Chapter 45

Isla POV

To say I was closing my hand in your face so I could preserve Keiran’s touch was like stirring a bomb with the trigger, waiting for Tristan to blow off which I couldn't afford so I swallowed it down and did the coward’s thing… I lied with small, careful movements.

“It’s nothing important,” I said. “Just…trash.”

Tristan’s hand closed around mine—gentle, then not… and the bond reacted the way a wounded animal might: flinching, confused. He inhaled sharply as though tasting something that did not belong to our life.

A scent. Keiran.

My chest went cold.

“You’re lying,” he said, low, not accusing but stating a fact.

His voice has taken on a sharper edge, different from his nonchalant ones.

I wanted to tell him that Keiran had said the right things, the wrong things, the things that fit into lonelier corners of me.

I wanted to say every awkward, beautiful, dangerous part, but the words were trapped in a ball of shame.

I squeezed my eyes shut and remembered Keiran’s look in the garden….hungry, unapologetic, sure.

My hands shook slightly. “No, im not. Just got busy picking up flowers out there.”

Tristan pulled me close like an anchor and for an instant I let myself be anchored.

My cheek brushed his chest and I tasted cedar and something that used to mean safety. But the ember—our ember—was guttering. I could feel the weakness like a bruise.

I didn’t want to be the woman who broke the most sacred bond the moon goddess had entrusted to keep us safe and strong.

And in that terrible second, I resented Keiran with a clarity that throbbed.

He had made me notice gaps I thought didn’t exist. He had found the part of me I’d kept hidden even from myself.

Parts that Tristan never saw.

TRISTAN

She came in like a quiet storm—stained with night and trembling like a leaf. Isla always smelled like rain and home and the kind of quiet that meant tomorrow would be alright. Tonight she carried a stranger with her. A thread of scent I couldn’t place at first, then Keiran—sharp, foreign, the scent of flame in a house of wool.

Isla’s eyes skittered, and my chest went tight the way the wolf knows when prey is near and the pack is at stake. I didn’t ask her where she’d been because I’d already known—of course I’d known. The bond was a living thing that had always told me things without words. It hummed against my ribs now, and instead of roaring like it always did, it hesitated. Her anchor had become untied.

“You were in the garden,” I said because I needed to map the lie before it could grow roots.

She tried to look away. Usual Isla—trying to shield me from the things that might hurt me. If anything it made the leaden weight in my gut worse. “The air,” she said. “I needed air.”

I watched her fingers, the way they clenched. That’s where you find the truth—under the skin, in the small betrayals. When my hand brushed hers I expected the surge: the pull that had synced our breaths since we met, the thunder in my bones that would tell me, without words, yes, we were meant to be go back inside, yes, she was mine.

Instead, there was hollowness. Like touching a wound that hadn’t closed properly. I felt the bond flinch under my palm. My wolf answered with a soft, low growl that didn’t belong in human speech. I tightened my hold. “What’s in your hand?”

She called it nothing.

She lied with the smallest of gestures.

Something happened out there that she didn't want to tell me about.

When my thumb traced her pulse, I felt a strange sensation come over me…quite similar to desire.

Being this close to her, her unique scent tickled my nose but that wasn't all.

I caught a hint of Kieran's.

It was faint…probability just a whiff but my senses locked on it instantly.

So I watched Isla’s face. She looked smaller somehow under the lamplight, as if the night had squeezed the air out of her.

“You met him,” I said. It wasn’t a question because the scent was a confession.

How to make matters worse, her silence confirmed it.

“I didn’t…” She started and then stopped. Her mouth moved, looking for a shape to fit the truth. The bond was jagged between us, and with every faltering heartbeat, I felt less sure. The wolf inside me knotted and flexed, protective and ancient. Every instinct screamed… claim, guard, strike.

“What happened out there?’ I needed to know To make sense of it all.

What I felt a couple of minutes ago doesn't just happen out of the blue.

Pack rules, the Moon’s laws… they existed for a reason.

Bonds didn’t fray on their own.

She looked like she wanted to tell me everything. Her eyes filled as if the words were heavy stones. “It was talk,” she said, and the sentence broke. “He said things as we talked about the ball and then I-” She swallowed, and the thing she didn’t finish was louder than the words.

He’d said something that made the bond hush itself, that made her legs tremble. He’d found a seam in her armor.

Anger was hot and immediate at the back of my throat.

There are things a man does not forgive because forgiveness would be a lie.

There are also things he cannot force into a shape of anger because fear arrives first—fear of losing a person who had become more than blood.

“Did he touch you?” I asked, needing clarity like breath.

She flinched, and the reaction was everything. Not the touch my question asked after, but the touch of his words…their pressure, their theft. “No,” she whispered. “He didn’t touch me. He…said things. He said the bond listens sometimes, and maybe it didn’t like what it heard.”

The moonlight felt thin and unfair. The bond, our bond, should have been a roaring thing between us, a fortress. Instead I had the memory of a moment where it had dimmed against my palm, and I couldn’t tell if it was failing because of her or because something else had reached for it. Keiran liked to sow doubts like seeds.

I could have asked who else he’d seen, or gone to him, made him answer with teeth. Instead the strangest thing happened: I believed her when she said he hadn’t touched her. I believed it with the same aching conviction with which I doubted every other part. Maybe because the look on her face when she lied was the kind of lie only a terrified heart could make.

“I won’t let him take you,” I said instead, voice low and flat, the wolf folding into it.

It wasn’t an accusation. It was a promise I intended to keep even if I didn’t know how.

The strange possessive feeling that I get took even me by surprise.

Ever since she's been in here, I barely gave her a second thoughts but now that the bond had weakened between us, it's like my eyes had opened.