Thessian ended the call with a curse, bond pulsing his rising fury, protective rage flaring hot toward her. "We have to go back to the pack..."
" I won't go back there...." Liora's refusal came before thought could temper it, her head already shaking as the words left her, as if her body rejected the very idea before her mind could fully grasp it. She could still feel it—the place he was asking her to return to—not as a location, but as something that had carved itself into her bones. It lived in the memory of cold stone beneath her skin, in the phantom weight of chains that had long since been removed but never truly gone, in the suffocating helplessness that had stripped her down to something raw and unrecognizable. That place was not behind her in the way distance suggested. It lingered inside her, waiting. And she knew, with a certainty that left no room for compromise, that stepping back into it would not be survival—it would be surrender.
