Jade
I could feel Zade slipping further away from me with every passing hour, like trying to hold on to smoke with bare hands. It was in the way he barely looked at me anymore, the way his responses grew shorter, colder, like he couldn’t summon the energy to pretend anymore. I told myself he was just stressed, that whatever was pulling him under would pass, but the bond between us buzzed with a tension so sharp it hurt to breathe.
I caught him once, standing outside by the treeline just as the sun dipped below the horizon, his phone pressed tightly to his ear, his voice low and sharp in the way it only got when he thought he wasn’t being watched. I stayed hidden behind the porch rail, not meaning to eavesdrop, but unable to tear myself away once I heard the name.
“Luca,” he said, his tone clipped. “No. I told you. It’s handled. She can’t know anything until I figure it out.”
My heart plummeted so fast it left me dizzy. I didn’t know who Luca was, or what he was keeping from me, but the words were enough. He was hiding something. Something about me. About us. The sharp slice of betrayal stung deeper than I wanted to admit.
When he finally came back inside, his face was carefully blank, but I wasn’t fooled. I sat curled up on the couch, pretending to flip through a book I hadn’t read a single word of, pretending I hadn’t heard him lying to someone in the dark.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked, keeping my voice light, casual, as if the answer didn’t matter. I didn’t know if I was trying to protect him or myself.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second — just long enough for my heart to crack further — before he answered. “Just a pack matter,” he said with a tight shrug. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
The lie slid between us, thin and sharp, slicing through the fragile connection we were both pretending hadn’t already frayed to the point of breaking. I nodded, pretending to accept it, pretending I didn’t feel the bond between us twitch in protest, like it knew the truth even if I was too afraid to face it.
That night, lying beside him in bed, I felt lonelier than I ever had in my life. His body was a few inches away, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him, but he might as well have been a thousand miles from me. I stared up at the ceiling, blinking back tears I didn’t dare let fall, trying to figure out where everything had gone wrong.
I thought about the promises we had made, the slow, steady trust we had built from the fragile pieces of our broken pasts. I thought about the way he had once looked at me, like I was the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth. And now… now he barely looked at me at all.
Maybe he regretted choosing me. Maybe the bond had tricked him into thinking he wanted me, and now that the dust had settled, he was realizing the truth. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t enough of anything, to stand beside someone like him.
The doubts gnawed at me, relentless and cruel, until sleep finally claimed me in fits and starts, full of dreams where he slipped through my fingers no matter how tightly I tried to hold on.
In the morning, he was already gone. No note. No text. Just the lingering echo of a door closing quietly behind him, the only evidence that he had ever been there at all.
I moved through the day like a ghost, the ache in my chest growing heavier with every minute he stayed away. I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t even know what needed fixing. All I knew was that the man who had once sworn to choose me, every day, now seemed to be choosing anything but.
By the time he returned late that night, exhaustion had dulled my fear into a quiet, aching numbness. I sat on the edge of the bed, my hands fisted tightly in the blanket, forcing myself to meet his eyes as he walked through the door.
“Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?” I asked, my voice steady even though everything inside me was shaking apart.
Zade froze for a heartbeat, the mask slipping just long enough for me to see the turmoil lurking beneath it. But then it was back, that cold, careful expression that made my chest ache with how unfamiliar it felt. “There’s nothing to tell,” he said, his voice too even, too empty.
I nodded once, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from saying all the things that threatened to spill out. The accusations. The pleas. The desperate, broken truth that I was drowning, and he was letting it happen.
He stripped off his jacket and disappeared into the bathroom without another word, the door clicking shut behind him with a finality that echoed in the hollow space between us.
Left alone, I curled back under the covers, pulling them up to my chin like a shield against the cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. I stared at the door he had closed between us, the silence pressing down harder with every second that ticked by.
I didn’t know how much longer I could keep pretending.