Chapter 53: Xander

Xander

I hit the dummy again, harder than the last time, hard enough that it swung back on its chain and nearly clocked me in the jaw on the return.

I wasn’t training. I was trying to knock something loose in my own head that wouldn’t move no matter how many times I hit it.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her face. The terror in it. The tears. That one word she’d said through the door, over and over, until it stopped sounding like a request and started sounding like a wound.

Reject me.

I hit the dummy again.

"Great," I muttered. "Apparently punching wood doesn’t fix supernatural disasters."

The problem wasn’t the bond itself. I could have lived with the bond, honestly, if it had gone the way it was apparently supposed to go in every story anyone ever told about mates. The problem was that Astrid didn’t want it.

And I had absolutely no idea how to fix that.

I kept replaying the moment it happened, her hand in mine, that warmth cutting through everything else in the room. The first thought that hit me, before I could stop it, was mine.

Then, immediately after: not mine. Her choice.

That correction mattered. I’d spent the whole night repeating it to myself like it might eventually stick.

I remembered how badly I’d wanted her at the ball, before any of this even started, the way she’d looked dancing, the warmth of her hand, her scent, close enough that leaning in would have taken nothing at all. I let myself imagine it for one reckless second, holding her against me, her head resting on my chest, my hands settled at her waist.

Then I remembered the look on her face when she pulled away from me on the balcony.

The fantasy died instantly.

I want to hold her. She wants me to stay away. I didn’t know which instinct I was supposed to obey, and for someone who usually had an answer ready for everything, that silence in my own head was unfamiliar and unwelcome.

I thought about standing outside her door last night, listening to her cry, listening to her try over and over to break something that apparently couldn’t be broken. I’d wanted to kick the door down. Not to force anything. Just to hold her, wipe her tears, make some stupid joke that would get her laughing despite herself.

She hadn’t wanted me inside.

So I’d stayed outside. And now I couldn’t stop wondering if that had actually been enough.

Reed walked into the training room a while later, taking one look at the battered dummy still swinging on its chain.

"You know it isn’t going to apologize," he said.

I gave him a look and didn’t answer that.

We talked about her, of course. I wanted to check on her. Reed said we shouldn’t, that she’d asked for space and we owed her that much.

"She’s miserable," I said.

"I know."

"Then why are we standing around?"

"Because she asked us to," he said, voice flat.

I didn’t like the answer. I knew he was right anyway.

"I don’t know how to do this," I admitted, gesturing vaguely at everything, the bond, Astrid, the entire mess my life had turned into overnight.

Reed asked what I meant. I didn’t have a clean answer. My whole life I’d gotten what I wanted through charm, through making people laugh, through being impossible to stay mad at. None of that worked here. I couldn’t flirt her out of being terrified. I couldn’t joke the bond into being something smaller than it was. I couldn’t fight it, couldn’t outrun it, couldn’t do a single thing I was actually good at.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely powerless, and I hated it more than I expected to.

I saw her later in the corridor, and the bond hit before my brain caught up, my whole body turning toward her before I’d consciously decided to look. Her eyes were still swollen. She looked exhausted.

Did you sleep? sat right there on my tongue before I remembered and swallowed it back down.

Our eyes met. Neither of us said anything. I gave her a small smile, and for a second I thought she wouldn’t return it.

Then she did. Barely. Tiny.

Something in my chest loosened anyway. I would’ve waited days for that smile if that’s what she needed from me.

I thought, briefly, about how absurd all of this was. Yesterday my biggest problem was whether I’d survive an entire ball without dying of boredom. Today I was apparently bonded to a girl who wanted nothing to do with either of us.

Of course this would happen to me, I thought.

The joke didn’t land the way it usually would. Not once I saw her again, walking away down the hall, and the whole reality of it settled back over me like a weight.

Selene caught me not long after, trying to needle me about ignoring her at the ball. I barely responded. Then she mentioned Astrid, and my whole attention sharpened instantly.

"What’s wrong with you?" she asked, noticing.

"Leave her alone," I said, before she’d even finished the sentence.

She blinked, clearly thrown. I wasn’t usually like that with her, cold instead of playful. Her friends nearby went quiet, watching. Selene didn’t push further, though I could see her filing the reaction away for later.

I saw Astrid talking to some guy from her year not long after that, nothing but an assignment, probably, completely innocent. My wolf reacted anyway, some ugly instinct demanding I walk over there and put myself between them.

I forced myself to keep walking instead, furious with myself the whole way. She wasn’t mine to be possessive over. She was a person, not a claim, and if she ever chose someone else someday, that would be her right entirely.

The thought hurt more than I expected it to.

I finally admitted to myself, somewhere around the third lap of that particular thought, that this wasn’t only about wanting to kiss her, wanting to hold her, wanting my whole body to settle the second she was near. That part was real, but it wasn’t the part that scared me.

What scared me was that I wanted her happiness more than I wanted anything for myself. If space made her happy, I’d give her space. If waiting made her comfortable, I’d wait as long as it took, even if it hurt every single day I did it.

The bond hadn’t made me care about her.

It had just made it impossible to keep pretending I didn’t already.

I watched her leave campus that evening, every instinct in me screaming to follow. I didn’t. I stood there instead, remembering her voice through that door, remembering how easy it would have been to just tell her the bond was real and she didn’t have a choice.

I wouldn’t do that. She deserved a choice, even if the choice broke something in me.

Then the actual thought of losing her hit, and that’s when I finally understood the real problem.

I could give her space.

I could give her time.

But I didn’t know how to give her up.