The pain was a living thing. It coiled in their chests, a serpent made of ground glass and fury, its coils tightening with every ragged breath. In the damp chill of the cave, the fire had dwindled to a sullen orange eye, offering little warmth and no comfort.
Connall paced the narrow confines of their sanctuary, a caged wolf whose bars were forged from his own agony. Each step was a jarring impact that sent a fresh spike of torment through the bond, but to stand still was to let the pain consume him whole. His face was pale, a sheen of cold sweat clinging to his brow, his control stretched to its breaking point.
Across the meager fire, Althea was a crumpled shape in the darkness. She had wrapped her arms around herself, a futile attempt to hold her body together as the violent thrumming of their connection threatened to rip her apart from the inside.
"We have to," she forced out, her voice a raw, broken thing. Her head lifted, and she gestured with a trembling hand toward the small, oilskin pouch resting near their meager supplies. The moon-herbs. "We have to try it."
Connall froze, his head snapping toward her. "No." The word was a flat, cold stone dropped into the silence.
"Dying from the pain," she gasped, forcing herself to sit up, "is no different from dying by their poison. There is no choice here."
"There is always a choice," he snarled, his mistrust an absolute, unscalable wall. "And the choice is not to swallow a trap laid by the man who sent assassins to kill us. He wants us dead, not soothed." He jabbed a finger toward the pouch. "That is a slower blade, nothing more. You still think like a Bloodfang, willing to believe any lie that offers a sliver of hope."
The accusation struck her, but the pain was a greater whip. Before she could answer, a wave of pure, debilitating agony crashed over them, a hundred times worse than before. A shared, guttural groan tore from their throats. Connall collapsed to one knee, his hand clutching his chest as if to stop his heart from tearing its way out. Althea cried out, doubling over, the world dissolving into a white-hot haze.
In that shared moment of torment, something in Connall shattered. The sheer, overwhelming force of their curse burned away the cold logic of survival. He looked at her—at the face contorted in the same agony that defined his own existence—and the truth of her desperate wager struck him. They were already dying.
With a roar of fury and resignation, he lunged for the pouch, snatching it from the floor. "Fine," he bit out through clenched teeth, his eyes blazing with a wild, cornered light. "If it's poison, we face it. Together." His gaze was a promise and a threat. "But I will prepare it. I trust no one."
The silence that followed was thick with tension, broken only by the scrape of stone on stone. Connall worked with a grim, meticulous focus, crushing the dark herbs on a flat rock, his movements precise and economical. He added a splash of water from their canteen, mixing the fragrant leaves into a thick, bitter-smelling paste. The air filled with the scent of crushed mint and something deeper, wild and earthy.
He divided the paste into two crude portions. Without hesitation, he scooped up the first and swallowed it in a single, grim gulp. His face betrayed nothing. He was a stone wall, a man testing his own executioner's blade. He waited a beat, his eyes locked on Althea, daring the poison to take him.
Then, he held out the rock. A silent offering. A shared sentence.
Her hand trembled as she took it. She met his gaze, seeing the same fatalistic resolve that echoed in her own heart. She brought the paste to her lips and forced it down, the bitter taste coating her tongue.
They waited. The fire crackled. A drop of water fell from the cave ceiling, an unnaturally loud splash in the suffocating quiet. One minute stretched into an eternity of suspense. Nothing happened. The serpent of pain still coiled in their chests, unabated.
*A trick.* The thought flared in Connall's mind. *A cruel joke.*
Then, it began. It wasn't a sudden vanishing, but a slow, miraculous recession. The razor's edge of the pain dulled first. The grinding, tearing pressure eased, as if a great weight were being lifted from their souls. The psychic scream that had been the background noise to their every thought faded to a whisper, and then, finally, to a blessed silence.
They both let out a shuddering breath they hadn't realized they were holding. The relief was so absolute, so profound, it was disorienting. For the first time, they could breathe without pain. They could think without the haze of agony twisting every thought into rage or fear.
Connall looked up, his vision clearing. He saw Althea—truly saw her—not as a symbol of the pack that had butchered his family, but as a she-wolf. Her features were no longer a mask of torment but were fine-boned and pale with exhaustion. He saw the deep fear in her silver eyes, a fear that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with their shared fate.
*Without the rage and the pain, who am I? Just a ghost?*
Althea stared back, her own world tilting on its axis. The fearsome rogue, the grim survivor, was gone. In his place sat the Alpha prince he was born to be. The raw, coiled power was still there, a shadow in the hard lines of his face, but it was controlled now, focused. He was the last Silvermoon, the rightful heir to a throne of ashes.
*He saved me, but he's the last Silvermoon. What does that make me? The Luna of a ghost pack? A traitor to my own?*
The silence that followed was a different beast entirely. The pain had been their justification, the brutal chain that shackled them together, forcing their proximity. Now, that chain was broken. They were just two enemies, two survivors from opposing sides of a bloody war, sharing a cave by choice.
Instinctively, Connall shifted, putting a few more feet of space between them. Althea drew her knees to her chest, creating her own small island in the quiet. The space between them crackled with an awkward, unspoken tension that was heavier than the pain had ever been. The fire was now the loudest sound in the cave, its crackle and pop an intrusion on the charged stillness.
*Without the pain forcing us together, what is left?* The question hung between them, a tangible thing.
A tremor ran through Althea, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cave's chill. Her eyes widened, her gaze fixed on Connall with a dawning, horrified awareness. The chaotic agony was gone, yes. But in the deafening silence it left behind, something else surfaced. It was faint, a barely-there sensation she had never been able to detect through the storm.
A warm, steady, and terrifyingly pure thrum. The true Mating Bond, unobscured.
She broke the silence, her voice a fragile whisper, laced with a new and more profound kind of dread.
"Connall… the pain is gone. But the bond isn't."