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Maybewe'rejust not enough. Maybe the three of us are so broken that no one, not even our fated mate, wants us.
My eyes burn. A smart man would walk away right now, would leave her crying alone on the river. But I'm not a smart man. I care about her, about her safety, more than I care about my heartbreak. I'll do what my kind are good at. I'll slip into the shadows and watch her until she reaches the cave, and her true love, once more.
Knowing we’ve lost her is indescribable. It’s painful in a way that is worse than any injury. Right now, my skin is the only thing holding my heart in place. I want to shift into my shadow beast form, even knowing that doing so would make me vulnerable to the shadow king, vulnerable to the sun in this bright world. I want to race through the woods, as far and as fast as I can, until I leave her behind.
Yet, I'll never escape her memory.
And I can’t risk her safety, no matter how angry, how hurt I am. I’ve sent Phantom and Onyx ahead of me so I can make sure she gets back to Rayne. As much as I hate him, she doesn’t. As much as it hurts me to know, hurts all of us to know, I can’t let her be hurt. I won’t.
After a little while, she strips and goes into the river. She hasn’t stopped crying though, and I try to keep my gaze on the ground. Try because this is not how I want to see her naked. But even so, her pale skin glows beneath the sun’s rays, and her blonde hair makes her look like a mermaid of fantasy when it’s wet and hanging down her back and shoulders.
When she climbs out of the water, dries, and dresses, she’s still crying. Her sobs never slow. It’s as if she thought by being clean, she’d feel good again.
Or maybe she thought washing off the scent of another man would calm us.
It doesn’t. Whether she smells of Rayne or not, she’s made it clear that he’s her choice, and there’s no way to accept that. To move on from that. To simply be okay with losing our one and only mate.
And yet, I keep watching her. Waiting for what she’ll do next. Not knowing what to do when she remains there, crying her heart out, on her knees, looking so damn lost.
Her eyes look even larger when they're filled with tears. The shades of blue within them are the colors of the ocean, the colors of a pure waterfall. The liquid that slides down her pale cheeks draws attention to the scattering of tiny marks, freckles, across her cheekbones. And her blonde hair, pulled back once more in a warrior's tail, is messy, with little tendrils flowing around her face. A hairstyle that I find oddly suits her. Even the clothes the shadow beast female lent to her suits Ann. They’re big on her, but they draw attention to her curves in a way her other clothes didn't, at least not as well. As I stare at her, I swear my heart aches even more. This tiny, perfect woman is mine in my heart, but that's the only place she belongs to me.
She lifts her head as though she can sense me or hear my thoughts. When her gaze falls on me, her eyes widen, and she wipes the tears from her eyes and her cheeks, as if doing so will hide the fact that I was watching her cry. She's trembling a little when she stands from where she’s fallen to her knees, and she makes her way toward me.
I should’ve hidden better. I wanted to keep her safe, but I'm too raw to speak to her, to be close to her in any way.
Yet, I stay rooted in place, watching the swing of her hips as she comes toward me. My heart is in my throat. My mind is spinning through all the possible things she might say when she reaches me. It clearly isn't that she regrets fucking that fae and refusing to be our mate, so what is it?
“Dusk.” Her voice is soft, a touch, a reminder of a memory that she wasn’t even in. My mind flashes back to a woman with long white hair and a smile she rarely gave. Then on the body dragged from the moat, the one I couldn't bear to look at closely. One of my clearest memories is of her long white hair flowing around her in the water. Of her still, dead corpse.
We lost our woman then, just like we're doing now. But the outcome this time will be different, although the heartache will be the same. The wreckage. The utter destruction. But even worse because this is our mate. Even worse because losing one’s mate is something that is impossible to move past.
"Listen..." she begins again, but she doesn't sound like she knows what she plans to say.
And I realize that I can’t hear her words because I’ll break. I have to stop her.
Whether she leaves now or later, it’s going to destroy us. “Stop talking.” I sound angry, which is better, infinitely so, than the sadness burning through me. “If you’re going to go, do it.”
Her eyes flicker. She’s so fucking upset, so hurt it pains me to look at her. It pains me to see what this is doing to her on our behalf. She’s not doing this on purpose and my heart knows it. Hell, even my fucking head knows it. But the rage inside of me, the part of our father that always exists in Phantom and I needs an outlet.
“I don’t want to leave you when you guys need me.”
I scoff. I laugh because I know it’s going to hurt her and none of us are going to be okay. “We don’t fucking need you.”
“What about the prophecy?”
“Were you thinking about the prophecy when you were with him?” Jealousy isn’t an emotion I’m good at. “When you were on top of him with his dick inside you, were you thinking about the prophecy?”
She shakes her head and looks down. “No.”
“So why do you give a fuck now?” I hate talking to her this way. Hate feeling any of this shit.
She doesn’t answer with more than a loud exhale through her nose.
“That’s right. We got along before you came here and we’re going to get along after.”
The surprising shove against my chest is enough to make me stumble. The grunt from in her throat is half scream, half anguished bellow. She’s angry. It’s in her eyes, her voice, her stance. The way she stomps away.
I sit at the edge of the river and watch her go. It’s probably going to be the last time I see her, the last time I get a whiff of her natural scent in all its flowery goodness. I touch the scar on my chest where she healed me. It’s red. Puckered. Not painful, though. She took that away for me.
