Chapter 100: Not Yours

Azura’s POV

I walked toward him.

Not fast. Not with any of the panic that was sitting in my chest. Just steady and deliberate, one foot in front of the other, crossing the yard toward the black wolf standing in the middle of it with those eyes that were getting darker by the second.

I could feel Torin behind me. The shift in his breathing. The particular quality of silence that came from a wolf reading a threat and deciding what to do about it. I needed to get between them before that decision finished making itself.

I kept walking.

When I reached Logan I raised my hand slowly and pressed my palm against his muzzle. He was warm. Hot, actually, the heat coming off him in waves, the way it always did when he was close to the edge of something. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

I felt the tension in him under my hand, the coiled controlled energy of something that had made a decision and had not fully committed to whether it was going to hold to it.

I brought my other arm up and wrapped both of them around his neck. Not restraining. Just holding. Like holding was something I had the right to do and he had no reason to question it.

"Breathe," I said quietly. "Just breathe."

He was still for a long moment.

Then something in him shifted. The tension did not disappear, but it changed quality, moving from the sharp, coiled kind into something heavier and less dangerous. He leaned into me slightly, his weight pressing against my arms.

I held on, until I felt a movement

Then he shifted.

The change moved through him fast and I stepped back to give him room. When it finished Rhydor was on his feet in front of me, breathing hard, both hands gripping my arms just below the shoulders. His head was down. His chest was heaving like he had been running.

He did not let go of my arms.

I looked back over my shoulder.

Torin was not there. The space where he had been pushing himself up from the ground at the base of the tree was empty. Just the tree and the disturbed grass around it and the leaves that had fallen when he hit it.

I turned back to Rhydor.

"Let’s go inside," I said.

He looked down at me. Then he looked toward where Torin had been. Something moved in his expression that I did not examine too closely. Then he looked back at me.

And picked me up.

The sound that came out of me was completely involuntary. "Put me down, Rhydor. I can walk."

"Not a chance," he said. Flat. Like it was already a closed matter.

I looked at the side of his face. At the jaw that was set in that way, it got when he had decided something and had no intention of being talked out of it. I thought about arguing. I weighed the options available to me.

Then I let him carry me inside.

****

The room was quiet.

Rhydor set me down and I stepped back and put some space between us. I crossed my arms and looked at him. He was standing near the door with his hands at his sides and he was not moving toward me.

"What are you doing here, Rhydor?"

He reached into his coat without answering immediately. His hand came out holding something. He held it toward me.

I stared at it.

My journal.

The worn leather cover. The edges are soft from years of handling. The particular weight of it that I knew in my hands the way I knew very few things.

I had left it behind when we fled the pack house. In all the smoke and the noise. I had not even realized it was gone until days later.

I crossed the room and took it from him. My fingers moved over the cover without thinking, tracing the familiar worn patches along the spine.

"You came all this way to bring me this?" I asked.

"Mother said you would need it," he replied.

I looked at him. Then in the journal. Then at him again.

"Thank you," I said.

The words came out flat. Not cold exactly. Not warm either. Just honest. Just what they were.

I set the journal on the table beside me and did not open it.

The quiet that followed was the heavy kind. The kind that had weight and shape and sat between two people who were both carrying too much to know where to put it down first.

I did not look at him. I looked at the journal. On the cover. At the worn edges, I had just been tracing with my fingers.

"I want to make things better between us."

His voice broke the silence and I laughed before I could stop myself. Short and sharp and with nothing light in it.

"Why all of a sudden?" I asked.

"It is not sudden." His voice was steady. "I have been thinking about it for a long time."

"And you chose now?" I looked at him properly. "After everything?"

"I am here now," he said simply.

I looked at him. At that face that I had spent months either trying not to look at or trying not to think about. The man who had stood in front of me and said the word meaningless like it was just information he was passing along. Who had sat silent while the council blamed me for the missing children. Who had embarrassed and made me look like a fool in any means possible.

"I do not want you here." The words came out low and controlled, pressed through my teeth. "And if you actually want to make things better between us, the first thing you need to do is apologize to Torin."

His jaw tightened. The muscle in it jumped once.

He said nothing.

"You attacked him," I said. "In his own yard. He was not threatening me. He was not hurting me. He was talking to me, and you put him in a tree. You do not get to hurt my friends because of whatever is going on inside you."

"I was not jealous," he said. Flat. "And no."

I looked at him. "No?"

"I will not apologize to him."

I stepped closer. "You attacked a man who took care of me. Who carried me out of a burning pack house on his back. Who fed me and kept me safe and asked for nothing back."

"He said he would give you something I could not."

"He was talking to me," I said. "There is a difference between talking and threatening and you know that."

"He said he would give you something I could not," His voice had dropped. Lower and quieter and somehow heavier for it. "I heard every word."

"And that gives you the right to put your hands on him?" I held his gaze without flinching. "You have no right over me. Not really."

He moved closer.

I did not step back.

His eyes were dark in a way that had nothing to do with Logan and everything to do with Rhydor, the man underneath the wolf, the one who felt things deeply and said almost none of them and showed the ones he could not hold back in ways that came out wrong half the time.

"I have every right," he said quietly. "You are my mate."

"I do not have your mark," I said. My voice did not shake. I made sure of that. "I do not have your claim. I do not even know if I want them."

He looked at me. Something moved behind his eyes at those words. Something that went deeper than the jaw tightening or the controlled breathing. Something that actually landed.

"You rejected me," I said. "You stood in front of me, and you rejected me, and then you spent months treating me like I was something you had to tolerate. You made my life a living hell, and then you showed up through my window like that, undoing everything. And now you are here acting as if you own me." I shook my head. "You do not."

"Azura." My name in his voice, low and rough around the edges.

"Apologize to Torin." I picked up the journal from the table. "That is the first step. Not for me. For him. Because you were wrong and you know you were wrong."

I walked to the door.

My hand found the handle.

"I am going to check on him," I said without turning around. "You can stay here or you can leave. I do not care which."

I pushed the door open.

"I am not leaving."

His voice came from directly behind me. Quiet and certain in the way he was certain about things he had decided completely.

I stopped.

I did not turn.

"Then stay," I said. "But know that your presence suffocates me."

I walked out.

The door closed behind me.

The afternoon air hit my face, and I stood outside for one second with my hand still on the closed door, and my journal pressed against my chest, and my jaw set, and my eyes dry because I had decided they were going to stay dry.

Then I went to find Torin. He was the one who needed me now.