Chapter 27 What the Wolf Knows
Rhys’s POV
I had been avoiding Kattie without making a decision to.
That was what bothered me most about it.
I hadn’t sat down and weighed anything. Hadn’t chosen distance. Hadn’t told myself anything at all. I had simply stopped going toward her. Taking different routes through the manor. Scheduling meetings at times when she was occupied elsewhere. Answering her questions directly and briefly and not staying in rooms longer than necessary when she was in them.
Not avoidance by thought.
Avoidance by instinct.
And that instinct was the problem.
My wolf had gone quiet in her presence. Not calm. Not settled. Just absent in a way that didn’t belong to anything natural.
I went back to Vela.
\-----
She was in her garden when I arrived, crouched near a low row of plants I didn’t know the names of, her hands in the earth. She looked up before I spoke.
“You’re not here for a routine check,” she said.
“No,” I said.
That alone made her stop what she was doing. She stood.
“Come inside.”
\-----
The examination took longer this time.
She went through the same passes as before, bond perception, internal wolf response, the channels that governed recognition, but she didn’t stop at the surface of each one. She went deeper, slower, repeating sections with a careful focus that told me she was actually looking for something rather than just checking.
I sat still and let her work and watched her face.
For a long time it stayed neutral.
Then it didn’t.
She frowned once. Then again. Not dramatically, just a slight change in her attention, a pause that lasted a beat too long, like something she expected kept refusing to show up.
I watched her hands more than her face.
“Say it,” I said finally.
She exhaled.
“There’s a change,” she said carefully. A pause. “The bond response is not unstable anymore.”
My jaw tightened slightly. “Explain.”
She didn’t answer immediately.
That silence was new. When Vela hesitated, it meant she was no longer reading cleanly.
“It’s not confusion,” she said at last. “It’s direction.”
My wolf stirred once. Not forward. Not back. Just still, like something waiting to hear the rest.
She continued.
“Your system is not fluctuating around Kattie anymore,” she said. “It has settled into rejection.”
A pause.
“But not in the way rejection normally behaves.”
I held her gaze. “What does that mean.”
Her voice lowered slightly.
“It means something in you has already decided she is not your mate.”
Silence.
That word should have been simple. It wasn’t.
Because my wolf did not react like something being corrected.
He reacted like something being confirmed.
I stepped back. “Don’t repeat this.”
“Of course not,” she said. Then, quieter: “There is one more thing.”
I waited.
She chose her words carefully, the way she did when she wasn’t sure how they would land.
“Whatever has been interfering with recognition,” she said, “it is not currently active confusion.”
A pause.
“It feels more like removal.”
My wolf shifted. Once. Deep.
Not pain. Not relief. Something that lived between them, with no name I could reach for.
I left without saying anything else.
\-----
Outside, the air felt heavier than it should have.
I walked without direction at first. My mind should have been sorting through what I had just heard, organizing it the way I organized everything, into categories, into problems with approaches, into things I could act on.
But it wasn’t doing that.
Because my wolf was no longer arguing.
And somehow that was worse than the months of restlessness had been.
Then I heard her.
Kattie.
Her voice came from the east corridor, laughing lightly at something one of the she-wolves had said. Warm. Easy. The sound of someone completely at home.
I stopped walking.
And waited.
Waited for my wolf to respond the way he was supposed to. The pull, the recognition, the instinct that was meant to be there when your mate was nearby.
Nothing.
Not resistance. Not discomfort. Not even a flicker of the confusion that had been living in my chest for months.
Just absence.
Like a frequency that had been producing noise for so long you had stopped registering it as separate from silence, and now it was simply gone.
My wolf did not move toward her voice. Did not reach. Did not even lift his head.
He just sat, quiet and still, in a way that felt nothing like loss.
I stood in the corridor and listened to her voice fade around the corner.
And for the first time since I had been told I was cursed to be alone.
I did not feel alone.
I felt unchained.
And I did not know what that meant.