Ithilien stood exactly where he had left her.
For a few seconds she did not move at all, as though the room itself had frozen around her. The kitchen looked the same as before—the sink half full of dishes, droplets sliding down the windowpane, the faint smell of soap and wet porcelain lingering in the air. Nothing had changed.
Except something inside her...
"You're still waiting for him."
The sentence echoed in her mind with a stubborn clarity she could not push away. She inhaled slowly, steadying herself, forcing her shoulders to remain relaxed. It was an old reflex, that composure. Years of practice had taught her how to wear calm like armor.
He doesn't understand.
That was the first thought that rose automatically, familiar and safe.
Of course he didn't understand. Kidd was a stranger, an alpha from another territory, a man who had stumbled into a situation far more complicated than he could possibly grasp. Wolves like him lived in simpler structures: loyalty, territory, hierarchy. Decisions made cleanly and carried out without hesitation.
He had no idea what it meant to live with a bond that refused to die.
He had no idea what it meant to be tied to someone whose life had moved on without you.
So his words shouldn't matter. They shouldn't have carried any weight at all.
And yet somewhere at the farthest edge of her consciousness something had cracked open. Not loudly, not dramatically—just enough to let a cold realization seep through the barrier she had so carefully built around it.
Waiting.
Ithilien pressed her palms against the edge of the counter and stared down at the wet porcelain in the sink, watching the water swirl around the drain.
She wasn't waiting. She had told herself that so many times it had become a truth she rarely questioned. She wasn't waiting! She had accepted reality. She had moved forward. She had built a new life in a new place, far from Evergreen, far from the pack that had once defined every part of her existence.
She had accepted that Ace had chosen.
Chosen duty. Chosen his pack.
Chosen someone else.
Her fingers tightened against the counter. Then she heard Kidd's footsteps fade somewhere in the hallway. A moment later the front door opened.
Closed.
And just like that his presence disappeared from the house. The shift was immediate.
Until that moment she had not realized how much space his aura had occupied, how strongly it pressed against her senses even when he stood across the room pretending calm control. Now the house felt abruptly hollow, the air cooler and strangely empty.
The silence rushed in like water filling a space where something heavy had just been removed.
Ithilien stood there for another few seconds, listening to it.
Then her hands slipped from the counter.
She sank down slowly, her knees hitting the kitchen floor harder than she expected. The shock of it barely registered before the rest of her followed, her back sliding against the cabinet until she was sitting on the cold tiles with her arms wrapped around herself.
The first breath she tried to take came out wrong.
Her chest tightened as though something had wrapped around it from the inside, squeezing until the air refused to move properly through her lungs. She pressed a hand against her mouth, but it did nothing to stop the sound that escaped her.
A broken inhale.
Another.
And then the tears came.
Not quiet ones. Not the kind that could be wiped away quickly before anyone noticed.
Her body shook with it, shoulders trembling as the sobs forced their way out in uneven bursts she could no longer control. Each breath came in spasms, too fast and too shallow, as though her body had forgotten how to breathe normally.
It hurt. Everything hurt. Not the sharp kind of pain that arrives suddenly and fades quickly, but the deep, familiar ache that lived somewhere behind her ribs—a place that had never fully healed no matter how much time had passed.
Ace.
The thought of him arrived without warning, as vivid and merciless as the first day she had realized what his choice truly meant.
He was alive - that had always been the cruelest part of it.
Alive, somewhere far away, living a life that no longer had space for her.
The bond still existed. It pulsed faintly in the back of her awareness like a distant heartbeat, impossible to sever completely.
But the man attached to it was gone. Gone in every way that mattered.
Ithilien pressed her forehead against her knees, curling inward as another wave of sobs shook through her chest.
She had known this for years, she had accepted it.
Hadn't she?
But hearing it spoken aloud—hearing someone else see the truth so clearly and throw it back at her without hesitation—had torn open something she had worked desperately to keep closed.
You're still waiting for him.
"No," she whispered hoarsely into the empty kitchen. Her voice sounded small in the silence. "I'm not…"
But the words carried no conviction, and even she could hear it.
The house remained quiet around her, the rain tapping softly against the window. Marco was gone. Kidd was gone. The air carried no other presence, no other warmth, no other energy to distract her from the truth pressing against her chest.
The kitchen felt too large, too empty.
And for the first time in a long while Ithilien allowed herself to cry without restraint, the sound of it echoing softly through the silent house as the weight of a loss she had never truly escaped settled over her once again.