Nicholas’s POV

I came back the wrong way.

Not slow and easy — not the kind of waking up where you drift through fog for a few minutes before the world slots back into place. It was violent. Like being shoved face-first through a wall. All at once. No warning. Pain hit before my eyes were even open. Deep, bone-level pain, the kind that lives in your marrow and doesn’t apologize for being there.

I didn’t move.

Couldn’t, for a second. Every muscle had the consistency of wet cement. My hands weren’t responding. My lungs felt like they’d been through a press. I just lay there in the dark and let the pain wash over me, and I waited.

It’s what I do. I’ve taken worse. I’ve always taken worse.

Slowly — too slowly — my body started to come back online.

The pain began to shift. Not disappear. Shift. Like something underneath my skin was working, reknitting what had come apart. I could feel it happening in real time, which was one of the stranger experiences I’d had in my life, and I’ve had quite a few strange ones. A deep pull in my chest cavity where something had clearly been very wrong. A dull throb in my shoulder that was already fading from sharp to dull to almost nothing. My spine, which had felt like someone had swapped it out for broken glass, was slowly, grudgingly, settling back into something that functioned like a spine.

My body was healing.

That meant something had been very, very wrong.

I opened my eyes.

The room was dark. Not pitch dark — some faint light was bleeding in from somewhere, the gap under the door, the thin edge of a curtain not fully drawn. Enough to make out the ceiling. High ceilings. My ceiling.

I was in my own room.

I didn’t remember getting here.

I lay still for another few seconds and did an inventory. Arms. Legs. Head — there was a headache, but distant, already retreating, like a storm that had passed and left damage in its wake. My lungs worked. My ribs ached, but held. Everything that had felt shattered an hour ago — or a day ago, or however long I’d been out — was quietly, methodically reassembling itself.

Then I noticed the taste in my mouth.

Metal. Blood.

I ran my tongue over my teeth, checking.

Not mine.

I knew the difference. I’d tasted plenty of my own blood over the years. This wasn’t it. This was something else — warmer, faintly sweet in a way that had no business being sweet, and the moment I registered it my wolf raised his head from wherever he’d been buried in unconsciousness and went absolutely still.

Alert. Focused. Like he recognized something I didn’t yet.

I filed that away and pushed myself upright.

Bad idea. The room tilted hard to the left. I grabbed the edge of the mattress and waited for the world to pick a direction. After a few seconds, it cooperated. The dizziness retreated. I was sitting up.

Progress.

I looked around.

Empty.

No Roman standing in the corner with that expression on his face. No Andrei in the doorway running his mouth.

No Irina.

I looked at the other side of the bed. The pillow. The blanket.

I reached out and pressed my palm flat against the sheets where she usually slept.

Cold.

The room had her scent. Old. Fading.

*Where is she?*

The mate bond doesn’t work like language. It doesn’t work like sound. It’s more like — a direction.

Something was wrong with it.

I reached for her and the bond lurched.

Like grabbing a rope and finding it frayed halfway through. Still connected, still taut, but wrong. Thin. Far away in a way that made zero sense from inside my own bedroom.

My wolf came fully awake.

He snarled.

I reached again, harder this time, and the bond answered with a wave of sensation that came out of me as a sound — not a word, not a shout, just a rough involuntary noise that I clamped down on immediately. My hand pressed flat against my chest without meaning to.

She was far.

She was far, and she was getting farther.

The bond didn’t thin out over hallways. It didn’t weaken across palace wings. It weakened across miles. Across territory lines. Across borders.

The word landed in my head with the quiet certainty of something I already knew and was only just now admitting.

*Borders.*

She crossed the border.

I sat with that for one second.

One.

Then something that had been holding itself together with sheer mechanical stubbornness since I’d opened my eyes cracked all the way down the middle.

She left?

My wolf slammed against the inside of my skull so hard my vision blurred at the edges. He was past fury. Past the kind of anger that still has language attached to it. He was in the place where there’s only motion, only instinct, only the unbearable wrongness of the distance growing between him and his mate, and the fact that we were both still sitting in this room instead of moving was making him absolutely feral.

I felt the same way.

*Why.*

The question clawed at me and I shoved it down. Not yet. Why was for later. Why was a question I would ask directly, with Irina standing in front of me, and she would be standing in front of me — that was not a wish or a hope, that was a settled fact that had already been decided the moment I’d understood what was happening.

She was not going to keep running.

Nobody ran from me. Nobody had ever successfully run from me.

I stood up.

My legs held. Barely. I didn’t care.

The bond stretched tighter and tighter between us. I could feel her out there. Moving. Every second she put more distance between herself and this territory, and every second I could feel it like something being slowly peeled away from somewhere raw and unprotected. She was taking something with her that she had no right to take. Something that belonged here, with me.

My wolf was done waiting.

And so was I.

The sound that came out of me started somewhere below my ribs and didn’t stop — it rose up through my chest, tore out of my throat, filled every corner of the room, rattled the glass in the window frames, and rolled out into the dark hallway beyond the door like a shockwave.

A howl.