Chapter 22 - Ado

For the next few days, I am a mess.

Keira won’t talk to me. She doesn’t even look at me. She spends the first two nights in the medical bay, and by the time she’s released, we have not spoken again.

When we cross paths in the halls, she veers away like I’m a ghost, a shadow she doesn’t want to acknowledge or have to look at. She’s always encircled by Olivia and one or two of others, keeping a watchful eye on her, and sometimes Byron escorts her to and from places. I can tell he has made it his mission to make sure she’s okay. The two of them barely say a word to me either. I’ve suddenly become an outsider among my own pack.

I can’t blame them.

I’ve replayed the conversation we had in the med bay over and over in my head. I was cruel, I think, or at least inconsiderate. I shouldn’t have approached her like that. I meant everything I said—or most of it, anyway. All of the things I can remember through the haze.

My protective instincts have been on overdrive ever since that blood bond snapped into place. It’s tearing me up inside not to be near her, not to make sure she’s safe. I barely sleep, spending nights pacing in my room, trying to feel her in the building, to know she’s safe.

But she doesn’t want to see me. And I can’t force it.

There is still work to be done. Aris tries to keep us focused, pushing us to analyze the intel we gathered from the auction, trying to make sense of the information we have. But the pack is fractured. Percy and Rafael do their best to stay neutral, but even they seem quieter, more reserved. They shoot me sympathetic looks when they think the others aren’t looking.

There’s no banter during the meetings, no camaraderie. We’re all walking on eggshells, waiting to be the first to break one.

For a few days, it is miserable in the pack center.

I try to focus on the work. I want nothing more than to drown out the chaos in my head with numbers, names, and connections we need to piece together, but it’s no use. Every time I sit down at the table, I feel the empty space where Keira should be gaping opposite me, the silence where her voice should fill the air. The bond strings me along like a puppet. I am constantly compelled by a foreign force. I can’t even tell if she’s healing, if she’s sleeping, if she’s eaten. That lack of connection gnaws at me like an open wound that won’t scab.

When I do catch glimpses of Keira, she looks tired. I catalog the shadows under her eyes and the slight hollowness in her features. She looks haunted.

Of course, she’s haunted. The worst thing that’s ever happened to her almost happened again.

And to save her, I violated her trust forever.

Aris keeps trying to pull us back together. We’re a pack, but right now, we feel anything but united. He looks like he wants to grab us all and smack our heads together half the time, but he does nothing yet. He’s waiting to see if I can figure this out alone. I can tell.

So much for being the only team member not to have ever given him trouble. Those days are long gone.

***

The rooftop of the pack center is quiet when I find her there.

The moon hangs low in the sky, casting a pale silver glow over everything like a wash of white paint. It sharpens the corners of the world. Keira stands near the edge, up against the railing right where I love to stand with my coffee in the mornings, staring out at the forest. Her arms are wrapped around herself as if she’s trying to hold herself together.

I hesitate at the exit to the roof, unsure if approaching her is the right thing to do. But the pull of the bond is relentless. I can’t take it anymore. If I stay away from her any longer, I might just die.

The night before the infiltration, I thought I needed her. I thought I knew what need was. As it turns out, I had no idea what need could feel like—not one fucking clue.

I take a deep breath and step forward. The gravel crunches under my boots, and she tenses at the sound.

She doesn’t turn around, but I know she hears me.

“Keira,” I say softly, my voice barely more than a whisper of breath in the stillness.

She doesn’t respond. Watching the treetops with her shoulders tight around her ears as if it’s an effort to stay upright, she’s still just as beautiful as she’s always been. There, with the night air swirling around her, the moonlight seems to love her almost as much as I do, caressing her face and hair, casting her in an otherworldly glow.

For a heartbeat, I think she’s going to walk away from me. I think if she walked away now, it would be for the final time. She’d be gone forever if she left now.

But she stays where she is.

“I can’t... I can’t keep doing this,” I admit. The thickness of my voice makes me cringe. I am not an emotional man. Not until she came back into my life. “I can’t stand this distance between us. Not after everything. I just can’t do it, Keira. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t do it anymore.”

She’s still silent, her back to me. I step up to the railing and stare at her side profile in the soft glow of the night, imploring her to look at me, to see me as she always has.

The words start spilling out of me, like a dam has finally broken.

“I loved you before,” I say, my voice rough and raw. “I loved you before the bond, before the auction, before everything went to hell, and I’ve loved you for longer than I can even remember, since the day I met you. Keira; I’ve loved you for as long as I’ve known what love feels like. Because it’s only ever been you. And this... this bond, it just... I didn’t want it to happen this way, but it did, and now I feel like I’m burning alive because I can’t be near you.”

My head is spinning—I have to draw breath. I clutch the railing and clear my throat. I feel like a teenager. I feel like an old, old man, so worn out by my life that I only want to lie down beside the woman I love and hold her.

Keira finally turns to look at me, her eyes wide with shock. She doesn’t say anything, but her gaze is locked on mine. The intensity in her eyes almost pins me to the spot, but I step closer with physical strain, closing the distance between us.

“I didn’t want to make that decision,” I continue, my voice softer now. “But I had to. I couldn’t risk losing you. Not again. I couldn’t... I couldn’t let them take you from me. And I couldn’t let that happen to you—even if I never saw you again, I couldn’t let them have your freedom. I couldn’t do that to you. You have to understand, Keira. This bond... it means something. It’s not just some obligation or some accident. It’s... it’s everything.”

She finally speaks, her voice shaky. “Ado, I... I don’t understand.”

“I love you,” I tell her, my voice breaking. I need her to hear me, to really believe me. If I could take my heart from my chest to show her, I would. “How could I not love you? Look at you. I couldn’t not want you, not after all the times I’ve watched you fight and struggle and survive. I couldn’t lose you. And you can walk out of this building right now and go back to New York, but I’m going to want you forever, Keira. I’m going to want you until I die. And I refuse to give that—” I hold up my palm, gesturing to the wound from the blood bond. “—I refuse to give it up.”

Keira’s eyes glisten in the moonlight, and she looks away, back toward the forest. Her silence is deafening. In the ocean of doubt between us, a single thread of gold stretches, thin as a wire, between our souls. We both feel the pull of it. It shines even under the broiling of the dark waves.

“I meant it,” I say. “I mean it. I meant it. I’m asking you to believe me. It’s all I can ask you for.”

She finally looks back at me. Her lips part as if she’s about to say something, but the words don’t come.

In our army days, on long nights on the rooftop when the sky looked just like this, we would play lost and found, the two of us. It was mostly Keira’s game. I would tell her about things I had lost in my life—things, people, places—and she would invent their futures right in front of me, presenting what had happened to each as if it was really that simple. She told me all about the adventure my favorite keyring had gone on when I was eighteen and lost it on a night out in my hometown. She came up with an answer for why the only girl I’d ever dated had ghosted (she had been abducted by alien-vampire hybrids). She had words to fix every hurt I’d ever had.

She has no words now.

And yet, I wait, my heart pounding in my chest, even as the quiet curdles and cools to discontentment. It is longer than I’d like to admit before I turn away, my shoulders heavy with the weight of everything I’ve just said. Everything I’ve just laid bare.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter, my voice barely audible. “I didn’t mean to... I’ll leave you alone.”

As I reach the door to the stairs, I hear her voice, soft but clear in the quiet night.

“Ado, wait.”

I freeze in place, my hand hovering over the handle. I don’t turn around, but I hear her footsteps approaching, slow and hesitant. A part of me dares to hope she’s about to say something that will make this all right. Something that might put us back together.

I hear her sigh, and then she speaks again.

“Thank you for being honest.” A long pause. “And I... I believe you, when you say you care about me. But I need more time.”

Living a life like mine, you learn a lot about bracing myself for the pain—and there, there it is. It hits me all at once. Pain like being crushed by an anvil. I knew this was coming. I knew it was too much to hope for forgiveness so soon. But hearing it still hurts.

I finally turn around to face her. She’s standing only a few feet away from me, her arms still curled around herself as if trying to shield herself from the cold. Her eyes shine with wetness in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, my voice low. “I never wanted to hurt you, Keira. I just... I couldn’t let them—”

“I know,” she cuts me off gently. “I know you were trying to protect me. But that doesn’t change what happened—what happened now or back then. I need time to figure out how I feel about all of this. About us.”

The word lingers in the air between her and me, heavy with meaning. There is still something there, between us, even after everything. But it’s fragile, uncertain, faltering like a baby bird. I’m terrified we’ll smother it before it can fly.

Slowly, almost without thinking, I take a step closer to her. Her breath catches. For a blissful, unreal moment, I think she might let me close that final distance between us.

Our eyes lock, and there’s a second where everything else fades away. The past, the pain, the present—none of it matters. The bond between us hums with energy, tugging us. Briefly, it’s like we might actually bridge that impossible gap.

Keira pulls away.

She steps back. The cold night air rushes in to fill the newly reiterated space between us.

“I can’t,” she whispers, shaking her head. “Not yet.”

I wish I could nod or say it’s alright. I can do neither.

Keira gives me a small, sad smile, and then, without another word, she turns and disappears through the door leading back inside.