Page 75 of Primal

“I beg yourfinest pardon?”

Oh, yeah.Right.

She didn’t know.

“I’m really fucking mad at you, Ser,” I snap, hands dropping limply to my sides, the weight of it all dragging me down. I know I need her help more than I need to cling to this grudge. I’ll comeback to it later, let the anger breathe when it’s safe to. But right now? I need to get this shit out.

All of it.

“I know,” she whispers, wincing. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“Yeah…” I sigh, lowering myself onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.”

She doesn’t ask what I mean. She doesn’t need to.

She just nods.

And I inhale, steadying myself, ready to lay it all out. Everything I know, everything I don’t and everything in between. Because I can’t carry this alone. And despite her lie, I still want it to be her who helps me hold the pieces. She’s my person, and we don’t get a lot of those in life.

“You have to tell him, Noa.”

Seren’s voice rings in my head, just as desperate and afraid as it had been in the kitchen many hours ago when she first said it.

She’d said it after I spilled everything—every twisted, tangled thread Zora helped me pull free. I told her Rennick had been right. That Mom had used her weaver magic to bind my wolf, to twist my memories of those final days in Pack Fallamhain, making me believe we were exiled because I was latent. I told her that more memories, especially the ones tied to Rennick, had been tampered with too. And how I’m almost certain now that Mom knew he was my fated mate even then, that something must’ve happened, something big enough to make her tear us apart.

It wasn’t just the shifting she stole when she bound my wolf. It was my designation, my charmer gifts, everything that made meme.

Her eyes had nearly fallen out of her head when I told her I’m an oracle.

“Well, fuck, I should have guessed that when you said you were hearing voices,” she’d offhandedly commented with an apologetic grimace. “Probably a bit of a relief to know you’re not actually losing your noodle, huh? Not to freak you out, though, but it’s probably going to start feeling like you’re part of a psychic group chat that you were added to against your will. And there’s no silencing your notifications. Buckle up, buttercup, shit’s a wild ride.”

Then I explained how being near Rennick after all these years cracked the first fissure in the binds, and how every second I spend around him weakens them further. Because like Amara had told her, heisthe key.

Whether I want him to be or not.

That was enough to shake her. But it wasn’t what broke her.

What broke her was the rest.

I laid out what comes next. That when the binds lift completely, my suppressed omega instincts won’t just resurface, they’ll crash down all at once in what Zora called a “super heat”. Which is possibly the most horrifying combination of words anyone’s ever said to me. Seven years’ worth of suppressed cycles, all detonating at the same time.

And with my body this weakened, already breaking down, there’s no surviving something like that.

That’s when the fear in Seren’s face turned into full-on panic. Her calm cracked. She looked at me like I was already dying. I could see it sinking in, just how close I might be to leaving her.

When I told her there was one thing that might give me the strength to make it through the intense heat and stop the slowdecay—a completed mating bond;hismark—her expression changed again. It lit up. With that pesky little bitchhope.

Hope I crushed immediately.

She stared at me like I’d lost my damn mind.

“You’re not thinking clearly, the pain and hurt from the rejection is fucking with your mind. He has to know, Noa. Youhaveto tell him so he can help you,” she pleaded, tears spilling down her face. “His bite will get you through it. It willsaveyou. You have to see that.”

I took her hands in mine, voice hoarse and low. “I was already a sacrifice Rennick was willing to make. I won’t allow myself to become an obligation he’s bound to as well.”

You can’t get wrecked by rejection if you never put yourself in the position to be rejected in the first place. And even if I could set my pride aside and resign myself to being an obligation, how the hell am I supposed to look that man in the eye, tell him I probably won’t survive this, and then hand him the solution like it’s his responsibility to save me?

How do I trust him with my life, with my heart, with the last fraying pieces of my soul when he’s the reason they’re broken to begin with?

---