It rained the way memory does—fine, relentless, as if to prove that what had happened, would keep happening until you rewrote it.
You tried to sleep and found a hunt instead.
Not yours. His. Trees. Stone. A flash of silver that was not lightning. Then the wrong smell in the right place: copper where there should have been rain.
You woke with your heart already running and your feet agreed before your mouth could talk them out of it. Shoes were a rumor. Your building's stairs forgot to creak. The street tilted toward a tower you had sworn not to enter again today and did not ask your permission.
The night was a throat you could have sung through. You didn't. You listened instead—to the rhythm of your own blood and to the other rhythm that had made itself at home. His.
The Syndicate's tower wore the storm like jewelry. Guards looked past you and then at you and then through you. The door that shouldn't have opened, did. The elevator forgot numbers and told a story—up, up, up—until the air thinned into a speech about altitude.
At the top, a corridor led to a single, unkind door. You lifted your hand. The latch clicked before you touched it.
Atlas stood in the bloom of a storm-lit window, breath hard, shirt open at the throat, his body halfway between decisions. The wolf pressed at his skin, like moon light behind thin clouds. His eyes were wrong for a man—glacial blue lit from inside, ancient and new.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
The sentence had lost its conviction. It sounded like a rule cited for form.
"Then why am I," you asked, stepping inside, letting the door close on anything that wasn't this.
He opened his mouth to say Because I failed, and changed it to, "Because I can't keep you away anymore.
The wind cuffed the glass. The room smelled like storm and iron and a past that had finally found you.
You crossed to him. Not fast. Not slow. As if your body had discovered the correct speed for unavoidable things.
"Tell me to leave," you said, stopping close enough to count the fine silver at the edge of a scar. "If you mean it."
He looked at your mouth, then at your throat, then at the place in the air where your hand hovered as if it could hold a decision. The wolf in him lifted its head. The man did not move.
"I should," he said.
"You won't," you answered.
The tether brightened—thin and clean, a silver arc from your sternum to his. The air hummed. Somewhere in the building, lights flickered and pretended they hadn't.
He took one breath like a man about to dive. "Lexa," he said, and the way he said your name was not a question or a command. It was an oath. One he had not meant to swear.
You lifted your hand.
Your fingers met the rough edge of his jaw. Warm. Real. The contact was small, obscene, in its simplicity. The bond did not flare. It bowed. A pressure moved through the room like the weather kneeled.
You felt it in your bones first, then in your blood, then in the place under words where truths live: the wolf inside him—older than law, older than glass and towers and good intentions—lowered its head for you. Not in weakness. In recognition.
Atlas closed his eyes.
The storm went very quiet.
"Say it," you whispered, though you didn't know what you were asking for.
His mouth shaped the beginning of a vow. The threads beneath your skin lit like constellations learning how to be a map.
On the floor below, a security panel died and came back to life. In the city, sirens chose a different street.
In the chamber where Cassian liked to speak as if the future took dictation, a candle went out without help.
You felt the Alpha bow.
And then—before the word could form, before the kneel could become law—the door at your back clicked like a throat clearing.
"Elara," Atlas said without moving, voice low, dangerous, almost grateful.
"Alpha," Elara said, from the threshold, not crossing, eyes a confession of loyalty and sin. "They're moving."
"Who," you asked, not taking your hand away.
Cassian, Elara did not say. The Scatter loyalists, she did not add. She looked at Atlas and you and the silver line between you and chose a different sentence.
"Everyone," she said.
The tether held.
The wolf did not rise.
You didn't breathe.