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Ellie pressed on, too absorbed in the subject to notice the color draining from my face. "The bond gets abused constantly by witches locking themselves to others just to feed off their abilities. Love rarely enters the picture. It is the very reason I have guarded myself against it without exception."

Ellie fascinated me in ways I hadn't fully explored yet  but my own history was the fire burning closest to my feet.

"Can it be managed? When you carry that many people's feelings around inside you, how does a mage stay whole?"

A quiet laugh escaped her. "Shared magic means shared everything, my dear. You cannot carve out one piece and leave the rest at the door." Her eyes warmed. "My wish for you is that you grow into it rather than away from it."

I turned that over quietly. Four mates already stretched the edges of what I could hold. Layering a magical bond on top of that felt like trying to carry water in cupped hands. And yet  somewhere in my bloodline, my mother and father had done exactly this.

"My parents were Bonded, weren't they?"

Ellie surfaced from her thoughts and brought her full attention back to the table. "A child can be born without a bond in place  though for wolves, who only feel the heat after their mates have found them, the odds narrow considerably."

I nodded, but my gut had already reached its conclusion. They had been Bonded. Everything Kira had pieced together pointed in that direction, my mother with more than one mate, my father choosing a life beside a wolf shifter and pouring everything he had into keeping me breathing. They had made a deliberate choice to stand between me and the danger chasing us. My father couldn't have known the venom his sister Pandora carried toward wolves  or that she would turn that venom on the child he left in her hands.

"What we've managed to figure out," I said steadily, "is that my parents ran with the Winter Wind pack. They placed me with family and ran in the opposite direction, drawing the Denraider pack after them instead of me. It didn't save them. The Winter Wind pack is dust now, and nobody ever returned for me. Somewhere in the chaos I passed through the Nightsinger pack briefly, before Frost Fang consumed them whole. After that I traveled with the other displaced wolves  until I landed in Bloodfang."

Something moved across Ellie's face. Her eyes widened and held.

"Winter Wind." The name left her mouth like something she hadn't spoken aloud in years. "That pack stood apart from every other. Their alphas bound themselves by a promise  no commands pressed against their own people. Equal footing between mates, always. No omega kept in chains. Their doors stayed open to every outsider, every shifter who had nowhere else to belong."

"Were you "

"Winter Wind never had my parents. They knocked on another pack's door, one sitting further from Denraider territory  and got turned away without a second thought. After that rejection, their minds were made up. They wanted out. No more pack land, no more pack rules controlling their every move. New York was where they headed  the Store. Darmark City sat on the backup list. They never lived long enough to reach either one."

"The New York Store?" Something about that name sat strange on my tongue. No map I'd ever laid eyes on carried it. Shante gave a small shrug.

"Word is every creature under the sun coexists peacefully up there." Ellie's tone made it clear she found that laughable. "Reality tells a different story: fae and witches have their fingers around that city's throat and dress it up as harmony. There is no promised land, not anywhere." She reached for her mug. "Darmark City breathes outside pack authority too, but that just means whoever has the sharpest claws owns it this season  witches, then fae, then shifters, rotating like clockwork. Pack law exhausts me some days, but at least sunrise doesn't come with a new ruler."

Living beyond the Northwest had never crossed my mind as something worth imagining. But hearing it laid out that way, I could see exactly what she meant.

Her expression shifted then  something in it went quiet and careful as she looked at me.

"Denraider swallowed your parents whole." The words came low. "They consumed mine as well. Witches have always been prey to them. And any wolf who dares to love one  who bonds with a witch or a mage the way our parents did  gets branded a traitor deserving of death. Same story, different family."

"And they're far from the only ones who think that way." The words tasted like ash. "Pandora, the woman who shares blood with my father, she's the one who buried my magic when I was barely old enough to understand what magic even was. She presented it as love. As shielding me from a world that despises people like us." Something sharp moved through my chest. "Then she came back to hollow me out from the inside. Whether I survived the process didn't appear to concern her in the slightest."

Ellie's gaze didn't waver. It moved through me rather than over me. "Clearly she miscalculated." Her eyes cut briefly toward the door. "Did your mates put her in the ground?"

"She outsmarted me. Planted the image of Cassius walking beside me so convincingly I never questioned it while I was standing completely alone. By the time I understood what had happened, she was already gone."

Ellie was quiet for a moment, fingers laced together on the table. "Every mark of magic on your body shares one signature. One hand touched all of it. She wasn't simply after your power  she wanted the ground pulled out from under the Frost Fang and Bloodfang alliance. Your curse already belonged to her. Stitching a counterfeit mate bond onto something she'd already built would have been nothing, distance wouldn't have slowed her down at all."

Something cold settled in my stomach. Luca and I had more in common than wolf blood.

"My little warrior." Luca's voice arrived without warning, carrying that familiar undercurrent of amusement. "Something brought me to mind?"

"The two of us are people in our own bloodlines treating us like stepping stones."

A low sound moved through our bond. "Truer words." A beat passed. "Tell me  has Lucien surfaced yet?"

Underneath the question lived something that didn't want an answer. But before I could form one, Shante's voice floated across the room.

"Her eyes went somewhere else. She's with one of them right now, isn't she?"

Ellie lifted her mug. "She'll grow better at concealing it in time."

"Not yet," I murmured back to Luca. "We arrived ahead of him. I'll find you again soon."

A wordless warmth passed through the bond before it closed. I blinked myself back into the room  back to two faces watching me with knowing amusement.

"Before I was so rudely pulled away " I aimed a look at Ellie that landed somewhere between playful and genuine. "Can a person build walls around it? Is there a way to contain it?"

Ellie considered this. "Those who carry it say awareness grows slowly  the same way a child eventually stops narrating every passing thought out loud. It becomes instinct." She opened her palms on the table's surface. "Beyond that, I have nothing useful to offer. I have kept that particular experience at a very deliberate distance." She paused, then added more carefully, "One thing before we move on  your aunt's handiwork hasn't loosened. That curse is sitting right where she left it."

I gave a single nod.