Nova's POV:
"He sent me to find you," Aldric said. "Not to warn you off."
He said it before I even sat down, which told me he was good at reading people and had read me walking across the hall toward him and decided that leading with the thing I most needed to know was more efficient than small talk.
I sat down across from him anyway and looked at him properly.
He was built like someone who had spent their entire life being useful in physical situations. Broad through the chest, steady in the way he sat, with brown eyes that were warm but not soft. He was maybe thirty, dark-skinned, with the particular quality of stillness that I was starting to recognize as specific to the people in this room. Present in their bodies in a way that most people were not.
Jess had vanished again. Of course she had.
"He rejected me in front of four hundred people two hours ago," I said.
"Yes."
"And then he sent you to find me."
"Within twenty minutes of the declaration," Aldric said. "He watched you walk out and he stood in the same position for four minutes and then he called me."
I thought about the connection in the parking lot. His exhaustion moving through the incomplete bond. The weight of something enormous.
"Why," I said.
Aldric looked at me for a moment. Deciding something.
"He needs you to understand why he did it," he said. "Not because he wants forgiveness. Because if you don't understand, you'll do something that puts you in danger. Something like staying in this city and being visible and accessible to people who have been looking for his mate for two years."
"Maren told me about the curse."
Something shifted in his expression. "You spoke to Maren."
"In the parking lot. She found me."
He was quiet for a second. "What did she tell you."
"That the curse kills the people he bonds with. That whoever placed it has been eliminating potential mates for two years. That my mark appeared when I was eleven and the wrong people registered it." I held his gaze. "She also told me the bond is incomplete but alive and that I'm in a window no one has been in before."
Aldric leaned forward. Both elbows on the table, his hands folded, his warm eyes serious in a way that changed the energy of the conversation completely.
"Two people," he said quietly. "Two of his people who he was close to. His Beta before me and a female elder who had been with his family since he was born. Both of them deteriorated over six months. He watched it happen and he could not stop it." His jaw tightened. "He has not let anyone within emotional distance since. Not me. Not anyone." A pause. "When your mark lit up tonight he felt the bond form before he could prevent it. The declaration was the only tool he had."
The only tool he had.
I looked at my hands on the table.
"He was protecting me," I said.
"Yes."
"While humiliating me in front of four hundred people."
"He didn't have another option. A private rejection doesn't sever the formal recognition. It had to be public and it had to be in the old tongue to carry legal weight in supernatural law." Aldric's voice was even. "He knew what it looked like. He did it anyway because the alternative was letting the bond complete and waiting to watch you deteriorate."
I sat with that. With the image of a man who had felt the pull through the connection in the parking lot, who had locked it down immediately, who had sent his Beta to find me within twenty minutes of doing the most brutal public thing he could manage.
He had rejected me to keep me alive.
I still did not feel warm about it. But I understood it in a specific, structural way that changed the shape of the anger.
"What does he want from me now," I said.
"He wants you to leave," Aldric said. "Tonight. Different city, no forwarding address, nothing that makes you traceable." He held my gaze. "He will have someone monitor you from a distance. You won't know who they are. But you'll be safe."
"And the bond."
"Incomplete bonds fade over time. Six months, possibly eight. You'll stop feeling it."
I thought about feeling his exhaustion through the parking lot concrete. About the pull he had locked down. About Maren's words. *Your Void Moon wolf is waking up faster than she has any right to.*
"My wolf," I said.
Aldric went still.
"Maren said my wolf is waking up," I said. "What does that mean for the incomplete bond. Does a waking wolf change the timeline on the fade."
He was quiet for three seconds too long.
"Aldric."
"A waking Void Moon wolf," he said carefully, "does not allow the bond to fade." He looked at me with those warm serious eyes and something in them that was close to regret. "She overrides the incomplete status and drives toward completion regardless of external declarations or supernatural law." He paused. "Which means the six month timeline doesn't apply to you."
"How long do I actually have."
"Until your wolf fully wakes." He looked at my collarbone. The mark was quiet now, just warm under my shirt. "When she does, she will reach for him. Across any distance. Through any barrier. The bond will attempt completion and if the curse is still active when it does—"
"It kills me," I said.
"Or him," Aldric said. "We don't know which end absorbs the damage in a Void Moon completion event. It has never happened while a curse was active. There is no record."
The hall around us was emptying. People moving out in small groups, conversations low, the floating candles beginning to dim.
I looked at my hands again.
"So leaving doesn't actually solve it," I said. "If my wolf wakes up she reaches for him regardless of where I am."
"Yes."
"Which means the only real solution is breaking the curse before my wolf fully wakes."
Aldric said nothing.
Which was a yes.
"How long until she wakes," I said.
He reached into his jacket and set a small card on the table between us. A number written by hand.
"Call that number when you're ready to have the full conversation," he said. "Not me. The person who answers." He stood. "Caius doesn't know I'm giving you that. He would not give it to you himself because giving it to you means acknowledging that leaving is not a real solution and he has spent two years believing that keeping people at distance is the only tool he has."
He picked up his jacket.
"How long," I said again.
He looked at me over his shoulder.
"Your mark has been glowing intermittently since you walked back in here," he said quietly. "You can't feel it because it's beneath your perception threshold yet. But I can see it through your shirt." He paused. "Three weeks. Maybe four. After that the wolf takes over and nobody controls what happens next."
He walked away.
I looked at the card on the table.
Then my mark pulsed, once, warm and specific, and through the incomplete bond came something I was not prepared for. Not his exhaustion this time. Not the controlled weight of a man managing an enormous burden.
Something that lasted only two seconds before he shut it down.
Something that felt exactly like relief.
He knew I hadn't left.
And somewhere in the dark room where he was sitting alone carrying a curse he had not asked for, Caius, the Blood Sovereign who had rejected me publicly two hours ago, had felt me still in the building.
And for two seconds he had been relieved.
I picked up the card.
I looked at the number.
I thought about three weeks and a wolf who would reach for him regardless and a curse that had killed two people he loved.
My phone buzzed.
Jess. *Where are you now. There's a woman outside who says she needs to speak to you urgently. Red coat. She says she's not Maren and she's not with Caius and you need to hear what she has to say before you leave tonight.*
I looked up.
Through the hall's glass front doors, a woman in a red coat stood on the path outside. She was looking directly at me.
She was smiling.
It was the kind of smile that had already won something.
END OF CHAPTER 3