The door closed behind Rohan with a soft click. The kind of sound that should have been insignificant but somehow wasn't.
It was the sound of a conversation ending.
The sound of secrets settling into the spaces between breaths, finding their places in the dark like spiders retreating to their webs.
Lucas sat alone in the dim light of the stranger's cabin, his wrists still raw from the silver, his chest still aching with a phantom pain that wasn't entirely his own.
The fire had burned down to embers, orange and red and the deep, bruised purple of dying things.
Shadows danced across the walls like memories trying to find somewhere to land, like old ghosts looking for a door that would let them out.
One day, you are both okay.
Rohan's words played on a loop in his head, scratching at the inside of his skull like mice in the walls, like fingernails on a chalkboard made of bone.
Laughing maybe. Tossing around on the bed.
Lucas closed his eyes, and there he was, Sebastian, pale as moonlight, dark hair falling across his forehead like spilled ink, a rare smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
The kind of smile that didn't come often but, when it did, made Lucas feel like the only person in the world.
Lucas could almost feel the phantom weight of him, the warmth of his skin, the impossible softness of a vampire who had no right to be warm at all.
The next day you were fighting over spilled milk.
They had fought about everything and nothing.
About Beatrice. About the future. About whether Lucas stayed too long or left too soon.
About words said in anger that couldn't be taken back and silences that stretched for weeks like wounds that wouldn't close.
About the fundamental, impossible truth that Sebastian belonged to someone else and Lucas belonged to no one at all.
Then some idiot gorgeous pale vampire decided to play the martyr and leave.
Lucas's throat tightened.
The words felt like hands around his neck, not choking, just holding. Reminding him.
Tanesab.
He didn't know that word. It sounded old. Ancient.
The kind of words that had been carved into stones and forgotten by everyone except the people who had been hurt by them.
A name for a wound that didn't have a name in any language Lucas spoke. A word that tasted like rust and regret.
He opened his eyes and found himself staring at Rohan's left hand—or rather, at the place where his left hand should have been whole.
The missing pinky finger.
He hadn't noticed it before.
He had been too consumed by his own pain, his own fear, and his own desperate need to understand where he was and who had brought him here and why the world kept spinning when everything inside him had stopped.
But now he saw it.
The empty space where a finger should have been, the scarred stump of a knuckle, and the way Rohan's grip adjusted automatically for the loss, as if he had learned to live without that piece of himself a long time ago.
As if he had made peace with the absence.
Tried to cut the bond. It wasn't enough.
The words landed in Lucas's chest like stones dropped into deep water—heavy, sinking, sending ripples through everything they touched.
He knew what that meant.
Knew what it cost to even try to sever an imprint bond.
Knew that some wolves didn't survive the attempt.
Their hearts simply stopping, their souls unraveling like thread pulled from a sweater, leaving behind nothing but an empty body and a smell like burned hair.
Rohan had tried.
And Rohan had failed.
But he had kept the scar to prove it.
Had kept the missing finger as a monument to his own desperation.
Lucas looked up, but Rohan was already gone, swallowed by the darkened bedroom and by whatever ghosts lived in the shadows of his own making.
The door stood half-open, a sliver of deeper darkness beyond, like a mouth caught mid-sentence.
Get some sleep. Tomorrow I'll teach you how to survive what's coming.
Lucas didn't move.
The fire popped, a single ember launching itself onto the hearth like a small, desperate star. Lucas watched it fade from orange to black, watched the light drain out of it until it was nothing but ash.
He thought about how quickly something bright could die. How quickly a person could go from warm to cold, from here to gone.
He hadn't moved from the chair Rohan had guided him into an hour ago—or was it two?
Time had gone strange in this cabin, stretching and compressing like a lung learning to breathe again after being held underwater too long.
His wrists still throbbed where the silver had bitten in, the skin raw and weeping, though Rohan had smeared something green and foul-smelling over the burns before he disappeared into the back room.
It stung. Then it numbed.
Then it left Lucas alone with nothing but his thoughts, which was perhaps the cruelest part.
Tried to cut the bond.
Lucas pressed his palms flat against his thighs and stared at the empty doorway. Somewhere in that darkness, Rohan was lying in a bed that smelled like old grief.
Somewhere in that darkness, a man who had once tried to tear out a piece of his own soul was probably not sleeping either.
What did it feel like? Lucas wondered. When you tried to cut it? Did it burn? Did it bleed? Did you scream?
He didn't know why he cared.
He didn't know why the sight of that missing finger had lodged itself behind his ribs like a splinter he couldn't reach.
Maybe because he had thought about doing the same thing a hundred times. A thousand. Every time Sebastian left in the middle of the night.
Every time Beatrice's name fell from Sebastian's lips like a confession.
Every time Lucas lay awake in whatever bed they'd shared that week, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to pull the bond out of his chest like a bad tooth.
But he had never tried.
He had been too afraid. Too hopeful.
Too stupid and desperately in love to even consider it.
And here was a man who had actually done it. Who had the scar to prove it? Who had failed anyway.
Lucas's laugh was quiet and bitter and tasted like nothing good.
So that's it, then, he thought. You can't cut it. You can't keep it. You just carry it until it carries you.
The fire made a sound like a sigh and collapsed further into itself.
The room grew colder.
The shadows grew longer.
Somewhere outside, an owl called out once, twice, and then fell silent, as if it had been answered by something Lucas couldn't hear.
He should sleep.
Rohan had told him to sleep.
Rohan had promised to teach him how to survive what was coming, and Lucas believed him, which was strange because he didn't believe in much anymore.
But his eyes wouldn't close.
Every time they did, he could only see what seemed to be a stone table.
The silver chains. The hands pressing against his bare chest. So confusing.
What's coming?
The question sat in the dark with him.
Lucas pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and waited for morning.