Chapter 85: You Broke Me

Isadora’s POV

I had been watching him for days. Not in the way I used to watch him. Not the soft, warm kind of watching that used to make my chest feel full just from seeing him across a room. This was different.

This was the watching you did when something was wrong and you were trying to figure out exactly when it went wrong and how you missed it.

He trained every morning. At the same time. Same ground. Same steady, controlled movements that made the younger wolves stop what they were doing just to watch him work. He corrected their forms with patience, which he did not always show in other places. He laughed at something one of the warriors said. A real laugh. Short and genuine, the kind that changed his whole face for just a second before it was gone.

I had not made him laugh like that for quite a while now.

I stood at the edge of the training ground with my arms crossed and watched him put his hand on a young wolf’s shoulder and point at something, explaining, and I tried to remember the last time he had looked at me the way he was looking at that training ground right now. Present. Fully there. Like nothing outside of that moment existed.

I could not remember.

That was the thing I kept coming back to no matter how many times I tried to leave it alone.

I could not remember the last time Rhydor had been fully present with me.

I had been telling myself it was the pack pressure. The missing children. The journey that everyone had been so worried about. I had been giving him reasons and excuses and space and time and all the things you gave a person when you loved them and wanted them to come back to you on their own.

He had not come back.

He had come back from the Wraithfen and walked past me in the corridor like I was part of the wall.

Not cruelly. Not with anger. Just without seeing me. And somehow that was worse than anything cruel would have been because cruelty at least meant I was still worth a reaction.

I uncrossed my arms. I was done waiting.

The warriors saw me coming before he did.

They always did. I had learned a long time ago how to walk into a space and make every head turn before I said a single word. It was something you learned when you grew up the way I did, in a house where being noticed was the only protection you had.

I walked onto the training ground and the sparring pairs slowed and separated without being asked. I did not look at any of them. I kept my eyes on him.

He was working with a young wolf, barely eighteen, correcting the way he held his stance. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. There was a light sweat across his forearms and his jaw was set in that focused way it got when he was teaching something he actually cared about getting right.

He looked exactly like the man I fell in love with.

That was the part that hurt the most. He had not changed. He was still him, completely and entirely him, and somehow that made the distance between us feel more impossible than if he had become a different person entirely.

He looked up when the young wolf’s eyes moved to me.

I stopped in front of him.

The young wolf looked between us with the uncertain energy of someone who understood he was standing in the middle of something much larger than a training session.

"Leave us," I said.

He looked at Rhydor. Rhydor nodded once. He left quickly, taking the long way around the edge of the ground to avoid passing too close.

We stood facing each other.

The morning air was cool. Around us the other warriors had drifted to the far edges of the ground, not leaving but giving us the only kind of privacy an open space could offer.

I held out my hand.

"Give me your sword."

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved across his face that I could not read. Then he flipped it and tossed it toward me, handle first.

I caught it.

He picked up the spare from the rack at the edge of the sparring circle without being asked. Like he had already known this was where we were going. Like he had been waiting for it too, in his own way.

We circled.

The first time our swords met the sound rang out sharp and clear across the ground.

I felt it in my wrists. On my shoulders. I had trained with him enough times to know how he moved, how he shifted his weight, and which direction he favored when he was conserving energy. I knew his patterns the way you knew the patterns of something you had studied for years.

"You have been avoiding me," I said.

He blocked without effort. "I have been busy."

"Busy." I struck again. Harder this time. "For weeks." Another strike. "You walk past me like I am part of the furniture."

"Isadora."

"Look at me." I pulled back slightly. Our eyes met. For one second, the swords were still between us, and I could see something in his face that was nothing. There was something there. I knew him well enough to know it was there. "What changed?"

He said nothing.

I swung.

I felt the difference from the first exchange immediately. He was not attacking. He was only blocking, absorbing everything I threw at him, moving with the controlled patience of someone who had already decided they were not going to fight back. That made me angrier than anything else he could have done.

"Is it her?"

His jaw tightened.

There it was.

"I knew it." I struck harder. "I saw it. I saw the way you looked at her and I told myself I was imagining it." Another swing. Metal against metal. "I told myself you would never." Strike. "That you knew what we had." Strike. "That it meant something to you."

"Stop."

"Stop what?" I stepped back, breathing harder now, the words coming out with the swings, one after the other, unstoppable now that they had started. "Stop telling you the truth? Stop being the only person in this entire pack who will actually say it out loud?"

"That is not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?" I swung again, and he blocked, and the impact ran up my arm, and I felt my eyes go hot, and I hated it. I hated that I was crying. I had promised myself I would not cry on this training ground in front of whoever was pretending not to watch from the edges.

"I gave you years." My voice cracked on the word and I could not stop it. "I gave you everything I had. I was supposed to be your Luna. I planned for it. I prepared for it. I gave up other paths because I believed in what we were building together."

He said nothing. He kept blocking. Never striking back. Just taking everything I threw at him and absorbing it and standing there and it made me want to scream.

"She looks at you and you forget I exist."

I swung wildly. Too much emotion in it, not enough technique, and the edge of my blade caught his arm before either of us saw it coming. A thin line of red opened up just below his elbow.

I froze.

The sword felt wrong in my hand suddenly. Heavy in a way it had not been thirty seconds ago.

I looked at the blood. At his face. At the blood again.

I dropped the sword.

It hit the stone with a sound that felt too loud for what had just happened.

"Why didn’t you fight back?" My voice came out small. Smaller than I wanted it to be.

He looked at the cut on his arm. Then at me.

"Because I deserved it," he said.

Something broke open in my chest at those three words. Not the anger. Not the heat of the fight. Something underneath all of that, something that had been sitting there quietly since the day he walked past me in the corridor without seeing me, finally cracked straight through.

I pressed both hands over my face.

I felt him step closer. Felt the warmth of him before he touched me. His arms came around me slowly, carefully, like he was not sure I would let him. I collapsed against his chest before I could decide whether to let him or not. My hands were still over my face, and I was crying into them and into his shirt, and I could not make myself stop.

He held me.

And that was almost the worst part. That he could still do that. That it still felt like him. That after everything, after all the distance and the silence and the walking past me like I was nothing, his arms still felt like the safest place I had ever stood.

"I thought we meant something," I said into his chest.

"We did." His voice was quiet. Low.

I pulled back enough to look at his face. His eyes were pained. Guilty. He was not pretending. Whatever he felt right now was real and that made it so much harder to stand in front of.

"Then why her?" I searched his face. "Why not me? I have been here. I have always been here. What does she have that I spent years trying to give you and couldn’t?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

I had asked the question so many times inside my own head. I had imagined every possible answer and prepared a response for each one. I thought I was ready.

"Tell me," I said. "You owe me that much."

He took a breath.

"She is my mate."

The words landed in complete silence.

I stood completely still.

"What?" I said. The word came out barely above a breath.

"Azura." He held my gaze. "She is my fated mate."

I stepped back. One step and then another, until his arms were not around me anymore and there was cold air in the space between us.

"Your mate," I repeated.

"I should have told you sooner."

"You should have told me." I heard my own voice going through the words as if they belonged to someone else. Calm and flat and completely disconnected from the thing that was happening inside my chest. "I waited years for you. I built my entire future around you. And this whole time you knew she was your mate and you said nothing to me."

"I was trying to fight it."

A sound came out of me that was almost a laugh. Bitter and short and nothing like anything I had ever heard myself make before. "Fight it. You were fighting it." I looked at him. At the guilt on his face. At the blood still running slowly down his arm that I had put there. "Look at you, Rhydor. You came back from that forest and walked straight past me. You did not fight anything. You were already gone before you even knew it."

He did not deny it.

That silence was its own answer.

"Why didn’t you reject her?" I said. Quieter now. Something colder moving in under the heat of everything else.

He hesitated.

"I tried," he said.

"You tried." I let that sit for a moment. "Mates reject each other. It happens. You could have chosen me." I looked at his face. "You just did not want to."

"It is not that simple."

"It is exactly that simple." My voice was steady now. Completely steady. I did not know where the steadiness had come from, but it was there, and I was holding onto it with everything I had. "You had a choice. You always had a choice. And you chose her."

"Dora."

"Do not," I said. "Do not say my name right now."

I turned away from him. Looked at the sky above the training ground. Pale blue and completely unbothered by any of this. I looked at the warriors at the far edges pretending to be very interested in their own sparring. I looked at the ground. At the sword lying on the stone where I had dropped it.

I had practiced this conversation so many times. In my room at night. In the corridors when I saw him coming and he did not see me. I had practiced staying strong and saying the right things and walking away with everything intact.

"I was nothing to you," I said. Not loudly. Not with the anger from earlier. Just quietly, like a fact being named out loud for the first time. "Just something comfortable to fill the time with until she arrived."

"That is not true." His voice was rough.

I turned back to look at him one last time. At the man I had loved for years, standing in front of me with blood on his arm and guilt on his face, and absolutely nothing he could say that would fix any of this.

"You broke me," I said.

I turned and walked away.

My head was high. My steps were even. I did not run, and I did not stumble, and I did not look back once.

But with every step I took away from him, something was changing inside me. Hardening. Settling into a new shape that did not feel like grief anymore. Grief was soft. What was moving through me now was not soft.

She had everything I had spent years building toward. My future. My place. My pack. Him. And she had walked into it with her rankless, orphaned, nobody life and taken all of it without even trying. Without even knowing what she had walked into.

She did not deserve any of it. She did not deserve him.

She did not deserve the title or the pack or the place at that table or any of the things that were supposed to be mine.

But she had them.

I walked through the pack house doors and let them close behind me and stood in the corridor alone for a moment with my hands pressed flat against the cold stone wall.

She did not even know what she had taken from me.

But she would.