Nova's POV:
"Don't go outside," Maren said.
She appeared at my shoulder from nowhere, her hand closing around my arm before I took two steps toward the door. Her colorless eyes were fixed on the woman in the red coat through the glass and every easy, measured quality she had carried in the parking lot was completely gone.
What replaced it was fear.
Maren was afraid of the woman in the red coat.
That was more information than anything she could have said.
"Who is she," I said.
"The person who placed the curse." Her grip on my arm tightened slightly. "Her name is Selene. She is the High Witch of the northern territory and she has been in love with Caius since they were children and she has been systematically removing every woman the moon marked for him for two years." She did not look away from the glass. "The fact that she is here, tonight, smiling, means she has already decided something about you that we have not caught up to yet."
Outside, Selene lifted one hand and gave a small wave.
Specifically at me.
"She can see us clearly," I said.
"Witch sight. Walls are irrelevant." Maren released my arm. "She is not here to hurt you tonight. If she wanted you dead you would not have made it to contact with Caius. She let that happen, which means she wants something from you specifically."
"What could she possibly want from me."
"That," Maren said, "is what frightens me."
My collarbone pulsed.
Not the warning cold from the parking lot. Something different. A pull, directional and specific, coming from somewhere north of where I was standing and moving through the incomplete bond like a compass finding its needle. He was north. His compound, his territory, and the bond between us was giving me his location with a precision that had not been available to me an hour ago.
It was getting stronger.
Three weeks, Aldric had said. Maybe four.
I looked at the card in my hand. Then at Selene through the glass, still smiling, still waiting.
"If she placed the curse," I said, "she can remove it."
"Theoretically."
"That's why she's smiling. She knows I know that." I looked at Maren. "She's offering."
Maren's jaw tightened.
"Whatever she offers will cost something you cannot afford to pay," she said. "Selene does not give. She trades. And what she trades for is always the same thing."
"Caius," I said.
"She wants him to choose her. Freely. Without the mate bond complicating his ability to make that choice." Maren finally looked away from the glass and looked at me. "She will offer to remove the curse. In exchange for your agreement to sever the bond completely. Not an incomplete rejection. A full severing, permanent, final. You walk away and the mate bond ceases to exist entirely."
I thought about two seconds of relief coming through a connection I had not asked for. About a man sitting alone in the dark carrying something that had already cost him two people.
"If the curse is removed," I said slowly, "he doesn't need a severed bond. He can bond safely with anyone."
"Yes."
"So why would she remove the curse and then want me to sever the bond. If the curse is gone she's already won. He's free to choose her."
Maren looked at me.
Something in her expression shifted. The fear was still there but underneath it something that looked like it was arriving at the beginning of hope.
"You're faster than I expected," she said quietly.
"She doesn't actually want to remove the curse," I said. "She wants me to think she will. She wants me scared enough and guilty enough about the three week timeline to agree to sever the bond in exchange for a promise she never intends to keep."
"And once the bond is severed—"
"She doesn't need to remove anything," I said. "Because the only person who could break her curse naturally is the Void Moon wolf. Me." I looked back at the glass. "Maren. Am I right. Is my wolf the thing that can break it."
The silence that followed lasted four full seconds.
"I did not tell you that," Maren said.
"You also didn't deny it."
She looked at the ceiling briefly. Then back at me with the expression of a woman reassessing something significantly.
"The Void Moon wolf," she said carefully, "does not destroy darkness. She contains it. Absorbs it. What was done to Caius is a binding of dark energy woven into his bond capacity. A Void wolf in full connection with him could theoretically draw that binding out the same way she would draw any dark energy." She paused. "But it requires a complete bond. Not an incomplete one. Not a rejected one. A full, consummated mate bond between the Void Moon and the Blood Sovereign."
Consummated.
I kept my face extremely neutral.
"So Selene knows that," I said. "She knows that my fully bonded wolf is the one thing that breaks her curse naturally. Which means everything she has done, removing the other potential mates, letting me reach contact tonight, being here right now with an offer, it's all designed to get me to sever the bond before my wolf wakes up fully."
"Yes," Maren said.
"Because a severed bond means no Void Moon. No natural cure. Caius stays cursed. Isolated. Alone. And eventually"
"He will stop fighting the isolation," Maren said. "And Selene will be the only one he has left."
The hall was almost empty now. Just the two of us near the back table and Jess somewhere I couldn't see and the woman in the red coat outside who had engineered two years of systematic removal and was standing in the cold smiling at me because she thought I was seventeen days into a three week clock and terrified.
I was terrified.
But I was also Harold Quinn's daughter.
I stood up.
"Nova." Maren's voice carried a warning.
"I'm not going outside," I said. "I'm going to stand where she can see me clearly through the glass and I'm going to let her read my face."
I walked to the door and stopped six inches short of it and looked directly at Selene.
She was beautiful up close. Sharp-featured, dark-eyed despite the pale everything else, with the specific confidence of someone who had been the most powerful person in every room for a very long time.
I held her gaze.
Then I shook my head. Once. Slow and deliberate.
Her smile stayed exactly where it was.
She reached into her red coat and took out a card and set it on the stone step in front of the door.
Then she turned and walked away down the path and the dark swallowed her in under ten seconds.
I opened the door and picked up the card.
One line, handwritten.
The bond completing will kill him, not you. Ask Maren if she knew.
I turned around.
Maren was standing eight feet behind me and her face was doing something I had not seen it do before.
It was doing nothing.
Completely, deliberately nothing.
The specific expression of a person who has been asked a question they already knew the answer to and had chosen not to offer.
"Maren," I said. My voice came out very quiet. "When the Void Moon bond completes while a curse is active. Which end absorbs the damage."
She closed her eyes.
"Tell me," I said.
"The Sovereign," she said. "The curse turns inward. The completion overwhelms the binding and destroys the host rather than transferring." She opened her eyes. "It would kill Caius. Instantly. At the moment of full bond completion."
The card shook in my fingers.
"You knew," I said.
"I was trying to find another way first," she said. "I have been looking for another way for eleven years."
"And Aldric."
"Aldric does not know. Caius does not know." Her voice dropped. "No one knows except me and Selene. And now you."
I looked at the card in my hand. At the one line in Selene's handwriting.
If I completed the bond, Caius died.
If I severed it, the curse stayed and Selene won.
If I did nothing, my wolf woke in three weeks and drove toward completion regardless.
There was no version of this where everyone survived.
My collarbone burned silver and hot and through the incomplete bond came something that moved through my chest so fast and so specific I had to press my hand against the door frame to stay standing.
He had felt my fear.
And what came back through the bond before he could stop it, raw and unguarded and completely unintentional, was not control or exhaustion or the managed weight of a man keeping everything at distance.
It was his voice. Not sound. Something deeper than sound.
I'm sorry.
END OF CHAPTER 4