Chapter 11: Three Days

"Did he know?" Lily asked. "The boyfriend?"

"No. You can only feel the pull on the werewolf side initially. But he could sense that something was wrong, that you were somewhere else in your mind. Wren told me afterward that you weren't being present with him."

That made Lily's throat tight. David had been right, and she'd been right to leave. But for different reasons than either of them had understood.

"What does it mean that I'm your mate?" she asked.

"Under pack law, it means one of two things. Either you leave the territory and never return, so I can eventually move past the bond and find someone else. Or you accept my claim." He paused. "The claim is a marking. A bite, specifically. Once marked, the bond activates fully, and we can feel each other's presence, emotions, physical sensations to some degree. We can't lie to each other after the bond is active. It's as close to merging two minds as two bodies can get while remaining separate."

"That sounds like a significant invasion of privacy."

"It is," Ryder said flatly. "Which is why it requires consent. Verbal consent and physical consent both. Once you're marked, you can't change your mind. It's permanent."

"Can I die if you die?"

"No. The bond is strong, but it doesn't work that way. But you'll feel his death, and vice versa. It's not something either party comes back from easily."

Lily processed this. The implications were massive. "And the alternative is that I leave."

"And never come back. Not to the valley, not to this territory. You'd have to relocate your research, move on entirely from this project." He looked away from her again, back to the sunrise. "I won't keep you here. I won't manipulate you or use the pack to pressure you. But you need to understand what your options actually are before you decide."

"What do you want me to choose?"

"That's not the question," Ryder said, and his jaw was tight. "What I want doesn't matter. What matters is what you're willing to accept and what you're not."

"That's a convenient way to avoid answering."

"No. It's the only honest way to ask." He finally looked at her completely, and she could see the exhaustion in his face, the wear of three years of fighting something internal. "Three years, Lily. Three years of feeling your presence in the back of my mind even though we weren't bonded yet. Three years of not being able to sleep properly. Not being able to think about anything except making sure you were safe. Not being able to bring anyone else into the pack without worrying about whether they might somehow threaten you or interfere with something that was supposed to be inevitable."

"That's not fair," she said.

"No. It's not. Which is why I want you to leave. I want you to leave so that you can have the kind of life where the biggest decision is what to do with your career, not whether you're willing to tie yourself to someone forever and let them feel everything you feel."

Lily got out of the bed. She was still in the borrowed clothes, and they hung on her awkwardly, but she didn't care. "If that's what you want, then why are you still here? Why are you telling me this instead of just packing my things and driving me back to Coldwater Creek?"

"Because the alternative is unbearable," Ryder said, and something broke in his voice when he said it. "Because I've already spent three years trying to do the right thing, and you're still here, and every second you're in this valley, I can feel the bond pulling at both of us. And because if you choose to leave, at least I deserve to know that you had all the information."

"That's the most honest thing you've said," Lily told him.

Ryder stood and walked to the door. "Breakfast is ready. Wren made something. We should eat."

But before he left the room, Lily said, "I'm not going to decide today."

"I know."

"And I'm not going to make the decision based on what's easiest for you or what's most ethical. I'm going to make it based on what I want."

Ryder's hand stilled on the doorframe. "What do you want?"

Lily thought about the forest, about the presence in the trees, about how it had felt when she'd put her hand on his head while he was in wolf form. She thought about the way his eyes had looked at her when she'd first walked into the clearing after the flood. She thought about three years of him suffering because he was trying to do the right thing, and the unbearable knowledge that she'd been suffering too, just in different ways, in different forms, for different reasons.

"I want to understand this better," she said. "I want to understand you better. And I want to do my research without having to leave Montana."

Something in Ryder's face shifted. Hope, maybe. Or determination. "Okay."

"But I also need to not be pressured. I need space to think. I need time to process."

"You'll have whatever time you need."

He left, and Lily stood alone in the room with the sunrise.

She could hear voices starting in the main hall — the pack waking up, the ordinary rhythms of people who shared a life in ways she was still learning to read. She opened her field journal to last night's entry and read it back. The last line: This is not going to be simple at all.

Then she heard Wren's voice through the wall, low and sharp.

"—council arrives Thursday. Three days, Ryder. If she's still in the territory and unclaimed by Thursday, they invoke the old law and the decision stops being yours to make."

Lily set the journal down.

Thursday was three days away. She did not have whatever time she needed.