Housebound with the Blackridge Heirs novel Chapter 85

Chapter 85

Chapter 85

Caden

The first night Maya ran from me, I thought I could handle it.

I thought if I chased her fast enough, if I stayed close enough, if I refused to let her vanish beyond my reach, then everything would eventually right itself.

I thought she would wake up the next morning, look at me with those warm determined eyes, and we would figure it out together.

But then the second night came.

And the third.

And then the fourth when she shifted without even opening her eyes, bolting into the woods like something inside her had already claimed the direction of her feet.

Somewhere around the eighth night, I realized I was losing her in ways I did not know how to stop.

Sleep became a rumor, something I had memories of, but hadn’t experienced in what felt like years. My body ran only on adrenaline and fear, while my mind ran on the memory of her collapsing unconscious in my arms under the moonlight.

Every night she slipped through our fingers. Every dawn we brought her back home. Every day she remained unresponsive in her bed, breathing softly but absent in every way that mattered.

For three weeks I lived in that loop. Three weeks of chasing her through cold forests, of praying she didn’t cross paths with Rohan, and of half-fights and half-conversations with Tylon because he was the only person alive who understood the sheer terror of watching someone you care about vanish into shadow without a single warning.

And that wasn’t even with the stress of Leo.

Leo’s stillness was its own kind of torture. His breathing remained steady, his pulse slow but present and his body warm but unmoving. It felt wrong to sit beside him and not hear him complain about me and Tylon’s hotheadedness, or laugh at the ridiculous things Maya said to fill the silence.

It felt wrong to speak to him and not have him open his eyes. I hated watching him lie there with that same calm expression, as if waiting for something I couldn’t give him.

I tried talking to him anyway. I told him he needed to wake up and that Maya needed him too. I also apologized profusely not reaching him fast enough.

Yet, none of it changed anything.

Leo still lay there in quiet. His wolf healed every scratch and bruise on the surface, yet his neck remained broken, and it was like something deeper inside him refused to move.

In the meantime, everything else in my life frayed at the edges.

The only reason I hadn’t completely lost my mind was because Tylon was losing his in the same house.

We moved around each other in a tense sort of orbit, all rough corners and sharp silences, yet somewhere in the middle of it there was a strange kind of respect.

I didn’t like him being mated to Maya, and he didn’t like me being the one who had her.

But we both loved her, and that was enough.

Knowing that she was tied to him too lit a fresh fire of anger in my chest every time it surged across the edge of my awareness. I hated it. I hated that the bond between us was no longer just ours. I hated that fate had decided to tangle my mate’s soul with another Alpha and then drag Leo into it as well.

The nights were the worst. We took turns watching her, whenever we needed food, sleep or bathroom breaks to ensure she didn’t leave. Yet, she somehow always slipped passed us.

What made it worse was that Aelera didn’t speak to me through my wolf. There was no warning, no explanation, no nothing. Maya simply shifted and bolted.

I called for Aelera more than once. I tried to reach her through my wolf, tried to demand answers as her mate. But she never answered.

Either she didn’t want to, or she was too bound by whatever force called her in the first place.

In the daylight, we channeled everything into the only thing we could control: hunting Rohan.

Tylon and I merged our patrol units, sending search parties deeper into the territories than we ever had before.

We found tracks sometimes, fleeting marks in the mud that hinted he had been there and gone hours before. But we never found him.

It bruised our egos that a rogue Alpha was able to evade us like this. If he was even a rogue.

But the longer it went on, the more the same question gnawed at me. When Maya ran at night, was she running away from us or toward him?

The thought hollowed me out from the inside. A part of me knew it was not fair to even think it. She hadn’t once chosen Rohan. She had fought him.

Yet whatever old power moved inside her now was older than any of us. And to me, it seemed like that power knew him.

What if that ancient memory was trying to bring her to him again?

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