My pulse hadn't slowed since Mia's words.
She'd said them so casually, like she hadn't just dropped a weight on my chest that threatened to crush everything I'd barely begun to believe in.
Draven choosing a mate soon.
"Mia," I said, trying to keep my voice light, casual, as though the question were nothing more than idle curiosity. "When you say he'll be 'announcing' someone soon, what exactly do you mean?"
She glanced up from wrapping my side with fresh gauze, her hands still busy, fingers deft and practiced against the torn skin along my ribs.
"Exactly that. It's been expected for a while now. Draven's held off longer than most would have, but a pack can't thrive long without a bonded mate beside the Alpha. The wolves feel the absence. It creates instability."
I tried to keep my expression neutral, but the tension creeping into my shoulders and the tightness winding through my jaw said otherwise.
Every muscle along my spine had gone rigid, and I could feel Hyde pacing restlessly in the back of my mind, ears flat, hackles raised.
"Isn't his mate supposed to be—a true bond?" I asked carefully. "Fated?"
Mia chuckled softly. "That's ideal. Of course. When it's a true bond—fated, chosen by the Goddess—it strengthens the entire pack. The Alpha and his mate's connection can boost the wolves' energy. It's not just romantic—it's spiritual. A sacred bond that runs through every member of the pack like a current."
Her tone shifted then, quieter, more careful. "But not all Alphas are given the luxury of mating for love."
I stiffened. The gauze pulled tight against the wound on my ribs, and I barely felt it. "So you think Draven might choose someone even if he doesn't—"
"Love them?" she finished for me, giving a small, wry smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Absolutely."
She adjusted the bandage with a final press of her palm, then met my gaze directly. "Draven is respected, Atlas. Even feared. But what makes him a good Alpha isn't his power—it's that he puts the pack first always. Even if it costs him."
The words rang in my ears like a bell tolling far away, each syllable landing heavier than the last.
He puts the pack first. Even if it costs him.
Even if it costs ‘us.’
I didn't speak. My throat had closed around whatever response I might have offered, and I could feel the blood draining from my face, could feel the slow, nauseating drop of my stomach as the implications settled into my bones.
Mia, mistaking my silence for curiosity rather than panic, kept talking.
"He's already lost someone before. The pain nearly tore him apart, though he doesn't speak of it. You think he'd risk that kind of vulnerability again? No."
She shook her head, folding the remaining gauze into a neat square. "He'll do what's safe and what's strong. He'll choose a mate who can lead with him—not one who makes him vulnerable."
The bandage was finished, but I didn't move.
My hands were clenched in my lap, knuckles white, the tendons standing out beneath the skin like cords pulled taut. I couldn't lift my eyes from the dirt floor of the tent.
Hyde had gone silent—not the comfortable silence of contentment, but the terrible quiet of an animal that had just heard the snap of a trap closing.
Vulnerable. That was me, wasn't it? The boy who had only recently learned to shift.
Who still sometimes woke with a scream in his throat from dreams too sharp and too real to shake—Dominic's voice, his father's fists, the cold stone floor of a room that had never felt like anything but a cell.
The boy who couldn't walk into a room without wondering if people were watching him, judging him, waiting for him to fail. Whose shadow magic still flared unpredictably when his emotions ran too hot, dark tendrils bleeding from his fingertips like something he couldn't be trusted to contain.
Not the strongest or the safest. Not someone like Talia.
She was everything I wasn't—fierce, confident, trained for years, with the reputation and bloodline to back it all up. She didn't hesitate nor did she falter.
She didn't wake up shaking at three in the morning with sweat cooling on her skin and the echo of old cruelties ringing in her ears. She walked into rooms and commanded them.
She looked at Draven like something she intended to claim, and no one questioned whether she had the right. The pack respected her. The warriors deferred to her.
Even Levi, her own brother, spoke of her combat record with the kind of quiet reverence usually reserved for wolves twice her age.
And I—what did I have?
A kiss in the woods. A moment beneath the canopy where the world had narrowed to nothing but his mouth and mine, his hands in my hair, the ragged sound of his breathing as he held me like I was the only real thing left in the universe.
The ghost of his voice whispering words that had branded themselves into the soft tissue of my memory—words I replayed at night when the doubt crept in, holding them up like a lantern against the dark.
But maybe that was just a moment. A fleeting storm before he remembered what he owed to the pack.
I didn't fit into either version of the future Mia described.
If Draven chose based on strength, it wouldn't be me. If he chose based on safety, on the fear of losing someone again, it still wouldn't be me.
I was the opposite of safe. I was a walking collection of fractures held together by willpower and a wolf who had arrived years too late.
And if he chose no one at all—
Then I'd remain what I'd always been. On the edge. Close enough to burn, never close enough to belong. The stray who'd wandered in from the cold and mistaken warmth for permanence.
"I'm sure it'll all work out," Mia said kindly, patting my hand. "You'll see."
I forced a smile, nodded, and whispered my thanks as she stepped away to clean her supplies. But inside I was sinking—slowly, steadily, like a stone dropped into dark water with no bottom in sight.
Because I finally understood what it meant to love someone so completely that the thought of losing them didn't just frighten me—it hollowed me out, scraped me clean, left nothing behind but the raw and trembling certainty that I would shatter if he didn't choose me.
And the equally raw certainty that he might not.