himself from the vulnerability of actually loving her.