My wolf howled. Not outward, not in any way anyone else could hear. The sound was inside me, reverberating through my bones, through the hollow place where the mate bond lived. It was a sound I had never heard her make before. Not rage. Something worse. Something that had no name, a keening that started in the marrow and didn't stop.
I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor.
The stone was cold beneath my palms. The impact jarred through my knees, my wrists, my belly. The pain in my abdomen sharpened into something bright and terrible. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. Inside me, my wolf had gone completely still. Not calm. The kind of still that comes before something breaks apart.
"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to the severing! How can you be this two-faced? The pup is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground! You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own pup will pay for what you've done?"
My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.
For the sake of Corvina's pup, he had cursed ours.
The mate bond between us, that fraying thread I had held onto for five years, pulsed once. Weak. Sickly. Like a heartbeat trying to keep going when the body around it had already given up. My wolf pressed her nose against it from the inside, and I felt her recoil. His end of the bond tasted like ash. Like scorched iron gone cold.
"Yeah, Seraphina, how could you do that? She just gave birth. You shouldn't have hit her!"
"No wonder Theron says he's more comfortable with Corvina. Seraphina's temper is way too much."
They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. Their voices blurred into a single wall of sound, and beneath it, I could hear my own pulse. Too fast. Too thin. My wolf was pacing now, frantic circles in the dark, her claws scraping against something inside me that felt like it was coming apart.