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But more and more, this night was turning that last statement into a lie. I didn’tlovehim or anything.Obviouslynot! But there was an annoying and undeniable surge of attraction for him that had deepened with the new glimpses I’d seen of his personality tonight.
Honestly, it scared me.
“Has anyone ever fallen out of love here? Like, can the mate bond ever... Stop working?”
I cringed, hardly believing I’d said the words out loud.
Gahn Errok’s healing chest rose with a deep breath.
“No,” he said, the word as decisive and cutting as the deadly blow of a blade. “Some people – usually women – in generations past ignored the mate bond and chose other partners. Usually, because they wanted sons that their mates could not give them. But that bond, those feelings, they never disappear. The sacred mate bond grabs hold of you like the long, squeezing body of a pattarak – it winds around you until you cannot breathe. And it never lets you go.”
I nodded wordlessly, my chin sloshing in the hot water. His answer made me feel... Weird. All prickly and somehow heavy and floaty at the same time. I hated that I’d even had to ask the question. Hated that my father and what he’d done made me weak enough to, even now, even in an entirely different world, need that kind of reassurance.
I was mulling over what he’d said when he lobbed a question back at me, distracting me from my thoughts.
“I assumed that the human mate bond, thisfalling in love, was just slower to establish in the new women, but that it was just as permanent and strong as our mate bond once it eventually appeared. Is this not the case?”
I laughed bitterly. “Nope. Sorry. Love is fickle. Some people fall in and out of love like the changes in the weather. Some people fake it the entire time.”
I was never entirely sure which of those options had described my father. Whether he’d actually loved my mom and me or not. He’d certainly left us far too easily for any of his feelings, if they’d ever been real, to have been permanent. My fists clenched beneath the water, thinking of the way my mom had tried so hard not to fall apart when he’d left. The way she’d doubled down on her own love for me, doing everything she could to make me feel worthy and enough. Like I wasn’t a kid who somehow deserved to be abandoned.
But in the end, even she had left me too soon, too. Not that dying had been her fault – of course not. But to an anxious and angry teenager trying to make sense of the world, I was ashamed to say it had felt like a sort of betrayal. My grandma, who took over my guardianship while I was still in high school, hadn’t had the money for therapy. But she had a friend at a ranch just outside Calgary who would let me come help out with the horses.
And that pretty much saved my life.
“You sound upset,” Gahn Errok said.
“Just bad memories,” I muttered tensely, swishing my hands through the water. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”
I expected him to press me further, or to at least ask, “Why?”
But he didn’t. Instead, he surprised me by saying, “I understand.”
His sight stars glittered, piercing through the steam despite his loss of strength.
“You do?” I asked.
“Yes. We are more alike than you realize, Zuh-Tephanie.”
“We are?” I asked, not sure if I should be shocked or offended or what. How was I similar to this cocky, possessive alien king? This man who’d barged into my life, insulted pretty much everyone I knew, and had challenged our host to a freaking death match tonight?
But when he answered me next, I felt like I was the one who’d been shot through with an arrow. This hulking alien from across the universe had seen right through me, peeled back the layers and punched right through to my core with his words.
“Neither one of us,” he said softly, “wants to be weak. Especially in front of others.”
When the hell did he get a psychology degree?!
It was confusing and infuriating andterrifyingthat he was so fucking right.
I didn’t want to be weak. I didn’t want to be vulnerable. I didn’t want to be the woman with my world turned upside-down like my mom had been. I never again wanted to be the confused and crying child I once had been.
I didn’t want to fall in love because that meant that shit could fall apart. And I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to put the pieces back together again.
I’d already had to do that on Earth. And there were still pieces missing. Little jagged holes left behind.
My jaw worked as I tried to figure out what to say next. My instinct was to deny everything, to push back against Gahn Errok. Distance myself –protectmyself – from his words. Fromhim.
But I was stopped, maybe saved, from doing any of that by the sudden cacophony of voices and footsteps coming into the cave.
