Page 228 of Knot Unwanted: Part One

Stone pauses suddenly, color draining from his skin, and I’m about to ask why just as the scent of sage and rain hits me. Finn.

I turn to find him standing there at the entrance to the kitchen, gaze locked on Stone.

The temperature in the kitchen seems to drop ten degrees. My chest constricts as I watch Finn go impossibly still. He’s grippingthe doorframe so hard his fingers look strained, and his scent—gods, his scent. The sage and rain turns sharp, acidic, with shock.

“What bond?” His voice is barely a whisper.

None of us move. None of us breathe. The silence stretches, thick and suffocating, broken only by the distant sound of the wind playing in the leaves outside.

Movement at Finn’s back and a moment after, Hailey appears. She’s staring at us and the fragile scared omega we took in isn’t there anymore. The look of shock on her face quickly morphs into horror as her gaze slides to Finn.

Fuck, they were supposed to be sleeping.

Hailey reaches for Finn, wraps her arm around his arm as she presses herself into his side, her instincts moving before thought.

Because she can feel it. Without me having to voice anything. She can feel Finn’s heart breaking in two. Just like mine is.

Just like Stone’s.

“What bond?” Finn takes a single step into the kitchen. “What are you talking about?”

“Finn,” Stone starts, but stops when Finn holds up a hand.

“You’re talking about the accident.” His voice is eerily calm now. Too calm. “The same accident that gave me these, right?” He lifts his shirt to reveal the network of scars across his torso.

Just the sight of them and guilt almost suffocates me.

I exchange a quick glance with Stone, whose face has gone ashen. We never told him. After he woke up from that coma, after everything…we never told him how close we came to losing him completely. How for three minutes and forty-two seconds, wedidlose him.

“You’ve been keeping secrets.” Finn says, and now there’s a tremor in his voice. He swallows hard. “Youliedto me.”

The betrayal in his voice cuts deeper than any blade. I take a half-step forward, but Finn backs away.

“The bond,” he says again. “What happened to our bond?”

None of us answer. None of us can. How do you tell someonethat the thing connecting you—the thing that made you pack, made you family—snapped the moment their heart stopped beating? That we felt it break, felt it shatter into pieces that never quite fit back together?

That we’ve been wounded ever since, hoping it would repair itself, but it never did?

“Finn,” Stone tries again, but Finn is already backing toward the door.

“You know what,” he whispers. “Fuckyou.”

He turns and walks away, his steps unnaturally steady. For a moment, Hailey watches him go, her back turned to us. And then, when she finally turns to face us, the hurt and accusation in her eyes is enough to break even me.

We hear as she hurries after him and catches him on the stairs, murmuring, and then footsteps as they climb higher. A door closing. Not slamming. Just… closing.

Somehow, that’s worse.

“Well,” I say into the silence, my voice sounding strange to my own ears. “I guess now he knows.”

Stone makes a sound like he’s been shot all over again.

Two years. We’ve kept this secret for two and a half years, thinking we were protecting him. Thinking if we just pretended hard enough, loved him fiercely enough, it wouldn’t matter that the bond was fucking hanging by a string. That it would mend itself and we’d be alright again.

Now, listening to the quiet sounds of movement upstairs—Finn pacing, probably, trying to process what he’s learned—I wonder if we’ve just made the biggest mistake of all.

Because some secrets, once revealed, change everything.

---