“you can’t keep denying her.”

A snaky guttural groan wrenched out of him as he grabbed at his chest and struggled to breathe. The bond was punishing him, its force unmistakable, unyielding. With every moment he resisted, it sank its claws deeper, threatening to unspool him completely.

I watched him, feeling both pity and frustration. “You’re hurting yourself, and her, as you don’t want to accept what’s already been written. Let me go, Nathaniel. You have to let me go.”

He bent over, his expression twisted in pain, but his voice still bore that same steely defiance when he rasped, “No. I can’t. I won’t. Angie, this… this wasn’t how it was supposed to end. We pledged to love one another, even if the connection wasn’t ours to own.”

A hand reached for me, desperation in his eyes, but I took a step backward, standing fast. “It doesn’t matter what we promised,” I said, my voice harsher than I had meant. “These promises are hollow today. It’s over, Nathaniel. You’ve already lost me.”

He jerked his head up, his expression roiling in grief and rage.

“It’s not over,” he rasps, his voice vibrating with held-back strength. “It will never be over. Come back with me, Angie. Don’t do this.”

Then I felt it for the first time, the weight of his Alpha command crashing down on me, a load I hadn’t even known I would ever have to carry.

He had sworn he’d never use it against me, never force me. But now, in his desperation, he used it like a weapon, trying to draw me back to him, trying to bend my will to his.

Tears threatened to spill from the corners of my eyes, but I wouldn’t want them to fall.

“No,” I replied, firm, though my heart ached for the man I had once loved. “Not this time.”

Nathaniel had broken his vow, his Alpha power a weapon against me. And yet I would not be moved, my strength a citadel he could not penetrate.

“I’m not yours, Nathaniel Byrne,” I said, my voice cold as ice, unbending. “Not anymore. My loyalty is with Black Widow now.”

His fury constricted the air between us, and yet he pressed.

“Come with me.” The command resonated with the same authority that had once twisted my will—a hollow sound now.

“You’re not my Alpha,” I retorted, syllables jagged as splintered bone. “You’re not Malcolm. You ceased to have dominion over me the moment you broke your oath. Leave. Or I’ll call the guards to haul you out.”

A harsh laugh escaped him, laced with wounded vanity.

“Try it.” There was the scowl of a politician with the vision of an artist, the aristocratic features hardening into a mask of defiance. “See what happens.”

My senses focused, sensing the challenge in his posture. You have no permission to be here — the same way you had no invite to slip past the academy gates to visit me those years. Clever then. Pathetic now.”

“Pearl Harbour’s Alpha has no meaning in these halls,” I went on, sounding as brittle as frosted glass. “Here, you’re a trespasser. No better than Yoan. Than Carl. No better than the ghosts you’ve made of me these last two years.”

The wound flickered across his face. Good.

But this rot between us did not start with Yoan’s claim as his mate.

It began that day in the sterile hospital room, the midwife’s words still clawing at my ribs, “Conceiving again may prove… challenging.” Nathaniel had stood statue still at the window that day, the sun gilding him in profile — and then, muscle by muscle, he’d stopped seeing me altogether.

His laughter with Yoan soon resonated through pack dinners to which I was not invited. His confidences migrated into Carl’s ear. My calls to his office went unanswered, my smell scrubbed from his clothes.

He didn’t leave.

He just made sure that I’d already gone.

He approached my bed only when the heat threatened to singe his sanity, or when loneliness compelled him to hunt the ghost of what we’d been. Not an ounce of tenderness remained across those meetings — simply the cold clinical precision of resetting a broken bone.

Even his offerings came through like tax payments. Holidays marketed as “time for us” turned into orchestrations, Yoan’s laughter echoing in every villa, Carl’s opinions filling up silence between courses.

Gods, I missed the boy who’d dare prefect rounds to scale Black Widow’s gates at midnight. Who’d jam stolen academy chocolates into my palm, still warm from his pocket. We’d once called it romance, his recklessness.

But the attack stripped away that delusion.

I still taste the metallic tang of my own blood from where I lay in the forest mulch, ribs screaming. Nathaniel was not fighting his way through the throng to reach me.

He was thirty metres upwind, pinning Yoan to an oak — he was using his body as her shield — and my screams dissolved into the chaos.

That’s when I knew. Not only that he’d chosen her.

But that the man I’d loved had bled out in that forest, long before the rogues were done.

The beam of a guard’s torch sliced into the present. I swallowed, throat clenched, as the young sentry nodded — a kid I’d once pooled trigonometry notes with, in the days when futures felt pliable.

“Angie! Heard you’re back for good!” The guard’s smile caught the torchlight — a fragment of normal from another life. “It’s teaching at the academy, then?”

I kept smiling, holding on to this banal script. “First seminar’s Monday. Can’t wait.”

We exchanged hollow courtesies about lesson plans and rugby fixtures. When I looked back, the moonlit courtyard was empty. Not even the sound of retreating footsteps. There was no shadow pooled under the yew tree.

Nathaniel hadn’t merely left.

He had evaporated like smoke, leaving nothing but the acid stain of his absence.

And just like that — without ceremony, without sound — the last bridge between us fell to ash.

That night, in the east corridor, Mother stopped me. “Malcolm’s asked for a walk with you after supper. If you're amenable."

I said yes before she finished speaking — yearning for the cold slap of night air to scour Nathaniel’s smirk from my mind, Yoan’s perfume from my memory.

Malcolm showed up at eight on the nose, without gloves even though it was frosty. No alpha command thrummed under his polite

"Shall we?" Just the same steady gaze he’d given when we’d chased tadpoles in Wellspring Loch as kids.