POV: Faye
"You should have let me die."
The words crawled out of Jason's throat like something wounded and half feral, barely a whisper against the damp forest floor, and Faye felt them land in her chest with the precision of a blade she had spent five years trying to forget, because his voice was rougher than it used to be and deeper and cracked at the edges in ways that spoke of suffering she had not been there to witness, and she realized that the sound of him saying her name had haunted her dreams for eighteen hundred nights but nothing in those dreams had prepared her for the reality of him bleeding out in the silver soaked mud while the moon turned the color of a bruise overhead.
"I didn't ask for this," she heard herself say, and her own voice sounded foreign to her ears because it was steady when she was shaking and cold when she was burning and calm when she wanted to scream, and she watched his bloodied fingers twitch toward her even as the silver wires continued to hiss against his skin, and the bond between them pulsed with a desperate and erratic rhythm that felt like a heart having its final seizure before giving up entirely. "I didn't ask for any of this. You left. You walked away. You do not get to crawl back here and tell me I should have let you die as if that is a kindness you are owed."
Jason's laugh was a wet and horrible thing that turned into a cough which turned into a groan which turned into silence, and when he spoke again his voice was so quiet that she had to lean closer until her cheek was almost touching his lips and her hair was falling around their faces like a curtain shutting out the rest of the world. "I left to keep you alive."
"You left to keep yourself whole," she snapped, but the words came out softer than she intended because she could see the truth in his eyes even as she tried to deny it, and the forest seemed to hold its breath around them while the scent of petrichor and crushed mint grew stronger until it was everywhere, inside her lungs and her veins and the hollow spaces where her heart used to live before he took it with him into the dark. "You left because you were afraid of what the bond would make you. Not because you loved me. Because you loved your freedom more."
He shook his head with a desperation that made the silver wires dig deeper into his throat, and fresh blood welled up around the barbs while his eyes never left hers, and she watched the tears slide down his temples and disappear into his matted hair because he was too weak to wipe them away and too broken to pretend he was not crying and too far gone to care what she thought of him anymore. "I have spent every single day of the last five years regretting that walk," he said, and his voice cracked on the word regretting as if it cost him something to admit it, as if the admission was a kind of amputation he had been avoiding until the pain of keeping the limb had become worse than the pain of losing it. "I have lain awake in foreign territories and hostile dens and every single time I closed my eyes I saw your face. Every single time. There was no freedom, Faye. There was only the absence of you. And it was a slow and miserable way to die."
"Then why?" The question tore out of her before she could stop it, and her hands were shaking now as they hovered over his wounds, and her wolf was pacing and snarling and begging her to claim him, to mark him, to drag him somewhere safe and never let him go again, but the Delta in her was screaming about duty and loyalty and the pack that would execute her if they found her here with a deserter in her arms. "Why did you stay away? Why did you let me believe you were dead? Why did you let me mourn you?"
He reached up with a hand that trembled from blood loss and silver poisoning and five years of running from a bond that would not let him go, and he touched her face with fingers that were cold and shaking and so gentle that it broke something inside her that she had been holding together with spite and stubbornness and the desperate hope that one day the pain would stop. "Because Silas knows," he whispered. "He knows about the bond. He knows what you are to me. And he will use you to get to me. He will use you to destroy everything we have ever loved. I stayed away to keep his eyes off you. But I cannot stay away anymore because the war is here, Faye. It is already here. And you are not safe."
The sound of heavy boots crunching through the undergrowth grew louder with every heartbeat, and Faye recognized the distinct scent of old iron and woodsmoke that always followed the Enforcers under the command of her rival Mara, and she knew that she had seconds to decide between the woman she had become and the woman she had been before he left, between the Delta who enforced the law and the mate who would burn the world to save the man bleeding in her arms. "I hate you," she said, but her voice broke on the last word, and they both knew it was a lie, and they both knew that hate and love were not opposites but neighbors, and she had been living next door to him for five years without ever admitting the address.
"I know," he said, and his eyes fluttered closed as consciousness began to slip away from him, and his hand fell from her face, and his breathing became shallow and ragged and terrifyingly slow. "I know."
Faye looked down at the man who had shattered her heart and then spent five years apologizing for it from a distance she had not known existed, and she heard the Enforcers breaking through the treeline behind her, and she felt the weight of her duty pressing against her shoulders like a physical force, and she made a choice that would cost her everything because she had already lost everything once and she had survived it, and she did not know if she could survive losing him again. She grabbed him by the collar of his ruined shirt and she began to drag him toward the mouth of the forbidden caves, and the last thing she heard before the darkness swallowed them both was Mara's voice calling her name with a suspicion that would not be easily dismissed, and she understood that she was no longer a Delta of Silver Hollow, but she was finally something she had not been in five years, which was honest about who she loved and what she was willing to sacrifice for that love, and the terror of that honesty was so vast that it had no shape and no name and no end, but it was hers, and she would carry it into the dark with him, and they would face whatever came next together, or they would not face it at all