KADE POV
Kade could not let her walk away like that.
He reached out and grabbed her wrist gently. Not rough. Not demanding. Just touching her because he needed to know if the bond was real or if he was losing his mind. The moment his skin made contact with hers, electricity shot through his body so violently that he nearly gasped.
It was real.
The bond was screaming at him now. Absolutely undeniable. Absolutely impossible to ignore. This was his mate. This was the woman he was supposed to spend the rest of his life with. This was the one who had been chosen for him since before he even understood what that meant.
And he had rejected her.
"Do not touch me," Lyric said quietly. But she did not pull away.
"I feel it," Kade said desperately. "The bond. I know what you are to me. I know you are my fated mate."
Lyric was silent for a moment. Then she turned around. Slowly. Deliberately. Like she was finally giving him permission to see her face.
Her expression was completely calm. Like ice. Like she was looking at something that did not matter very much.
"Yes," she said. "I was your fated mate three years ago."
The words hit him like a physical blow.
"I felt the bond for six months," Lyric continued. Her voice was steady and even. "Every pack run. Every time you walked past me. Every time I saw you in the distance. The bond was there, pulling me toward you like gravity. Like the universe had decided we belonged together."
She paused. And in that pause, Kade realized he was about to hear something that would change everything.
"I hoped you felt it too," Lyric said. "I convinced myself that an Alpha as strong as you would recognize a fated mate immediately. That the bond would pull at you the same way it pulled at me. I thought maybe you were just waiting for the right moment to claim me."
Her eyes met his. And there was no hope in them anymore. Just truth.
"But you did not feel it," she said. "Or you felt it and chose to ignore it. Either way, the result is the same. You stood on that platform three years ago and announced Victoria Sterling as your Luna. And the moment you said her name, the bond broke inside me."
Kade opened his mouth to argue. To explain that he had not understood at the time. That he had not realized what was happening. That he had been young and foolish and making what he thought were strategic decisions.
Lyric did not let him.
"What you feel now is not the bond," she said. "Not the real bond. What you feel is an echo. A ghost of something that died the night of the ceremony. The bond I felt for six months broke completely when you rejected me in front of three hundred wolves. I have spent three years building myself into someone who does not need the echo of a broken bond."
She pulled her wrist away from his grip and it felt like losing everything.
"I am here to heal your pack," Lyric said. "That is all. I am here because your wolves are dying and I have the skill to save them. Nothing more."
"That is not true," Kade said. "You feel something. I know you do. The bond would not still be there if you felt nothing."
"The bond is a biological function," Lyric said coldly. "Mate bonds do not dissolve immediately just because one half rejects the other. They fade. They weaken. They become something a person can eventually learn to ignore. I have spent three years learning to ignore it."
She turned back to her work like he was already dismissed.
"You have to listen to me," Kade said. He moved around to face her, blocking her access to the microscope. "I made a mistake. The biggest mistake of my entire life. I was young and scared and I thought I needed to make the smart choice for the pack. But I was wrong. I have always been wrong about that choice."
Lyric looked up at him. Her eyes were empty.
"Kade, you felt the bond and you rejected me anyway," she said quietly. "That is not a mistake born from not understanding something. That is a choice. A deliberate choice to pick status and bloodline and political advantage over what your own soul was telling you. You knew I was your mate. And you chose Victoria anyway."
"I did not know," Kade said desperately. "I felt something but I did not understand what it meant."
"Then you are not as smart as everyone says you are," Lyric replied. She moved around him with ease, dismissing his Alpha power completely. "An Alpha should recognize a fated mate. The fact that you did not tells me something important about you."
She sat back down at her workstation and picked up her microscope.
"It tells me that you only see what you want to see. You saw Victoria because she was beautiful and high-born and came with useful alliances. You did not see me because I was invisible. Because I was omega. Because I had nothing to offer you except a bond you did not think you needed."
Kade stood frozen as she returned to her work like he had already left the room.
"I spent three years becoming someone who matters," Lyric continued. Her voice was calm but there was steel underneath it. "I became someone powerful enough that invisible does not apply anymore. And you know what I realized during those three years?"
She glanced up at him briefly.
"I realized that I do not need you. I do not need your bond or your acknowledgment or your regret. I realized that the person I became is better off without you than with you. And I made peace with that."
Kade tried to find words that would make sense of this. That would convince her that he had changed. That he was different now than he had been three years ago. But nothing he said would matter. She had already made her decision. She had already moved on.
"I am still here," he said quietly. "The bond is still here."
Lyric did not look up from her microscope. "Yes. And that is unfortunate for you. But it changes nothing about what I came here to do. I came to save your pack. Not to save us."
She adjusted the microscope lens with focused precision.
"Now please leave. I have work to do and you are wasting my time."
Kade stood in the workroom staring at her bent over the microscope. He was waiting for her to look at him again. Waiting for some sign that she still felt something beneath that wall of ice.
But she did not even acknowledge his presence anymore.
She was working on the poison samples like he did not exist. Like the bond between them was just an inconvenient fact instead of the most important thing in the universe. Like three years ago had not happened at all.
And Kade finally understood what he had done.
He had not just rejected his mate. He had destroyed her in a way that made her rebuild herself into someone who did not need him. Someone who could look at him with complete indifference. Someone who had learned to be stronger alone than she could have ever been with him.
He had lost her completely. Not just three years ago on the ceremonial platform.
He had lost her now, standing right in front of him, watching her work with absolute focus.
And he had no idea how to fix it.