After My Mate Used the Bond as a Leash

He found the petition an hour later.

I heard him before I saw him—boots on the stairs, too fast, missing the rhythm they usually kept. The door didn't open so much as it broke open, slamming against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He was holding the paper like it had bitten him.

"What is this." Not a question. His voice already climbing.

I didn't answer. I was folding a sweater into the bag on my bed, and I kept folding it.

"Sloan." He crossed the room in three strides and slapped the paper down on the mattress beside my hands. My own handwriting stared up at me, calm and legal and precise. *I, Sloan Cooper, formally petition for release from the incomplete mate bond with Alpha Braxton of Ironridge Pack.* "Do you have any idea what this looks like? If this got out—if the council—"

"It's a petition," I said. "Not a rumor. It's meant to get out."

His hands closed into fists at his sides. For a moment I thought he might hit the wall, or the dresser, or something that wasn't me. Instead he grabbed the paper and tore it. Once, twice, the halves fluttering to the floor like dead moths.

"After everything I built for you," he said. "The territory. The house. Your name on every treaty in that drive you think I don't know about. You'd throw that away over—over *tests*?"

"You locked me in a room lined with silver and told my body it couldn't move," I said. My voice didn't rise. It never does anymore. "That wasn't a test. That was torture with a Moon Goddess excuse pinned to it."

"I needed to know you were real!" It came out cracked, too loud, bouncing off the walls. "Ten years, Sloan, and I never knew—every time you smiled, every time you said you loved me, some part of me kept asking if it was the bond talking or you. I needed proof."

"You had proof," I said. "You had ten years of it. You just didn't like the answer, so you kept asking a different question until you got the one you wanted."

He stared at me. Something in his face was folding in on itself, the fury sliding sideways into something rawer, something that looked almost like begging, though he'd rather choke than call it that. "Sloan. Please."

I looked at him. Really looked. And there was nothing there. Not anger, not the old ache, not even the ghost of the girl who used to catalog his moods like weather. Just a flat, quiet distance, like watching a stranger cry about a stranger's life.

He ran out of words. The silence afterward sat in the room like a third person. He stood there a long moment, waiting for me to fill it. I didn't. Eventually he left, and the door closed softer than it had opened, which somehow made it worse.

---

The patrol wolf found me in the east corridor two days later. Young, low-ranked, his eyes down before he even spoke.

"Luna—ma'am. We found the dog. On the highway, past the north marker. He didn't—" He stopped. Started again. "He's gone."

I didn't make a sound. I felt something drop through the floor of me, fast and total, like a trapdoor swinging open in silence.

"Thank you," I said. "You can go."

He hesitated, then left. I stood in the corridor for ninety seconds—I counted them, because counting was the only thing my mind would let me do—and then I went to find Braxton.

He was in his office. He must have already known, because he didn't ask what was wrong when I walked in.

"I have something for you," he said instead, too fast, like he'd rehearsed it. He gestured to a carrier on the floor by his desk, lined in soft blue fleece. Inside, a wolf pup blinked up at me, purebred, golden-eyed, blameless. "And the east wing—I had it redone. Bigger den. The windows you wanted. This is me doing better, Sloan. This is the start."

I looked at the pup for a long time. It yawned, small and unaware, tail thumping once against the fleece.

Then I looked at Braxton, and he was glass. I could see straight through him to the wall behind, to the years behind that, to nothing at all.

"No," I said.

I set the carrier down gently on the floor, because none of this was the puppy's fault, and turned toward my room.

That night I packed one bag. My laptop. The drive. The journal. Three changes of clothes. I did not look at the torn halves of the petition still lying where he'd dropped them.

At dawn, I walked out through the front gate. No one stopped me. The mark on my neck throbbed with a cold, phantom ache that kept pace with my footsteps, worse with every mile, like something dying slow instead of clean.

I didn't look back. There was nothing behind me I wanted to see twice.