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Leanna sighs, resting her hand on my shoulder. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Maya. Your mom wouldn’t want this for you.”

“I know,” I whisper, the words sticking in my throat. “But I see no future, no one in it. Everywhere I look, it’s just me, by myself. It was always Mom and me, but now…She died in there, Leanna, alone, scared, and it haunts me. God, it doesn’t stop.”

“It will.” Leanna forces me to look at her. “It will once Griffin finds the culprits and punishes them. Once they pay for what they did, your heart will feel at ease.”

I give her a weak smile. “I don’t think Griffin is really looking into the matter. He’s just trying to say anything he can to get me to stay and work on the antidote. I was a fool once. I won’t be one again.”

My friend leans against me. “You don’t know how messed up Griffin has been.”

“Everybody keeps saying that!” I burst out. “He’s the one who chose Aria, Leanna. You saw them. He sent me a dress, wrote all sorts of fake promises. He wanted to humiliate me. That’s all. He was the one who kept harping on about the fated mate crap. I didn’t even want to be a fated mate. And once he had me well fucked and falling for him, he decided to discard me, to throw me away like I was nothing. Fine, maybe he couldn’t come back, maybe he never got the message, but he still—Why did he have to break my heart? I didn’t deserve to be treated like that! I did nothing to him. He should have just stayed away from me—”

Leana covers my mouth, stopping me. “There are some things you don’t know, Maya.”

I lower her hand, feeling myself deflate. Letting out a heavy sigh, I admit, “Maybe. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“Are you sure you believe that?” She lifts one eyebrow.

“It doesn’t matter, Leanna. His reasons don’t matter. The fact is that I’m just tired of everything. I don’t want him coming back into my life and throwing things off course. I’m fine with my life the way it is.”

“But are you happy?”

My friend’s question makes me smile bitterly. “Why does that matter?”

“It matters to me,” Leanna leads me back into the room and sits me down on the edge of the bed. “It would’ve mattered to you mother.”

I look away, and she sits down beside me, holding my hands. “Here’s what I think happened. He broke your heart because, like my Cedric, he’s an idiot most of the time. When Helen died, you needed him, and he wasn’t there, and that broke something else in you because you had begun to trust him.”

I pull my hands away from her. “That’s a fun story, Leanna, but I have things to do. I need to get to work, and you—” I pause, knowing how harsh my tone just was. “You should go home to your family. Stop wasting your time on me. I’m happy I got to see you, but your life and mine are very different, and I just—Don’t let me fuck up your life, too, okay? I want you to be happy and safe. Go home.”

Saying that, I leave my quarters, feeling a dull headache throbbing between my ears.

Chapter Sixteen

Griffin Wild

The morning sun filters through the palace windows, casting long shadows across the marble floors. I stand at the glass door of the laboratory, watching them work together—Maya and Mathew, her purple-haired assistant from Seattle. They move in perfect synchrony, anticipating each other’s needs without speaking. When she holds out her hand, he places a pipette in it. When he frowns at a sample, she adjusts the microscope settings without being asked.

Two weeks she’s been here, and I’ve never seen her smile—except with him.

It’s a small thing, barely a curve of her lips, but it’s there when he makes some ridiculous joke or pretends to swoon dramatically over a particularly promising test result. Her laughter, rare and precious, floats across the lab, and each time I hear it, something twists painfully in my chest.

“You’re staring again,” Erik says quietly, appearing at my side.

I don’t look away from the scene before me. “I’m observing the progress of our kingdom’s most important scientific endeavor.”

Erik snorts. “You’re observing Maya like a starving man watches a feast.”

“She’s my mate,” I say simply, as if that explains everything. And it does, to me at least.

“A mate who doesn’t want you within ten feet of her,” Erik points out. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you circle the lab like a ghost, never entering when she’s there.”

I finally tear my gaze away from Maya to look at my brother. “She needs space.”

“She needs help,” Erik counters, his voice dropping lower. “Have you seen how much weight she’s lost since she arrived? Jerry says she barely eats. The staff report she hasn’t touched her breakfast in days.”

A muscle in my jaw tightens. I’ve noticed. Of course I’ve noticed. The hollows under her cheekbones grow more pronounced by the day. The blue of her veins stands out starkly against her pale skin. But I’ve also seen how she flinches whenever I approach, how her heartbeat accelerates with stress rather than desire.

“I can’t force her to eat,” I say, though the wolf in me howls at the thought of my mate going hungry.