Chapter 19 What He Can’t Deny
Rhys’s POV
It happened again at breakfast.
Kattie sat across from me, talking about the upcoming moon gathering. Logistics, attendance, the usual things. And my wolf just sat there like a stone at the bottom of still water.
Not peaceful. Not settled.
Just blank. The same way he responded to a conversation about border fencing or grain supply. Present, but completely unmoved.
I looked at her while she talked. Her face was familiar. Comfortable, even. I had known this face for over fifteen years. I knew the way she laughed, the way she argued, the way she looked when she was calculating something she didn’t want to show.
And my wolf felt nothing.
Not resistance. Not warmth. Just the particular absence of something that was supposed to be there. Like asking a compass to point at a wall.
That was what bothered me most. Not friction. Not rejection. Nothing.
I said the right things at the right moments and she left satisfied, and I sat at that table for a few minutes afterward staring at my cup.
This was not the first time.
I had been trying to talk myself out of noticing it for weeks, which was embarrassing in itself. I was not a man who talked himself out of things. I looked at what was in front of me and dealt with it. That was how I had run this pack for years.
So I was going to look at this.
\-----
Dane was my most trusted guard. Had been for six years. Not a man who asked unnecessary questions or repeated things told to him in private, which was the precise combination of qualities that made him useful for conversations I didn’t want on record.
I found him near the east post after the morning patrol.
“Walk with me,” I said.
We moved along the fence line, far enough from the main buildings that sound didn’t carry.
“I have a question,” I said. “I want your honest answer. Not the one that sounds correct.”
He glanced at me sideways. “When have I ever given you the one that sounds correct?”
“Fair point.”
I kept my eyes forward. “Is it possible for a mate bond to feel incomplete? Not broken. Not absent. Just off. Like it doesn’t sit right, even when all the signs point to it being real.”
Dane was quiet for a few steps.
That was one of the things I appreciated about him. He didn’t fill silence with noise.
“I’ve heard of it,” he said carefully. “Mostly from older pack members. There are a few reasons it can happen.” A pause. “Trauma can do it. If a wolf has been through something bad enough, the recognition gets distorted. The bond is there, but the wolf can’t process it right. It reads wrong.”
“What else?”
“Illness. Deep enough injury.” He glanced at me again, brief. “Internal instability. If something is off inside the wolf itself, the bond signal can get scrambled.”
I said nothing.
“Why?” he asked.
“Curiosity,” I said.
He gave me the look that meant he didn’t believe that for a second but wasn’t going to push it.
“There’s one more thing,” he added, slower. “And I’m only saying it because you asked for honesty.” A short pause. “I’ve heard, not confirmed, just heard, that there are ways to make a bond read wrong from the outside too. Not just from within.” He said it quietly, like he was handling something fragile. “But that’s old talk. Dark territory. Nobody I know has ever actually seen it.”
I nodded once. “That’s all. Thank you.”
He peeled off at the next junction without another word.
I kept walking.
\-----
The pack witch lived at the edge of the residential quarter in a low, wide building that always smelled faintly of smoke and something green. Her name was Vela. Somewhere in her fifties, sharp-eyed, with the kind of stillness that came from spending too much time listening to things most wolves couldn’t hear.
I had visited her exactly twice before. Both times for pack matters. Nothing personal.
She looked up when I walked in and didn’t seem surprised, which I wasn’t sure how to take.
“Alpha,” she said.
“I need you to look at something,” I said. “Discreetly.”
“Sit.”
I found a stool and sat.
She worked quietly. No ceremony, just her hands, a few instruments I didn’t have names for, and her full attention. She checked my wolf response, my bond perception, the internal channels that governed how a wolf received and processed mate signals. The whole thing took about twenty minutes.
I watched her face the entire time.
For most of it she was neutral. Focused. The expression of someone doing careful work.
Then she slowed down.
Not stopped. Just slowed. She repeated one pass, and I felt it as a faint pressure behind my sternum. Her brow pulled together slightly.
Then she sat back.
“Well?” I said.
She set her instruments down and looked at me with the careful expression of someone choosing words.
“I cannot find external interference,” she said. “Nothing that reads clearly as manipulation. No mark, no working, no obvious imprint on your bond recognition.”
“But?”
She exhaled slowly.
“There is something that doesn’t fully align,” she said. “In your wolf’s response. The internal pattern is inconsistent. Like a signal that has been interrupted partway.” She pressed her lips together. “But I cannot tell you whether that inconsistency is because something outside you is interfering, or because something inside you is.”
“Meaning?”
“The source could be external. Magic used on you that is beyond what I can detect from this angle.” She met my eyes. “Or it could be something within you that was damaged and never fully repaired. Old grief. Deep trauma. A wound in the wolf that was never properly closed.” A pause. “Either one can produce what I’m seeing.”
The fire in the corner shifted.
“If it’s external,” I said. “If someone were using magic of that kind, would you be able to detect it?”
“If I knew the source, possibly yes.” She shook her head slightly. “But powerful masking work is designed specifically not to be found unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Without the source, I’m looking in the dark.”
I stood. “Don’t discuss this.”
“Of course not.”
I walked to the door.
I had come in hoping for a clear answer. Either something was wrong with me, or something was being done to me. One or the other. Something I could act on.
What I had instead was both doors left open and no way to see which one led somewhere.
My hand was on the frame when she spoke again.
“Alpha.”
Quieter than before. The kind of quiet that means someone is saying something they considered not saying.
I stopped. Didn’t turn all the way around.
“I cannot tell you what is being hidden from you,” she said. “But whatever it is, it reacts like something deliberately kept out of reach.” A pause. “Whether by magic. Or by something already inside you that was never fully healed.”
The corridor outside was cool and still.
I stood at the threshold and felt, for the first time in a long time, genuinely uncertain.
Not about the pack. Not about strategy or borders or politics. About myself. About whether what I had been feeling for months, the wrongness, the incompleteness, the wolf that went quiet near one person and felt nothing near another, was a sign of something done to me.
Or something broken in me that I hadn’t known was there.
Both possibilities sat in my chest with equal weight.
And I had no idea yet which one was worse.