After My Former Mate Crashed My New Bond

The table has warmed. The tension that gripped the room when Duke first appeared hasn't disappeared—it's still there, coiled at the courtesy end like a snake waiting—but the pack has chosen to ignore it. They're trading stories now, voices overlapping in the easy rhythm of wolves on safe ground.

Lena Park is halfway through a tale about her mate's disastrous attempt at smoking trout when someone asks me how Victor and I reconnected.

I feel Victor's hand tighten slightly at my back. A warning, maybe. Or just awareness that whatever I say next, the entire table will hear.

I don't look at him. I look at Lena, at Eleanor, at the warm faces turned toward me with genuine curiosity, and I tell them the truth.

"We grew up together," I say. "Before I left for college. There was this place in the Cascades—a cliff above a glacial pool. Granite drop, maybe forty feet. I used to dare him to jump."

Lena grins. "Did he?"

"Once," I say. My voice softens without meaning to. "The summer before I left. I told him I was going whether he came or not. So I climbed up, stood at the edge, and jumped."

The table goes still. Not tense. Just listening.

"I was in the air maybe two seconds," I continue. "Then I heard the splash beside me. Not behind me. *Beside* me. A wolf hit the water half a second before I did, right beneath where I was falling. He surfaced under me. Broke my drop."

Eleanor's eyes flick to Victor. Her mouth curves slightly.

"He shifted mid-fall," I say quietly. "Forty feet. No warning. Just… went."

The table erupts in laughter—warm, approving, the kind that comes with a story every wolf here recognizes as significant. Marcus claps Victor on the shoulder. Lena's mate shakes his head, grinning.

Victor's ears have gone red.

His hand at my back presses harder, and his scent—smoky pine and warm leather—intensifies so sharply I feel Lune rise to meet it. His wolf is stirred. Not embarrassed. Remembered.

What I don't tell them is that Victor is terrified of heights.

That he stood at the edge of that cliff with his hands shaking, his breathing shallow, and jumped anyway because I was already in the air and he couldn't let me hit the water alone.

That when we surfaced together, gasping and laughing, he didn't say a word about the fear. He just treaded water beside me, his eyes still a little wild, and asked if I wanted to go again.

I didn't. Not after I saw what it cost him.

But he would have.

Across the table, at the courtesy end, Duke's jaw is locked. His glass sits untouched. His gaze moves from my face to Victor's hand at my back, and I see it—the tightness in his expression that isn't anger but something colder.

Recognition.

Duke never once put himself in danger for me. Not real danger. Not the kind that required him to face something that scared him and do it anyway because I mattered more than his comfort.

He gave me possessiveness. Control. The appearance of devotion.

But he never gave me the cliff.

The table doesn't need me to say it. They already know. I can see it in the way Marcus glances at Duke and then away, his expression carefully neutral. In the way Lena's mate tightens his arm around her shoulders, a silent, instinctive contrast.

The story wasn't an accusation.

But it landed like one anyway.

---

Reid, Duke's Beta, leans in and says something low. I can't hear the words, but I see the way Duke's shoulders stiffen. The way his amber-tinged eyes scan the table—me laughing, Victor's hand steady at my back, Eleanor watching us both with that quiet, final satisfaction.

Reid's discomfort is visible. He shifts in his seat, his gaze dropping to his plate, and I realize with a jolt that Duke's own second-in-command is struggling to mask the shame of what their presence here is starting to look like.

They're not guests.

They're witnesses.

Duke straightens. Smooths his expression back into its practiced ease. But his fingers curl too tightly around the stem of his glass, and the muscle in his jaw jumps.

He's calculating.

I feel it before I see it—the shift in his posture, the way his gaze sharpens and locks on Victor. On me. On the space between us that he can't cross.

Lune growls low in my chest. *He's going to say something.*

Victor's hand at my back shifts slightly. Not pulling me closer. Just… there. Anchoring.

The table is still laughing, still warm, but underneath it all I feel the wire pulling taut again.

Duke is about to strike.

And this time, I don't think Victor is going to let it slide.