When My Mate Rejected Our Bond

The healer's office smelled like dried herbs and antiseptic. I sat in the chair across from her desk with my hands folded in my lap, the way my father taught me to sit when receiving news that required composure.

She didn't soften it.

"Your wolf is dying, Sophia."

I already knew. I had known for months, the way you know a tooth is cracked before it finally splits — a dull, persistent wrongness that lives just below the threshold of crisis. But hearing it said out loud, in that flat clinical voice, made it real in a way my own body hadn't managed to.

She explained the rest carefully. The unreciprocated bond was draining me. My ability to shift had been deteriorating since last winter. The window for stabilization was closing. There was one option left — conceiving a pup during my remaining fertile window could anchor my wolf permanently, give her something to hold onto when the bond couldn't.

I nodded. I thanked her. I walked out into the afternoon light and stood in the parking lot for a long moment, breathing.

Then I went home and started cooking.

I don't know why that was my first instinct. Maybe because it was the only thing I knew how to do that felt like love without requiring anything from him. Slow-cooked rosemary lamb — his favorite, the dish I'd learned in our first year together when I still believed that patience was a strategy rather than a sentence. I'd made it maybe a dozen times since. He never commented on it. He ate it, and that felt like enough.

Shadow settled across the kitchen threshold while I worked, his grey head resting on his paws, watching me with those steady amber eyes. He always knew when something was wrong. He'd known before I did, probably.

"It's fine," I told him.

He didn't move.

I rehearsed what I would say while the lamb braised. I kept the words simple, practical. I wouldn't mention the healer's diagnosis — I knew better than that. Aaron had made his position on my medical claims perfectly clear three years ago, when he found the forged records. I had done that to myself, and I had no one to blame for it. I would just ask. Plainly. One heat. One chance. And then I would give him whatever he wanted.

It sounded reasonable in my head. It sounded like something a person could say without falling apart.

I set the table at eight. By ten, the food had gone cold and I reheated it. By midnight, I reheated it again and stopped pretending I wasn't watching the front door.

Shadow hadn't moved from the threshold.

Aaron came in just past midnight, still in his training clothes, smelling of sweat and pine and the cold night air. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at the table — the set plates, the candle I'd lit and then felt foolish about — and something in his expression