Chapter 30 The Full Moon Is In Three Days
Rhys’s POV
I stood next to Kattie at the border report meeting and waited.
That was what I had decided to do. Stop avoiding without acknowledging it, stop reading from a distance. Stand close, pay attention, and wait for whatever my wolf was going to give me.
We were at the map table in the east room — six of us, reviewing the northern sector. She was at my left, close enough that our arms were nearly touching. She was speaking with confidence about the patrol rotation, making a point about the gap in the third checkpoint that was actually a reasonable point.
I listened. I watched her face. I let myself be still and present and simply waited.
My wolf gave me nothing.
Not resistance. Not the blank absence I’d felt in the corridor after seeing Vela — that had at least been something, even if that something was a gap. This was more subtle than that. A kind of flatness. Like standing in front of a door and knocking and hearing absolutely no response. Not blocked. Not locked.
Just no one there.
I looked at the map.
“The third checkpoint issue has been flagged twice now,” I said. “We’ll reinforce the patrol on the eastern approach. Dane, coordinate with the night shift.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
The meeting continued. Kattie glanced at me once — a quick, checking look, the kind she’d been doing more of lately. I met it neutrally and looked back at the map.
She looked away.
The meeting wrapped up twenty minutes later. People filtered out. Kattie lingered, the way she sometimes did, straightening papers at the edge of the table.
“You’ve been quiet today,” she said.
“Long morning,” I said.
“Mm.” She looked at me sideways. “You don’t have to keep doing this, you know.”
“Doing what?”
“Thinking through everything so carefully.” She said it gently. Familiar. “You’ve always been like this — turning things over until they’re smaller than they started.” She almost smiled. “Some things are simpler than you make them.”
I looked at her.
“Maybe,” I said, though it didn’t feel like agreement.
Something moved in her expression. Not hurt, more like the careful recalibration of someone adjusting aim.
“The full moon is in three days,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
She held my gaze for a moment, then nodded once, gathered the papers, and left.
I stayed at the map table.
My wolf still had nothing to say about her.
I was crossing the main hall two hours later when I felt it.
Not heard, not saw — felt. A shift in my attention so immediate it stopped my feet before I’d located the source. My wolf went from flat to present in the span of a single breath.
I turned.
Bella was coming through the side door at the far end of the hall, maybe forty feet away. She hadn’t seen me yet. She was looking down at something in her hands — a folded paper, or a small cloth, I couldn’t tell from the distance. Her expression was focused, working through something, that familiar quality of a mind that didn’t stop moving.
I didn’t mean to stop walking. I did anyway.
My wolf pulled. Not the settled quiet from the nights at the treeline. This was more active — a draw, almost directional, like a current moving toward a specific point. It was stronger than before. Noticeably stronger, in a way that I couldn’t attribute to proximity or atmosphere.
It was just her.
She looked up.
Our eyes met across the length of the hall.
She stopped walking.
For a moment neither of us moved.
It lasted longer than it should have. The hall was mostly empty, the afternoon light lying in long angles across the stone floor between us, and I was standing in the middle of it trying to understand what was happening in my chest with the distinct, uncomfortable awareness that I was not succeeding.
She broke it first, just a small nod, practical, and kept walking toward the corridor that led to the residential hall.
I watched her go.
The pull didn’t diminish with distance. If anything, it stayed present longer than her footsteps did, like something stretched rather than released.
Three days until the full moon.
Three days until the pack expected an answer I didn’t have or rather, an answer I was increasingly afraid I did have, and was not sure what to do with.
Because this was no longer about Kattie.
It might never have been.
And whatever I was standing in the middle of right now—acknowledging it was going to change everything about how this pack understood its Alpha.