That little dorm room had become my refuge away from everything and everyone. It was the one place I could call my own. Not only that, but there were the issues with the breach of security at the academy. I wasn’t going to run away and leave my friends and classmates that remained to face whatever evil was lurking around the campus without me.
I wouldn’t run away from my problems ever again. This was my era of facing them head on, even when it was the harder path to take.
Standing up straight and pulling the band of my leggings up, I doubled down. “No, I’m still sticking to my choice. But you can come visit me, remember?”
Our previous scheduled time together sounded awful now that I actually wanted to spend time with him. Only seeing him on the weekends wasn’t going to cut it, but I was aching to spend more time with Lincoln and to have the opportunity to talk to Andrei without his father around, so Drake would have to come to me and be around them during the week.
He grumbled his begrudging understanding before ushering me out of the room once he was fully dressed in his dark navy suit. Damn, he was so beautiful. “We need to stop by the library in my office before grabbing you some blood in the kitchen.”
My curiosity was piqued as I glanced up at him out of the corner of my eye. “Oh?”
His face was guarded, and as I tried to focus on how he was feeling, I got a sense of confusion from him. Channeling into his head, I got small pieces. Naturally, he’d always erected a solid wall around his mind as a defense mechanism, so he was working on letting me in slowly.
Bond.
Unusual.
Think he’d seen it before, though.
All night, I’d felt such contentness and warmth from him as I could feel him thinking about the bond, but this was the first time I’d picked up on something unusual.
As if he sensed me prodding his brain, he tossed me a lop-sided smirk as he turned the corner and guided me toward two large, dark double doors. “I promise I’ll let you know when I find what I’m looking for. I don’t want to misspeak on the matter before I can read up on it. It’s not something I remember the details of well.”
Uncertainty bled through me as anxiety knotted my insides.
A beautiful, curved wall of books on black, worn bookcases stared back at me as he pushed the doors open and strode inside. A heavy desk sat in the middle of the room atop a large, silver area rug. Two oversized chairs sat on either side of a small side table to the left of the room near the only window providing natural light.
Striding to the middle of the sun rays, I soaked in the warmth seeping in through the window as they hit my back. I watched Drake with rapt attention as he scratched at his beard, walking from one end of the room to the other, scouring the shelves for a book. He pulled an occasional few out, glancing at the front cover before mumbling to himself, “No, no. It’s here somewhere,” before placing them back.
As he reached for the top shelf on the bookcase closest to me, I mentally oohed and ahhed over the beautiful, dark purple leather-bound book that he pulled down. It had intricate gold fonts and symbols etched into the spine and cover, reflecting in the sun as he pulled it open.
A thrill ran through me, and I rushed over to sit in the empty chair across from him as he did the same. His eyes tracked the words on the page with single-minded focus as he furiously flipped through the pages. Finally, he must have found what he was looking for as he exclaimed, “Aha! I knew I’d seen it before. Have a look,Comoara.”
Turning the book around, he extended it to my greedily waiting hands. Snatching it from him, I quickly scanned the top left of a passage next to a drawing of three dots with a line through it after settling it on top of my thighs.
My pointer finger brushed across the rough parchment as I read the dark, sprawling script out loud. “Although this has only occurred once in our recorded history, there remains the near impossible chance of what they called theConiuncta, a soul bond involving the alignment of multiple souls.”
My breath caught in my throat. Was he saying this was us?
Flicking my gaze up, I found his eyes trained on me, raptly listening as he rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “Go on,” he encouraged.
Wetting my lips as I glanced back down at the page, I took a deep breath before diving back in. “While there is only one recordedConiunctato go by, it was said that despite going years with three of her mates, the line between her mates never appeared until they happened upon her fourth. This leads us to believe that theConiunctaisn’t possible to achieve until all possible individual mate bonds have been established.
“This would explain why this type of bond is the rarest known. The chance of all of the souls finding each other and being alive at the same time would be nothing short of a miracle. The merging of these souls allowed the telepathy between mates to extend to all within theConiuncta,making them a complete unit with a bond between each.”
Confusion rocked through me.This couldn’t be us.
Furrowing my brow, I sighed heavily before sitting back in the chair. “This is really interesting, Drake, but why are you showing this to me? I felt the small spot burning where your dot would go, but nothing running through them all.”
He just stared at me for a moment before an arrogant smirk tugged the corner of his lip up. Arching a single eyebrow at me, he questioned, “Are you so sure about that,Comoara?Have you actually looked at your mark in the mirror since we bonded?”
My eyes furiously glanced around as I thought back over our time since then. Holy shit. My eyes widened as I breathed out, “Well, I…no, I haven’t, but I knew what the previous two looked like, so I figured it would be the same.”
Humming floated through the air from the direction of the kitchen, and I quickly raced to put the book down on his desk before darting toward the sound. It had to be Lo, and I needed to borrow her eyes right now.
“Lo!” I called out as I slid into the room, all but falling against the kitchen island as she spun around at the fridge door, her curls flying around in a movie star way that made me jealous.
Damn, she was so effortlessly beautiful.
