Time and distance was not helping Scarlett at all. If anything it was making things worse.
She felt on edge, a circle of emotions that kept coming back stronger than the one before. She had been crying all night, until her head felt about to explode, and then she became angry. Because she could not stop herself from crying. She hated it. She hated that even after what Peter had told her, she just kept crying.
Her eyes kept looking for her phone, as if she was waiting for a call, a text.
His voice, his texts that had now become such a habit. Stiles would always call her, to ask her something, or nothing. Sometimes it was just to chat about something silly. And she would laugh, and wait for him to say something funny or nice.
Why do I keep wanting him to call? She asked herself, anger taking over once again.
Peter had been clear about it. It was the bond. Those were not her feelings, it was all that freaking bond.
She pressed her palms flat against the kitchen counter and stared at the wall and tried to feel something useful. Anger was useful. Hunger was useful. The clean, simple pull of wanting something and taking it — that was who she was. That was her nature.
Not this.
Not standing in her kitchen at ten in the morning staring at a phone that wasn't ringing, waiting for a boy who wasn't going to call, feeling the specific weight of a silence that had never bothered her before he existed.
She thought about his laugh. The way it came out sometimes before he'd finished the joke, like he couldn't quite contain it. The way he'd looked at her that first time they'd kissed, with that open, unguarded brightness that she had never known what to do with and had never been able to stop wanting after him.
Stop it.
She thought about his hands. Warm. Always warm. The way he'd reached for hers without thinking about it, like it was the most natural thing—
Stop.
She picked up the phone.
There was nothing on the screen. No messages. No missed calls. Just her own reflection in the black glass, pale and hollow-eyed and completely unrecognizable.
I don't want to see you. Ever again.
The sound it made against the wall was enormous.
The screen shattered on impact, pieces scattering across the floor in a bright spray, and the silence that followed was somehow louder than the crash had been. Scarlett stood at the counter breathing hard, her hand still raised, and stared at the broken thing on the floor.
It didn't help.
She had known it wouldn't help.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and felt her eyes sting and hated herself for it, hated the stinging, hated that her body kept doing this without her permission, hated most of all that she was standing in her kitchen in the middle of the night mourning a phone she had just destroyed because looking at it was worse than not having it.
It's the bond, Peter had said. Those are not your feelings.
She knew that.
She knew.
She just wished knowing made any difference at all.
"When will you stop breaking everything?"
Peter's voice came from the doorway.
Scarlett didn't turn around. She heard him step into the living room — that particular quiet of his movement, unhurried, like he owned every room he walked into — and then the soft sound of him crouching down, picking up a piece of the shattered screen from the floor.
"It's just a phone," she said.
"It's the ninth thing this week." He set the piece on the counter beside her. "Not that I'm counting."
"Then don't."
He was quiet for a moment. Then his hand came to her shoulder — warm, familiar, the weight of it exactly the same as it had always been — and she felt herself go very still underneath it.
"Come here," he said softly.
"Peter—"
"You haven't eaten. You haven't slept." His voice was gentle in that specific way it got when he had already decided something and was simply waiting for her to arrive at the same conclusion. "Let me help."
She knew what he meant. She had always known what he meant when he used that tone — the offer underneath the offer, the way he had of making things feel like comfort when they were also something else. She had never questioned it before. It had always felt like the same thing.
She stepped away from his hand.
"I'm fine," she said.
The silence behind her had a shape.
"You're not fine," Peter said, and the gentleness had shifted by a fraction — not gone, just recalibrated. "And there's no reason to be stubborn about it. This is what we do. This is what we've always—"
"I know what we've always done."
"Moonlight—"
"I said I'm fine."
She heard him exhale. Not quite a sigh. The sound of someone setting something aside for later.
She was not fine. She could feel it. Every drop of it as if it was bile, hurting her like silver against skin. It burned and it pierced and it hurt. And she couldn't understand how to make it stop. It had to stop. Somehow it had to.
Peter moved through the apartment like he belonged there — because he always had, because she had always let him — and Scarlett sat on the edge of the couch and looked at her own hands and tried to remember what it had felt like to want the things she was supposed to want.
"There's a girl," Peter said eventually, settling into the armchair across from her with that ease that made everything sound like a casual observation. "Works at the hospital. Night shift. She walks alone."
Scarlett looked up. "What of her? Did she also helped Kate?"
"You need to eat," he continued, meeting her eyes with something that looked almost like concern. "And hunting will help. It always does — clears the head, resets everything. You know this."
She did know this. She had known it for six years because he had told her, and it had been true, and she had never thought to question the shape of that truth.
"Since when do you encourage her to hunt people?" Derek's voice made her turn to look at him, before she shared a quiet glance with Peter.
Peter turned to look at Derek with an expression of mild curiosity, the kind he wore when something had mildly surprised him but not enough to be worth showing.
"Good morning to you too," he said.
Derek was leaning against the doorframe of the bedroom, arms crossed, still in yesterday's clothes. He hadn't been asleep. Scarlett could tell from the particular quality of his stillness — too controlled, too ready — that he had been lying in the dark listening for a while before deciding to come out.
"Mum never hunted like this," Derek said. "You know that. Even for—" His eyes moved briefly to Scarlett. "Everyone was expected to follow it."
"Your mother," Peter said pleasantly, "is not here."
"No." Derek's jaw tightened. "She's not. But you shouldn't be telling her this. This is dangerous."
"I've already killed humans, Derek..." she muttered, but she knew he could hear her. And she was surprised by her own voice, she would have said it proudly before...
Before...
But now, she felt like she could not look Derek in the eyes. Like he was Talia figuring out what was happening. What she had been doing.
"Since when?" Derek asked with a frown. "Since the fire?" Scarlett closed her eyes and looked away. And she could feel that Derek had got her answer.
"You?" he said, and Scarlett heard Peter chuckle.
The silence that followed had a specific weight to it — the weight of something that didn't need to be said because it was already in the room, had been in the room since before any of them arrived. Peter held Derek's gaze with that unhurried patience of his, the kind that wasn't really patience at all but the confidence of someone who knew they had already won.
Scarlett looked at her hands.
"How long," Derek said, and now he was looking at her, "have you been pointing at people for her to kill?"
"Derek—"
"That is against of what we are. And you know it, that's why you did it all in secret." His voice was even. Not accusatory — something closer to the careful tone of someone dismantling something they should have dismantled earlier. "My mother would have never allowed it. She believed the code existed for everyone. Not just us."
"Your mother believed many beautiful things," Peter said, standing now, moving toward the kitchen with that unhurried ease. "And she burned for them. In her own home." He filled a glass of water and set it on the counter without drinking it. "I loved my sister. But her beliefs did not save her. They did not save any of them." He looked at Derek with something almost gentle. "I always knew that we should have embrace our true natures. Love that nature and be proud of that. If we did, it might have ended differently. You might consider doing the same."
"And you agree with him?" Derek asked, this time turning towards her.
"Why? What is it that you are doing right now?" She asked in an hiss, and Derek glared at her, but he didn't answer. He was now part of Peter's pack too. And if he'd asked for Derek to kill someone, that someone had to die.
"Embrace who you are Derek," Peter said, his lips turned up into a smile, "And everything will be much more easier."
Derek looked at Peter for a long moment. Then he looked at Scarlett. Then he sat down.
It was the most Derek thing she had ever seen him do — swallow something whole and sit down with it, because the alternative was worse.
Peter's smile didn't change.
"Good," he said quietly. Not triumphant. Just noting the fact of it. He moved back toward the armchair and settled into it with that particular ease of his, and the morning light came through the windows and made everything look almost ordinary, and Scarlett looked at her hands and waited.
"Jackson Whittemore," Peter said.
Derek's jaw moved. "What about him."
"He's become a problem." Peter tilted his head slightly, the way he did when he was presenting something as self-evident. "He saw something he shouldn't have. He's been asking questions. And he wants the bite — which means he's paying attention in ways that are becoming inconvenient."
"So what," Derek said flatly. "We kill him."
"We remove the problem, yes."
"He's a teenager."
"He's a liability." Peter's voice didn't change. "Tonight. He drives home from practice alone. The route takes him past the east end of the preserve." He paused. "It won't take long."
Derek said nothing.
Scarlett was looking at the window. She knew the route Peter was describing. She had driven it herself, weeks ago, when she had still been the kind of person who filed away information like that without thinking twice about why she might need it.
"What about Scott?" Scarlett asked, her mind already drifting to another pair of brow eyes, and she had to force herself to pushed that image away.
"He will be otherwise occupied, my love," A small smile at the edge of his voice. "His mother has been very receptive. She's lonely. She'll answer the phone."
"You want to seduce her?" Scarlett asked with a frown.
"I might not be as good as you in this field," Scarlett looked away at Peter words, she could her his smirk from where she was seated "But you know I can, and I did. We've got a date tonight." Derek and Sacrlett shared a glance. She didn't even know why she did it. She was supposed to be alright with that plan.
What the hell did she care about the puppy's mother? Or Jackson Whittemore? They had to move to get what they wanted. Only that mattered. Only that.
Then her eyes moved towards the coffee table, where Stiles' DVD was laying there. And again that aweful feeling in her chest came back.
Stiles seemed to care about Scott's mother... and even if he hated him, she was sure he'd never want to see Jackson dead.
But why the hell do I care? She scolded herself. If that had to die, the would die. That was simple. It had felt simple. It should have felt simple. Why didn't it feel simple?
"So you two will kill Jackson," Peter said simply, "While I keep Scott occupied."
She met his eyes. "Yes."
The word came out the way words did when you said them to end a conversation rather than to mean them. Peter heard the difference — she knew he heard it, he always heard everything — but he let it go. He nodded once and stood, and moved toward the armchair with that unhurried way of his.
"Jackson," he said as he set down, turning slightly toward her. "What do you know about his schedule?"
She looked up.
The question was simple. She had the answer, sitting in her head the way all the small collected details sat, filed away without deciding to file them. Jackson stayed late on Thursdays. Weights after practice. He wouldn't leave until nine, maybe nine-thirty. She had known it since the second week of school and had never thought twice about the day she would have used it against him. And yet... no sound came out her mouth.
Peter was watching her. Not impatiently. Just watching, with that particular stillness of his that meant he had already noticed something and was waiting to see how long it took her to notice it too.
"Scarlett," he said firmly, somehow making her lower her head.
"Thursdays, today is thursday" she said finally. The word came out flat. "He'll stay until late." Her leg bounched nervously as she spoke.
Why do I even care what happen to Jackson Whittemore? She thought hardly, as her eyes moved to the DVD on the coffee table.
"That's my moonlight," Scalett took a breath at his words. "Well then, all is left is to kill him."
That was all it was left. Scarlett turned to Derek, he was standing behind the couch with his arms crossed and jaw tight but he didn't say nothing. He just nodded and turned to go back in the room.
She would have never thought of seeing Derek agree with Peter on something like that. She guessed that Jackson was becoming a real problem. An idiot that suck his nose in things bigger than him, just to be the best at lacross.
How pathetic, she thought.
She had never liked Jackson, he was an idiot. A jackass. But why wasn't she feeling excited? Why was she feeling so anxious?
What is happening?
She had grew to love hunting. She liked how humans were so weak. And now... now it didn't feel like that.
The DVD was there again, in front of her, and she could just stare, while that bile that wouldn't leave her alone came again. She stood up adruptly, a breath leaving her lips as she made her way to the window.
The street below was ordinary — a car passing, someone walking a dog, the flat grey light of a Thursday afternoon that didn't know or care what was happening in the apartment above it. She pressed her forehead lightly against the glass and felt the cold of it and tried to feel nothing else.
"Scarlett," Peter's voice came from behind her, making her close her eyes. "You look exausted."
Exausted... That was exactly how she felt. In her body, in her mind, in her still heart.
"I'm fine," she said. For what felt like the hundredth time that day.
"You keep saying that."
"You keep not believing me."
She heard him move — that unhurried shift of weight that meant he was coming closer, not to crowd her but to occupy the space beside her the way he always had, the way she had always found steadying. But it wasn't. For some reason it wasn't.
"Talk to me," he said. But she bit her lips with a shake of her head.
"There's nothing to say." She answered quietly.
"There's clearly quite a lot to say." Peters said, and she could feel his eyes on her. "No matter how much time passes, but we are always the same. And I can read you better than anyone." Scarlett took a breath a he spoke, but she didn't answer. "And I've noticed you keep looking at that DVD."
Her chest thightned, and her voice came out as a whisper, "What?"
"You think I didn't notice?" Peter asked, "I notice everything, darling."
She closed her eyes. She knew she did, somehow her eyes would always lend on that DVD. And her mind would go back at those beautiful honey brown eyes looking at her softly, before leaning forward and kissing her. She remember how he was warm against her cold touch. And she remembered how she smiled. Then like always her eyes started to sting once again.
"It's the bond," she answered, starting to hating the sound of the word itself. And the way her body would always react to it, and Stiles' memory. "It's... it's fucking with my head. It's driving me crazy. And I can't... I keep spiriling over and over and I don't know how to stop it."
She could feel him looking at her. That specific quality of his attention — patient, precise, the look of someone reading something carefully before deciding how to respond.
"Tell me what it feels like," he said.
A dry laugh escaped her lips, "It feels like hell," she answered. "I've never felt something like this."
After the fire, she was lost, alone and angry. But it all felt so linear, so clear. There was not confusion. The pain... she felt pain, but she had found a way to cope with that quite soon. Anger and revenge, those had been liberating feelings. She immediately knew what she had to do. And she had been willing to do that... but now...
Now something was broken. Something was missing.
"I feel so empty, Peter," she said finally. The word came out smaller than she intended. "There's a void. It doesn't — nothing fills it. Not anger, not—" She took a deep breath. "I went hunting yesterday. It was supposed to be easy, he was just a runner at night and... I couldn't." She remembered how she had followed the guy in the woods. Her fangs out, and he was there alone and it would have taken her less than a second. But she didn't.
"Anger fullfilled me so much after the fire," she said, "I've started with hunters, all of those I could find and then... then I just kept going on. Being what I'm supposed to be. And I am angry, I am, but he won't leave—" She stopped to try and not let other tears of blood running down her face. But she felt that hot sensation anyway. "He keeps coming back, and it's not just anger; it's... it's painful, it's terrible, it's... "
She stopped.
She didn't have the word for it. She had never needed the word for it before because she had never felt it before, not like this, not this specific combination of things that had no name she could reach.
"What is this?" She said as she pressed her hand harder against the glass. "Why can't I go back to who I was? When everything was so simple. Why do I keep thinking about him? Why do I keep missing him?" The words came out like something extracted against her will. "I miss him and I hate that I miss him and I hate that I can't stop and I hate that he's the one who—" She stopped again, closing her eyes to try and calm her mind. "What is this, Peter?"
He always knew how to help her. He had done it so many times. He had taught her everything that she knew. He surely knew what was happening to her.
"That," he said, "is exactly how a bond feels when it breaks."
He crossed toward her slowly, stopping just in front of her, and when he spoke again his voice was very quiet. Very deliberate. "The bond created a dependency. And when a dependency is broken the absence of it feels like loss. Feels like grief. Feels like something real was taken." He held her gaze. "But it wasn't real, Scarlett. Any of it."
Any of it?
She should have been happy, she should have been relieved. It was not real. I was never real. But then why her tears kept running down? Why was her chest thightening? Why did she keep remembering how much she had feared for him when he was in danger? Why did she keep remembering how much she liked his voice and his laugh, and how his body felt against hers?
"It... It felt real though," she whispered with trembling voice. "It... it feels so real, Peter."
"I know," Peter said.
His voice was very gentle. The gentleness of someone who had expected this and had already decided what to do with it.
"It feels real," he continued, "because it was designed to feel real. That's the function of a blood bond, Scarlett. It doesn't create a pale imitation of attachment — it creates something indistinguishable from the real thing. From the inside." A pause. "That's what makes it effective. And that's what makes it dangerous."
She said nothing.
"Think about what you know," he said quietly. "Not what you feel. What you know." He held up one finger. "You chose him deliberately. You chose him because he was useful — close to Scott, accessible, easy to control. You came to me and you asked me to attack him so that you could create the bond. Those are facts."
She closed her eyes.
She remembered. She had tried not to, for months, but she remembered — the coldness of that calculation, how clean it had felt, how simple. A means to an end. A necessary piece.
"You built this," Peter said. "You built it deliberately and it worked better than you expected and now you're standing at a window crying because you can't tell the difference between your own feelings and the thing you engineered." His voice was almost kind. "That's not real, Scarlett. That's a trap you built so well you fell into it yourself."
Could it be possible? Did all the vampire had those kind of feelings when they decided to use the bond?
"But... It felt so real--"
"My sweet," His voice was still gentle. "The bond doesn't stay static. It evolves. It deepens. It finds the parts of you that were already open and it fills them." A pause. "You were lonely, Scarlett. You had been lonely for six years. And he made you feel less alone."
Somehow it hurted, it hurted so much. It was not real? Any of that? But... but she thought she was supposed to feel different. She thought that she must have recognized what she was feeling from what she wasn't. But she didn't...
"No, it's... it's..." She said, "I used to be able to do this," she said quietly. "Look at humans and see what they were useful for. See what they could give me. And then take it." A breath. "I was good at it."
"You were exceptional at it," Peter said.
"And now I can't even look at Jackson Whittemore without—" She stopped. "Without thinking about what Stiles would say. What he would think. Whether he would—" Her jaw tightened. "I'm filtering everything through someone who told me he never wants to see me again. That's—" A short, broken sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "That's insane."
"Yes," Peter said simply. "It is."
"So tell me how to stop it," she turned to him. "Tell me how to stop this, please, Peter. I can't keep going on like this."
He looked at her for a moment. "You know how to stop this."
Scarlett's eyes grew larger at his words, the thightened in her chest getting almost painful as she shook her head. "No, Peter... no..."
"The bond lives in him," Peter said. "As long as he's alive, this is what your life looks like. This void, this inability to hunt, this—" He gestured briefly toward the broken phone on the floor. "This. Every morning. Indefinitely."
From Scarlett's eyes ran down more tears. "I don't want to do it," she said in a whisper, "Peter, I can't do it."
"But you have to, my love," Peter answered, "It'll seem impossible now as you think of it. But it'll be easier than that. This is your nature," Scarlett bit her lips, feeling her body tremble. "That's who you really are. You break the bond," he continued, "and you break the source. The dependency has nothing to hold onto. It closes." A pause. "And you come back. The real you — the one who knew what she was, who wasn't ashamed of it, who could walk into a room and take what she needed and feel good about it." His voice dropped slightly. "The one who was going to make Kate Argent pay for every single person she burned alive."
The night had arrived without her noticing.
She had set on her black bike for almost an hour, parked three blocks from the Stilinski house, hands flat on her thighs, eyes fixed on the gravel of the street. The engine was off. The heat had gone with it. The cold had come in slowly — feet first, then hands, then everywhere — and she had let it, because the cold was concrete and she needed something concrete to hold onto.
Derek had gone to Jackson.
Peter had gone to Scott's mother.
And she was here.
It's simple, she told herself. It's the simplest thing you've ever done.
She had killed people whose faces she no longer remembered. She had killed people she remembered perfectly. She had learned to do it without thinking, without lingering, without bringing anything home afterward. Peter had taught her that guilt was a human construction, that predators didn't stop to consider the meaning of what they were.
She was not human.
She never had been. Not enough.
The bond lives in him, Peter had said. As long as he's alive, this is what your life looks like.
She looked at her hands in the dark. Steady. Always steady, her hands — even that time with the silver wire at her throat, even the times she had thought she wouldn't make it. Her hands had always stayed steady.
But they were trembling, now.
She closed them into fists. Opened them again.
Don't think. Just go. And she got up from her bike.
The Stilinski house was dark when she reached it, except for one window on the ground floor. The living room, she thought. Or the kitchen. Stiles' car wasn't in the driveway.
Good, she thought. Good.
She stopped on the pavement across the street, in the shadow of a tree, and waited. She was good at waiting. She had always been good at waiting — she could stay still for hours if she needed to, no complaint from the body, no wandering from the mind. Before. Before, she had done it without effort.
Now her mind kept wandering.
She thought about the way he had laughed the first time he had told her something stupid — that laugh that came before his brain had finished the sentence, uncontainable, almost embarrassing. She thought about his hands. Warm. Always warm. She thought about the moment he had handed her the bag of pig's blood with the air of someone doing the most normal thing in the world, and she had felt something shift in her chest without understanding what it was.
Stop.
The front door opened.
Sheriff Stilinski came out onto the porch with a bottle in his hand — nearly empty, from the way he was holding it — and leaned against the railing for a moment, looking at the sky. Scarlett watched him from her shadow without moving. She watched him breathe in the cold night air, exhale slowly, then go back inside.
The living room light stayed on for another twenty minutes.
Then it went out.
Then the hallway light.
Then the stairs.
The house went completely dark.
Scarlett waited another ten minutes, counting the seconds without meaning to, and in those ten minutes she thought about all the things she should not have been thinking about. She thought about the DVD on her coffee table. She thought about his laugh. She thought about I don't want to see you, ever again and the door closing and the cold parking lot and the sound of his car getting smaller and smaller.
She thought about Peter saying this is what your life looks like. Every morning. Indefinitely.
She thought about her family.
She thought about Kate Argent still alive.
Go, she told herself. Stop thinking. Just go.
The kitchen window was open a crack — she had noticed it the week before too, one of those pieces of information she had collected without deciding to, filed away alongside everything else. Stiles always left the kitchen window open a crack in winter because he slept better with a little cold air, and she knew this because he had told her one evening while they were talking about nothing, and she had memorized it the way she memorized everything, and now that small useless piece of information was here, ready, doing the thing it had never been collected to do.
She went in without a sound.
The silence of the house was the specific silence of a place where someone is sleeping — different from an empty house, heavier, fuller. The man would have not been a problem. Alcohol did that — flattened sleep, made it dense and hard to break.
The smell hit her before anything else did. It was just him. His specific warmth, the particular combination of things that made up the way he smelled, layered into the walls and the furniture and the air of the house the way smells only get when someone has lived somewhere long enough for their presence to become part of it.
She stood in the kitchen doorway and breathed it in before she could stop herself.
And for a moment — just a moment — the void was not there.
In its place was something so much worse. Something warm and specific and completely unbearable that she recognized immediately and could not name without making it real.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
Stop.
She made herself look at the room instead. The kitchen. Just a kitchen — too many mugs on the counter, a dish drying on the rack, a jacket on the chair. His jacket, the one with the patch on the elbow he had never gotten fixed. On the kitchen table a mug with the dregs of cold coffee in the bottom.
She looked at the mug for a moment too long.
She looked away.
On the wall beside the refrigerator there were photographs — she had never looked at them properly before, had passed them a dozen times without stopping. She stopped now. She didn't know why she stopped. She should not have stopped.
A younger Stiles — seven, maybe eight — with a woman who had his same eyes, the same quality of expression, like the face was always about to say something. His mother. They were both laughing at something outside the frame, the kind of laugh that happened before you remembered someone was taking a picture. Beside it, another one — Stiles and Scott, maybe twelve years old, both of them making a face at the camera that suggested the face had been someone else's idea and they had committed to it anyway. And then a smaller one, tucked into the corner of the frame of the second — just the Sheriff and a very small Stiles, the boy asleep against his father's shoulder, the man looking at him with an expression that had no performance in it at all.
She looked at those photographs for a long time. And then she foced herself to turn away.
Go to the living room, she told herself, her voice hard and internal and allowing nothing. Sit down. Wait. When he comes in, do what you came to do.
Simple.
She moved toward the living room.
She sat on the couch, in the shadow where the streetlight didn't reach. Hands on her knees. Back straight. Eyes on the front door.
But the smell was everywhere in this house. And the photographs were on the wall in the kitchen behind her. And the jacket was on the chair. And somewhere upstairs the Sheriff was breathing in the slow deep rhythm of a man who had drunk enough to stop feeling whatever he'd been feeling, and the house was quiet around all of it, and the quiet had a quality she recognized from her own apartment — the specific silence of a place where someone lives alone and is managing it.
She sat in the dark and tried to think of nothing.
The problem was that even thinking of nothing still had the same shape it always did.
His shape.
And then she heard it — the specific sound of his car turning onto the street, the engine she had learned without meaning to, the one she would have recognized anywhere — and something in her chest did something she had no name for, and her hands went very still, and she understood, in that moment, sitting in his living room in the dark with his smell around her and those photographs on the wall behind her and her hands finally still, that she was not going to be able to do this.
She understood it the way you understand something that has always been true and you have simply been refusing to look at directly.
She sat with that understanding for the three seconds it took his car to pull into the driveway.
Then the headlights swept across the living room wall and she heard the engine cut and the door open and close and his footsteps on the path, and she did not move, and she did not run, and she did not think about Peter or the void or Kate Argent or any of it.
She just sat there and waited for him to find her and did not let herself think about what came next.
The front door opened and closed and she heard him drop his keys on the hallway table — that specific sound, the small metallic scatter of them — and she heard him exhale, long and tired, the kind of exhale that belonged to someone who had been holding something heavy for hours and hadn't found anywhere to put it down yet.
She stayed where she was, on the couch, in the half-dark of the living room.
Now, she told herself. Get up. Now.
She heard his footsteps. The third step creaking the way it always did. The turn of the hallway.
She stood.
It was automatic — the way her body responded to a target, to proximity, to the specific calculation of distance and angle and timing that she had run a thousand times without thinking. She felt her fangs drop before she had decided anything, the familiar ache of them, the readiness of it, her whole system orienting toward the sound of his footsteps the way it had always oriented toward prey.
Now. Before he sees you. One movement.
She had done this in the dark a hundred times. She had done it faster than thought, cleaner than intention. This was what she was. This was what she had always been, underneath everything else, underneath all the months of cafeteria tables and lacrosse games and stupid movies and his laugh that came before the joke —
He came through the door with his jacket half-open and his eyes on the floor.
She didn't move.
He was already moving toward the kitchen, his eyes still down, one hand going to the back of his neck in that gesture he had when he was tired and didn't know what to do with his own body, and she was standing three feet away in the shadow and she could hear his heartbeat and she had not moved and she did not understand why she had not moved—
Do it. Now. Before he looks up.
His heartbeat. She could hear every beat of it. She had heard it for months — in the school hallways and the parking lot and in the dark of her own apartment when she was trying not to think about it — and she knew its rhythms the way she knew the rhythms of this house, the way she knew his laugh and his jacket and the cold coffee dregs in the mug on the kitchen table.
Her fangs were still out.
She looked at the back of his head.
And something in her chest collapsed. It was simply the absence, suddenly, of the ability to do the thing she had come here to do — as complete and final as a light going out, as quiet as a door that closes without slamming. The calculation her body had been running stopped mid-step and left nothing in its place except the specific, precise weight of how much she had missed him.
Her fangs retracted.
The breath that came out of her was not steady.
She pressed her hand over her mouth, fast, but it was too late — a small sound had already escaped, barely anything, barely audible, the kind of sound a person makes when something hurts and they were trying very hard not to let it show.
He stopped.
His whole body went still.
Then, slowly, he turned around.
The silence stretched between them like something held.
She didn't move. He didn't move. The hallway light was behind him and it put his face half in shadow, and she could see the exact moment he found her in the dark — the slight shift of his eyes, the way his body registered her presence before his mind had finished processing it.
She felt her eyes sting.
Don't.
He was still looking at her. His expression was doing several things at once — fear, and something underneath the fear that wasn't quite anger yet, and underneath that something she recognized and wished she didn't because it made everything so much worse.
He was still looking at her the way he always looked at her.
Even now. Even after everything.
She had been certain that look was gone. She had replayed the parking lot in her head for three days and told herself that look was gone, that she had used it up, that she had spent it and there was nothing left of it and that was why she had to come here and do what she had come here to do.
His heartbeat was very loud in her ears. Unsteady. Getting louder, or maybe she was just listening harder, or maybe the distance between them felt smaller than three feet and the room felt smaller than it was and all she could hear was that heartbeat she had memorized without meaning to and had not been able to stop hearing for three days no matter how far away she got.
"How did you get in here?"
"The window," she said quietly. "In the kitchen. It was open."
He stared at her. Then he looked toward the stairs, the instinct of it fast and involuntary, and she knew what he was thinking before he said it.
"He's sleeping," she said. "I'm not here for him."
"Then why are you here." Not a question. The flatness of it landed in her chest like a stone dropping into water.
She stood up from the couch, slowly, and she watched him watch her do it, watched him calculate the distance between them and the distance to the door, and hated that she could see him doing it, hated that she had made him someone who calculated distances.
"I needed to see you," she said.
"You needed—" He laughed, short and terrible. "You needed to see me. Okay. Okay, great." He moved, not toward her, away from her, into the living room but along the wall of it, keeping the coffee table between them, his hands going to his hair. "You broke into my house because you needed to see me."
"I know how it sounds."
"Do you?" He turned. "Do you actually know how it sounds, or is that just something you're saying?"
"Stiles—"
"Because from where I'm standing it sounds insane." He was moving again, restless, his hands dropping from his hair to gesture at nothing in particular. "It sounds like something a person does when they have completely lost the—" He stopped himself. Pressed his lips together. "What do you want?"
"It is supposed to be so simple," she said, and heard her own voice come out strange, too controlled, like something recited. "Peter is right. It's the bond. It's all the bond. He said that distance would make a difference but it doesn't. It won't stop, it won't break. It doesn't leave me alone. And I have to. I can't keep going on like this... it is supposed to be simple." Something cracked in her voice and she pushed through it. "It should be simple, but then... then you walked in. And I looked at you. And I couldn't."
She let out a shaky breath.
"I can't," she said again, and this time it came out furious. "And I don't understand that. I should have been able to. It should have been simple, it was supposed to be simple... Why is it not simple, Stiles?" The last part left her lips like a plea. Like she was begging him to give her an answer, because it didn't make sense. Knowing it was the bond hadn't been able to explain what was wrong with her, nothing had been able to help her understand. Not even Peter...
Stiles had gone very still.
She could see him working through it — the way his eyes moved, the small shift in his expression as the meaning of her words settled into place. The process of it was almost unbearable to watch.
"Simple," he repeated slowly. "You said it was supposed to be simple."
She didn't answer, her hands twitching at her sides.
"What was supposed to be simple, Scarlett?"
The way he said her name was different now. Careful. The way you speak when you're walking toward something you're not sure you want to reach.
She shook her head. "Please don't."
"I want you to say it."
"Stiles—"
"Say it." His voice didn't rise. That was the worst part.
"Please." The word left her like something torn. "Please don't make me say it." Her voice broke on the last syllable, and what came after wasn't controlled at all. "Don't make me say it, please, Stiles, please—" Her hands had come up without her realizing it, as she made a step, but he immediately got away. His eyes glistening in the dark and her chest thightened painfully.
"You don't even have the courage to say it," he said, as he kept looking at her.
"Stiles, please don't—"
"You came here to kill me."
The words landed between them like something dropped from a height. She felt them hit and didn't move.
He said it again, quieter. "That's what was supposed to be simple?"
She had known, driving here. She had known, sitting in the dark on his couch, listening to the familiar sounds of his street, waiting. She had known it the way she knew everything she did — cleanly, without flinching, without looking at it sideways. It had been a plan. A solution. The only logical next step.
But hearing it in his voice.
His voice.
Something cracked open in her chest so suddenly that she made a sound — small, involuntary, nothing like her — and her hand came up to her mouth before she could stop it.
"I—"
Something broke open behind her eyes. She felt the sting first, then the warmth on her cheeks, and she didn't bother raising her hand to stop it.
"Stiles—" she said again, and this time it came out wrecked, nothing left to hold it together. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't--"
"Okay," he said. Just that. One word, very quiet, and he turned away from her and put both hands flat on the back of the armchair and stood there with his head down, breathing.
She stood in the half-dark and watched him and felt the weight of what she had almost done settle over the room like something physical.
"I couldn't," she said again. It came out desperate, reaching.
"I know." He didn't turn around. "You already said that."
"Then why won't you—"
"Because knowing you couldn't doesn't make it okay that you tried, Scarlett!" He spun back, and now his voice had finally broken open, the careful quiet of it gone. "You came into my house. You sat in the dark and you waited. You were going to—"
"I know!" The word tore out of her. "I know what I was going to do. I know what I am." Her hands were shaking. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. I know exactly what I am and I looked at you and I still couldn't. I can't. And I don't—" Her voice broke completely. "I don't know what that makes me. I don't know what any of this makes me. But I can't, and you're the only reason, and I need to know why."
He observed her, his eyes glistening and wide as she cried.
"I don't understand it," she said, and it came out almost angry, almost desperate, both things at once and neither of them enough. "I don't understand what you did to me. I was fine. I was completely fine before—"
"Don't." His voice came out low and dangerous in a way she hadn't heard from him before. "Don't you dare make this about what I did to you."
"That's not what I—"
"You had me attacked." The words landed like something thrown. "You planned it. You chose me. You sat across from me for months knowing what you'd done and you—" He stopped. His jaw thightening. "You let me think you were—" He laughed, and it was the worst sound she'd ever heard from him. "God. What did you think was going to happen, Scarlett? What was the plan, exactly? Use the bond, get close to Scott, help the alpha with your revenge, and then what? I just — disappear? You move on?"
"I don't know," she said.
"You don't know."
"I didn't think—"
"No, you did think." He took a step toward her, the coffee table still between them, and there was something in his face she had never seen before — not just hurt, not just anger, something rawer and more specific than either. "You thought very carefully. You played me very carefully." He let out a laugh. "And I knew something was wrong! I knew it, like when you screamed when the Alpha roared at school. I knew something was wrong and I didn't—"
He stopped to take a breath, like he was trying to calm himself. "It was never real."
More tears left Scarlett's eyes.
"It's not true." The words came out before she could shape them. "It's not like that, Stiles, I swear to you—"
"Don't."
"Listen to me—"
"I said don't." His voice cracked on it. "Because you're going to stand there and tell me it was real and I'm going to want to believe you and I can't— I can't keep doing that. I can't keep being the person who believes you."
She opened her mouth, but he didn't let her talk.
"Don't," he said. "Don't say anything. Just— let me—"
He turned away. His hand went to his face, pressing hard against his eyes for a moment, and she stood very still and watched him and didn't speak.
When he turned back his eyes were red and wet and something in his face had shifted — the anger still there, underneath, but something else on top of it now. Something more exposed.
"I was happy," he said.
The words came out quiet and completely destroyed.
"I was actually — I was happy. Do you know how—" He laughed, and it broke in the middle. "I was so sure. I've never been that sure about anything."
Scarlett felt the tears come harder.
"Stiles—"
"I felt it," he said. "Whatever the bond does, whatever it is — I felt it and I thought it was—" He shook his head. "I thought it was just you. I thought it was just how you made me feel. But you built this."
Scarlett shook her head at his words, "No, Stiles—"
He pressed his lips together hard. "I want to believe you. That's the worst part. I'm standing here and I know everything you did and I still—"
He stopped himself.
Something closed in his face. Deliberate. The way you shut a window before a storm.
"No," he said quietly. To himself. "No."
"Stiles, please—"
"That's exactly what you do." His voice had gone somewhere flat and careful. "That's exactly how you do it. You say something true enough that I can't tell where the truth stops. And I start to—" He shook his head. "And I can't. I can't let you do this again."
She saw the tears before he could stop them — two, quick, running down his face while his jaw stayed tight and his eyes stayed on her — and something inside her split clean open.
"Stiles—"
"I want you out of my house," and then she felt it as soon as he spoke. The pull. Low and steady and inexorable, starting somewhere in her chest and moving outward through her limbs, her feet shifting back without permission, her body beginning to understand what his words had already decided.
"No." The word left her in a breath. "No, Stiles, please—"
"I want you to leave." He said it again, and his voice was wet and wrecked and it didn't matter, it didn't matter because the pull was stronger now, her feet moving backward through the hallway whether she told them to or not.
"Please don't do this." She reached for the doorframe, her fingers finding the wood, holding. "Please, I'm asking you, please—"
He came after her, slowly, his eyes still wet, his face doing something she had no name for, and he stopped just inside the threshold and looked at her and said, very quietly, "You're not welcome here anymore."
The force took her.
It wasn't violent. It was worse than violent — steady and impersonal, like gravity, like something that had always been true and was only now being enforced. Her fingers lost the doorframe. Her feet found the porch. The cold air hit her all at once and then her knees hit the wood and she was on the ground, both hands flat against the porch boards, the impact jarring up through her palms.
She looked up at him.
He was standing in the doorway. His face was wet. His eyes were on her and they didn't look away.
"Stiles." Her voice came out wrecked, from the ground, from her knees. "Stiles, please. Please let me in. Please."
He didn't move.
"I can't." The words barely made it out of him. "I can't, Scarlett."
She got to her feet. Slowly. Her hands shaking. She took one step toward the door and felt the boundary meet her — invisible, absolute, like a wall made of nothing — and stopped.
"Don't do this." She pressed her hand flat against the air at the threshold, against the nothing that was everything, and felt it hold. "Please, Stiles, please!"
Then he reached out.
And closed the door, slowly and deliberately.
The wood passed through her fingers — through the space where her hand had been pressed — and met the frame with a sound that was very small and completely final.
"No." The word left her before she could stop it. Her palm found the door, flat against the wood now, real and solid and shut. "No, Stiles — Stiles, please. Please open the door. Please." Her voice broke apart on the last word and she didn't try to hold it together. "Please. Please just open the door."
Nothing.
"Stiles."
The silence on the other side was enormous.
And then — so quiet she almost missed it — she heard him.
His back finding the door. The slow exhale of someone sitting down on the other side of it, knees up, head falling back against the wood.
And then he cried.
Quiet. Ragged. The specific sound of someone who had been holding something for a very long time and had finally, completely run out of the strength to keep holding it.
She stood on the porch with her palm pressed flat against the door and felt her own tears sliding hot down her face and didn't move.
Slowly, her legs gave.
She sank down onto the cold boards of the porch, her back against the door, her knees pulled up, the night wide and silent around her. On the other side of the wood she could feel him — the warmth of him, the specific weight of him against the same door — and she pressed her hand harder against it as if she could reach through.
She couldn't.
She pressed her forehead to the wood instead.
His heartbeat on the other side. Unsteady. Too fast. Slowing, very gradually, the way a storm slows after it has said everything it had to say.
She stayed.
The cold settled around her and the night stretched wide and neither of them moved and the door stood between them, thin as a breath, solid as everything.