Chapter 5 5

Chapter 5 5
Chapter Five
Hannibal

Valentina.

Of course it was Valentina.

She stood there in the harsh bathroom light looking pleased with herself, her dark eyes half-lidded and her lips curved in that slow, confident smile she always used when she wanted something. Her hair was down, which she knew I liked, and she was wearing very little. She had thought this through.

"Don't look at me like that," she said softly. "You've been avoiding me."

"I haven't been avoiding you." I stepped back until my shoulders touched the wall. "I've been busy."

"Busy." She repeated the word the way women do when they want you to hear how hollow it sounds. She moved closer. "Your father keeps talking about choosing a Luna from outside the pack. Alliances, he says. Strategy. As if love were a trade agreement." She reached up and touched my jaw. "You don't want that."

The truth was I didn't know what I wanted anymore. Three days ago I had stood in a field and rejected my mate. My wolf Axel hadn't stopped grieving since, a low persistent ache underneath everything I did, every meal I ate, every order I gave. It was like a song playing from another room that you couldn't quite make out and couldn't quite ignore.

"You should go," I said.

"Hannibal."

"This isn't the right time, Valentina."

She studied me for a moment, and I saw something shift in her face. Not hurt exactly. Valentina didn't bruise easily. It was more like calculation, a quiet repositioning. She had always been smart. It was one of the things I'd liked about her before everything became complicated.

"Something happened," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Nothing happened. I'm tired, and my father spent the afternoon reminding me that everything I am is second-rate. It's been a long day."

She looked at me a beat longer than felt comfortable, then pulled her hair back over one shoulder and walked to the door. "When you're ready to stop lying to yourself," she said, "you know where to find me."

She left. I stood in the bathroom for a while after, staring at the drain.

\---

I couldn't sleep.

I lay on top of the sheets and watched the ceiling and thought about Carmen in the river. The way she'd gone still. The way Gerardo had stood over her and said she'd be one less problem, said it quietly, like a fact, like weather. I had pulled her out. I had breathed air back into her lungs and watched her eyes open and felt something crack open inside my chest that I hadn't wanted to examine too closely. I'd told myself it was guilt. Basic decency. Nothing more.

But Axel knew better. He always did. He'd been howling at me since the moment the bond snapped into place, since I'd caught her scent that morning and understood what it meant. My mate. Out of every woman in every pack under every sky the Moon Goddess had managed to choose the one girl my whole pack treated like a stray dog.

I had rejected her.

She had let me. That was the part I kept coming back to. She hadn't cried. She hadn't argued. She'd looked at me with those dark eyes and said the pack is more important, and meant it. As if her own pain barely registered next to everyone else's. As if she were already used to not mattering.

I turned onto my side.

The rejection bond was strange. I'd heard other wolves describe it as a clean severance, painful but final. This didn't feel clean. It felt like a splinter buried too deep to reach, something working its way inward. Axel told me it was because she hadn't formally accepted the rejection, that as a human she wasn't required to, and some part of the bond was still holding. I didn't know if that was true or if he was just telling me what he needed to believe.

Either way, she was gone now. She'd packed her things and left the territory. One of the border wolves had mentioned seeing her heading northeast, alone, carrying almost nothing. A bag and a violin case. That was it. That was everything Carmen owned in the world, and she'd walked away with it into the dark like it was nothing, like she was used to having nothing because she was.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum.

My father was downstairs somewhere, probably still awake, probably nursing a drink and staring at Pablo's portrait. I could feel the shape of the pack around me, its moods and fractures, all the things I was supposed to hold together now. The war debt. The king's suspicion. Valentina's expectations. My father's grief turned outward, sharpened, aimed.

All of it waiting for me in the morning.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

What came instead was a memory I hadn't asked for. Carmen at seven or eight years old, standing outside her cabin in the rain because someone had locked the door on her. I had been twelve, and I'd stood there with the others and laughed. I remembered the way she'd hunched her shoulders, not looking at any of us, just waiting for it to be over. Even then she'd had that quality, that stillness. Like she'd learned very early that making herself smaller was the only protection available to her.

I had laughed.

I pressed my eyes shut harder.

Somewhere in the territory, a wolf howled, long and mournful, and Axel answered it from somewhere deep inside me without asking my permission, and I lay there in the dark and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.