My stomach twists as fragments start lining up in my head, the ease of that night, the way my guard dropped without me realizing it, the calm that settled in my chest when they were close. “I thought I was just being reckless.” I say. “Or stupid.”
Axel shakes his head. “No. You were responding to something that’s been part of you longer than fear.”
Silence settles for a moment, broken only by the steady beeping of the monitors, and then Atticus’s gaze sharpens, shifting to something more focused. “The wolfsbane.” He says. “We didn’t know about that. If we had, things would have gone very differently.”
My throat tightens. “What do you mean?”
“It suppresses instincts,” Axel explains, his expression darkening. “It dulls the bond, clouds recognition, weakens healing, and taken long term it
