Chapter 3 Chapter 3

The words landed exactly where she meant them to, but pain was not new to me. I had lived with it so long it had become another sense, another shape to navigate. I lifted my chin. “If Ty wanted you to have it, he can tell me himself when he comes home.”

Beth laughed, but there was no triumph in it now, only strain. “You really know nothing, do you? Ty isn’t coming home in a few months.” She paused, and I could hear her smile come back, sharp as glass. “He’s already here.”

Every part of me went still. Luna Lea made a strangled sound. Alpha Cameron swore under his breath. And then, from the open doorway behind Beth, I felt it—a presence so sudden and overwhelming that the fine hairs rose along my arms. Power rolled across the room, male and familiar and utterly changed. The bond between wolf and mate was only something I had heard whispered about, something I had told myself I would never know. But whatever slammed into me in that moment was fierce enough to steal the air from my lungs.

Boots crossed the threshold. No one spoke for three long heartbeats. Then a voice I had loved in a hundred memories and feared in just as many answered from the doorway, low and dangerous. “Take off my mate’s necklace, Beth, before I do it for you.”

The room stopped breathing.

I had imagined Ty’s return so many times over the last two years that I had stopped trusting my own memories of him. In some versions, he came back gentle and unchanged, his laugh warm, his hands familiar, his promise still intact. In others, he returned colder, harder, shaped by Alpha training into someone I would no longer recognise except by voice alone. None of those imagined reunions came close to this.

Power rolled off him in waves that pressed against my skin and settled into my bones. It was Ty, and it was not. The boy who used to race me through the creek beds barefoot and breathless had become something bigger, sharper, more dangerous. But beneath all of that—beneath the command in his voice and the force of his presence—there was something else. Something that reached for me with unmistakable, terrifying certainty. Mine, it seemed to say. Mine.

“Mate,” Neeka breathed, suddenly alert, suddenly reverent, as if the word itself carried ancient weight. Then her awe vanished beneath a growl. “And if that female doesn’t remove your necklace in the next three seconds, I will bite her myself.”

Beth gave a brittle laugh that shattered at the edges. “Ty, thank the goddess. They’re all overreacting. I was only trying to help with your welcome—”

“Take. It. Off.” Ty’s voice dropped lower, each word deliberate, controlled, and infinitely more frightening for that control.

For one heartbeat Beth stood frozen. Then I heard the tiny metallic click of the clasp. A second later something light struck the desk between us. The sound split me open. That necklace had once rested over my pulse. I had lost it with my sight, with my certainty, with the girl I used to be. Hearing it dropped like that—carelessly, angrily—hurt far more than it should have.

Boots moved across the floor. Not toward Beth. Toward me. Every step tightened the air in my lungs until I could barely draw breath around it. I knew Ty’s stride. I knew the slight pause in his right step from the old injury he got falling from the north ridge at thirteen. I knew the rhythm of him the way I knew the shape of my own hands. And still, when he stopped in front of me, I felt like a stranger waiting to be judged.

“Sila.” My name left his mouth like a prayer dragged through pain.

Everything inside me lurched toward that sound before I could stop it. Two years vanished in a single instant, and I was seventeen again beneath the cedar tree, listening to him promise he would come back for me. Then the ache returned with equal force. He had come back. Too late. Changed. And with an entire room watching us come apart.

“May I?” he asked quietly.

I didn’t answer quickly enough. Perhaps I couldn’t. But Ty must have taken my silence for consent, because a moment later the familiar cool crescent touched my collarbone. His fingers brushed the back of my neck as he fastened the clasp, and the contact sent a shock through me so fierce my knees nearly gave way. A low, rough sound came from his chest, as if touching me hurt him too.

His scent wrapped around me—cedar, cold wind, and the wild metallic edge of power. Beneath it was strain, tightly leashed and dangerous. He was holding himself back. From what, I wasn’t sure. Anger. Relief. The instinct to drag me behind him and tear apart anything that had touched me wrong. Mate-bond or not, I could feel the violence of his protectiveness like heat against my skin.

“Well,” Luna Lea said into the stunned silence, her voice suspiciously thick, “that answers several questions at once.”

“No one leaves,” Alpha Cameron ordered.

“This is ridiculous,” Beth snapped. “You can’t trap me in here because Ty had some dramatic entrance.”

“I walked into the pack house ten minutes ago,” Ty said. “Your mother saw me first. Do you know the first thing she said?” He did not wait for an answer. “She asked whether Sila had remembered anything about the night of the accident.”

Ice slid through my stomach. Beth sucked in a breath. Alpha Cameron let out a growl so low the desk seemed to vibrate with it. Luna Lea swore softly, with feeling. The world narrowed to the pounding of my heart and the dangerous quiet that always came before truth turned lethal.

“Ty,” I whispered, because suddenly nothing else mattered, “what do you know?”

He was silent for a fraction too long. “Not enough,” he said at last. “But more than I did when I left. Enough to know your accident wasn’t an accident. Enough to know someone inside this pack has been lying for two years. Enough to know the Landcaster’s should have been watched much more closely than they were.”

“You can’t accuse my family without proof!” Beth shouted. The pretty polish had gone from her voice completely now. Fear made it raw. “You disappear for two years and walk back in here talking about mates and conspiracies like you own the place?”

“I don’t need to own the place to know when someone reeks of guilt,” Ty said. Then, more quietly, to Alpha Cameron, “Check the silver box in Marian Lancaster’s room. Beneath the false bottom.”