"I want you to have sex with me."
I recognized Sophia's voice even through the fog. Even broken and bleeding on someone's bed, even with my eyes too heavy to open and the room tilting slowly behind them I still knew her voice. I had spent twelve years learning it. Every version of it. The laughing one. The lying one. The one she used when she wanted something and had already decided she would get it.
This was the last one.
Some things, I thought distantly, you never stop being able to read.
Her footsteps moved across the room slow, deliberate. I couldn't see her but I didn't need to. I could map every step in the dark behind my eyes, follow every turn. Twelve years of friendship had left me fluent in her, even now. Even like this.
Her voice softened then. Not gentle. Never gentle. That careful softness she used when she wanted something.
"Why should I stop?" she continued. "We're alone, Cael. She can't hear us." A quiet pause. "She can barely breathe."
I can hear you.
The words formed in my head, clear and furious but my lips didn't move. My tongue felt heavy, useless. All I could do was lie there and breathe, shallow and slow, like even that might be taken away if I did too much. I had always been good at surviving on the bare minimum. No wolf. No rank. No place in this pack that anyone had ever bothered to assign me. I had learned very early how to exist on almost nothing.
Today had just been a reminder.
"No, Sophia." Cael's voice came out low. Controlled. Too controlled.
"Is it because you still have feelings for Nova?" she snapped.
My chest tightened. Feelings. The word landed strangely. I turned it over in the fog of my mind, slow and careful, the way you handle something you're not sure is real.
"I know she's your fated mate," Sophia cut in, her voice sharpening, "but you chose me. Your father chose me. You don't get to take that back now." Her breathing grew heavier. "This is your chance to prove it. To show me I'm the one you want."
Cold spread through my body, slow and suffocating.
His mate.
The words didn't land all at once. They sank in piece by piece, each one heavier than the last. Sophia had said it so easily like it wasn't new, like it had never been new. That casual certainty, that quiet settled anger, meant she had known for a long time.
Which meant he had too.
I thought about the last time I had seen him. The way his eyes had passed over me not cruel, not cold, just nothing and I had spent three days afterward convincing myself that nothing meant nothing. I had told myself a lot of things over the years. I had gotten very good at it.
A memory surfaced, sharp and unwanted. His voice, younger, steadier, certain in a way no one else had ever managed to be with me: I'll always protect you, Nova. I had carried those words for years like they were something worth carrying. Like they meant I wasn't as alone as every other thing in my life suggested. And all this time all this time he had known what I was to him and had looked at that knowledge and chosen Sophia anyway. Chosen silence. Chosen to let me stay exactly where I had always been. On the outside. No rank. No wolf. No place. No idea.
Did he know this morning? The thought arrived quietly and then wouldn't leave. Did he know when she was hitting me?
The tears came before I could stop them, hot and silent, sliding into my hair. I pressed my lips together until they hurt. I had cried in front of Sophia exactly once in my life. I was not going to do it again. Not today. Not while I was already bleeding.
"I said no." Cael's voice cut through everything. Quiet. Final.
"Look at me." Sophia's voice cracked just enough to sound real. "I've been here. I've always been here. I've done everything "
"Have you not done enough?" Something shifted in his tone. Still controlled. But harder now, like something underneath it was pushing against the surface. "Today, Sophia," he continued. "Have you not already done enough today?"
"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked.
"You know exactly what it means."
Her voice cooled instantly. "I did what needed to be done. She had no business touching what belongs to this pack." A beat. "What belongs to me."
"She didn't touch anything." The words were sharper this time.
"…What?" Sophia's voice went still.
"She didn't take the pendant," Cael said. "You know she didn't. You've always known."
The memory hit me like another blow. This morning. Her room. The accusation. The way her friends had held me down the first hit, then the next, and the next while Sophia stood over me and smiled like she was doing something that had been a long time coming.
She probably thought it had been.
"I hate her." Sophia's voice dropped, soft and flat. Like a fact. Like weather. "Everything about her. The way she looks at you. The way you look at her " Her voice tightened. "The way you're looking at her now, like she's something."
Silence.
"I've been patient, Cael. I've been so patient. And for what? For her?" Her voice rose, sharp with something ugly and raw. "She has no wolf. No rank. She has nothing "
"She has me."
The room went completely still. I heard him say it and something in my chest did a complicated, unwilling thing because even now, even after everything, those three words still moved through me like they meant something. Like they were the same voice that had promised to protect me. I hated that. I hated how much I still wanted them to be true.
"You didn't choose her," Sophia said.
"I didn't choose anything," Cael replied, each word calm and measured. "Neither did she. That's not how this works. You know that."
A longer silence followed. When Sophia spoke again her voice had changed smoother, colder, like glass right before it shattered.
"Fine," she said softly. "Then let her rest." Footsteps moved toward the door. Then she stopped. "But Cael…" The smile was back in her voice, clear as ever. "When she wakes up, remind her what she is. Remind her what she isn't." Another step. "She can have the title. She can have whatever the moon thinks she deserves. But she will never have what I already took from her…"
A pause.
"Or else," Sophia added quietly.
"Or else what, Sophia?" Cael's voice came out lower this time tight, controlled but something underneath it shifted. Not fear. Something close.
A soft laugh. Unhurried. "Let's not rush things," she said lightly. "We still have the Lycan King's visit to get through, don't we?"
A step toward the door. Then she stopped again, and when she spoke her voice had dropped quieter, sharper, like a blade finding the exact angle it needed.
"I wonder…" she murmured, almost to herself, "what would happen if certain things came to light." Silence. Thick. Heavy. "The missing girls," she added softly.
The air in the room changed. Completely.
"Careful, Sophia." Cael's voice wasn't loud but it wasn't steady anymore either. That almost made it worse.
Another soft laugh. "Oh, I am," she said. "Very careful. I can decide what stays buried…" Her voice turned faintly amused. "…and what doesn't."
Then softer "Or…" A glance I could feel, even without seeing it. "…I could deal with your little mate instead."
The door clicked shut.
And Cael didn't move.
Neither did I.
I lay there in the silence he left behind, bleeding into someone else's sheets, and thought not for the first time, and probably not for the last that the most dangerous thing about Sophia had never been her hands.
It was that she always knew exactly what to bury.
And exactly when to dig it back up.