Page 44 of Primal

The slight tilt of her head sends a sharp pang of grief through my chest. It washermove, her signature tell, no matter the emotion. Happy, sad, mad, curious…Mom always did that and seeing it now, in a place I can’t be sure isn’t just a vivid creation of my subconscious, makes my heart ache.

“Your bond isn’t ripped apart, only frayed, Noa,” she insists. “You’ll see soon enough that a bond like yours isn’t something so easily destroyed. Trust me, my girl, I tried. The best I could do was delay it.”

An inky mixture of betrayal and hurt forms in my gut. “Why would you do that?”

Once again, sadness darkens Mom’s face. “Temporary heartache is a wound that heals. A lifetime of grief is one that never stops bleeding.”

I can’t commend her for her poignant words. Not now. Not when I’m drowning in confusion. “Were you always this fucking cryptic?”

The room once again starts to shift, but this time it’s starting to slowly slip away into nothingness.

Panicked that our time together is coming to an end, my attention shoots back to where Mom stands. She looks unfazed by the disintegrating walls around us and the floor beneath our feet. That’s when I see that she’s fading away too, the edges of her silhouette turning into a white mist.

“It’s time to remember, Noa,” she repeats one last time. “The threads have already started to unravel. The binds are starting to break. He will help with the rest.”

When I wake again,I’m alone.

My room is dark, the only light coming from the half-moon and stars outside thetoo bigwindows of my attic bedroom. Someone, I’m assuming Seren, has left the long white curtains open on all four, leaving me surrounded by the vast, endless night sky. There’s probably awitty analogyin that, some poetic bullshit about how the dark, empty space mirrors the vacant, gaping abyss inside me. Gotta hand it to the universe, it really hit the nail on the head with this cinematic, and slightly symbolic view.

Oh, look at that, your sarcasm is still firmly intact. Not all is lost. Maybe there is hope of survival, after all.

The pain is still there,humming beneath my skin, simmering in my blood, rooted so deep I’m almost positive it’s been carved into the very marrow of my bones.But it’s different now. It no longer steals the breath from my lungs or threatens to yank me into unconscious oblivion. It lingers, a cruel reminder of what was ripped from me—outof me.

My mind feels sluggish, like it’s wading through fog. The thoughts are there, but they’re slow to form, as if my neurons can’t quite remember how to spark with their usual fire. It takes me a solid minute to decide that I’m firmly in the present, that I haven’t found myself in another disorienting and cryptic dream.

That dream. Mom’s message. I want to pick it apart, find the meaning. But who’s to say it was anything more than grief? Maybe it wasn’t her at all and it was just my mind clinging to comfort in the middle of all this devastation.

I’ll talk to Seren about it, I still need her help to confront the words Rennick had used as his killing blow…“It was your own traitorous mother who bound your wolf and made you defective.”

My first instinct was to reject it completely, to fight against it with whatever scrap of internal strength I had left. But now, entwined with the lethargy and cloudiness, there’s a sliver—sharp and persistent—that whispers maybe he was right. Maybe it’s not impossible, after all.

I can’t tell what’s up or down anymore. My body feels foreign, like I’m just borrowing it, and the thoughts in my head don’t even sound like mine. So, really, what’s the harm in considering it? That everything I’ve believed—everything I’ve built myself around—might be a lie. That the one person I trusted above all else, the woman who gave me life and shaped who I am, might’ve taken my memories…and my wolf along with them. I’m brokenenough right now that accepting this possibility doesn’t hurt like it should.

I look inward, checking in with the being I share my soul with. As expected, she’s curled up in her glass cage. Her heartbreak and misery mirroring mine just as intensely. She raises her heavy head and howls. The sound is raw, a cry of mourning meant for someone who won’t answer.

He chose someone else.

I push myself upright in bed, the movement slow, my body stiff from too many hours—or days?—spent floating in and out of the black abyss. Time feels irrelevant in the wake of his rejection.My dark jeans and high-neck thermal cling to my skin, stale with the sweat from my fevered sleep. I still don’t knowhow long I’ve been wearing them or how longit’s been since I stood across from Rennick and he tore my heart out with nothing but a handful of carefully executed words.

What I do know is that I need to pull myself together.

And I desperately need a shower.

My mind screams it’stoo much, too big of a task,but I think of Seren telling me I have to fight. That I have tochooseto keep going. So, I cling to that, hold on to it with everything I have left, and force myself to move. The second my feet hit the floor, my muscles protest. My legs threaten to buckle, my bones groaning under the weight of simply standing on my own. For a moment, I consider falling right back into bed, pulling the twisted blankets over my head, and giving in to the allure of nothingness.

Instead, I push forward. One step. Then another.

Until I make it to the bathroom and turn on the shower.

The Victorian manor’s old pipes takeforeverto warm the water. Eventually steam starts to billow up and over the glass shower stall. I peel off my clothes, movements stiff and clumsy, and catch sight of myself in the fogging mirror.

My next breath is held captive in my tight throat.

I expected to look different. Forever changed, somehow. To see some kind of physical proof of what I’ve endured. A scar. A mark. But I don’t. I still look like me, justfaded. My skin is too pale, my eyes dull, lifeless. Haunted. I look…broken,like someone who’s been eviscerated and stitched back together wrong.

It’s a battle to force my gaze away and to step into the shower.

The hot water burns as it cascades over my skin, and for a fleeting second, Iwelcome it,pretending the scalding heat canerase everything he did to me.

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