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Her pale skin had gone ashen, the blue of her eyes bright and gleaming as if she was holding back tears and losing the battle.
It was impossible. The healers had only been gone a few hours. But she slid her fingers from mine and lifted them to her chest, right between her breasts. The fabric the healers had placed there for her modesty slipped away, leaving nothing but bare skin in its wake.
For once, I didn’t notice Veyka’s beautiful breasts. I was transfixed by the place between them where she pressed three fingertips. Right above her heart.
“Here,” she said, her voice quaking. “What… what does it mean?”
“It means that we are mates.” I knew that wasn’t an answer, but I didn’t have much more explanation to give.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Slowly, she lowered her hand back to the bedside. She didn’t reach for mine again, and I told myself it was because the energy she’d already exerted was too much.
“Mates aren’t real. They are a fairytale.” Her voice was getting stronger, edging from shock to something sharper. “There hasn’t been a mated pair in Annwyn since Nimue and Accolon.”
She remembered her history better than me.
“I know it is…” I paused, searching for the word to describe the feral, possessive rage I’d felt when she’d been torn away from me. The same desire to maim and kill that I’d felt when Gwen stepped into the room earlier. “Primal. Deeper than our consciousness. It is seeded in our souls.”
I didn’t need a thorough grasp of history to know as much. I could feel it.
Veyka’s eyes widened, her gaze shifting away from me, over my shoulder. But I could sense that she wasn’t looking outward at all. She’d turned her gaze inside of herself, searching for the tenants of the bond within her body and soul. I knew she’d find them as surely as I could feel their presence in my own body.
“I don’t want to be someone’s mate.”
Her words were a whisper on the evening breeze, and a knife to my heart.
“Are you rejecting the bond?” I growled, the words too harsh. But I couldn’t stop them. I was on my feet, pacing away from her, then back, menace and rage and that primal beastliness flowing off of me in waves.
Veyka’s eyes went wide once again.
“I am not rejecting anything. I am trying to figure out what the hell happened to me,” she cried, hysteria hovering at the edge of her tone. She didn’t watch me pace, she stared at the ground, at her hand, anywhere but at me.
I see all of you. And I am not afraid.
She’d said that to me once. But as she avoided my gaze, I knew it wasn’t true anymore. She was absolutely terrified to be my mate.
12
VEYKA
Just like that, the fragile thing between us was broken.
As surely as I had broken my body to shards, falling through the realms and crashing into the goldstone floor in uncontrolled freefall, I’d shredded the kernel of…us.
Not the mating bond. Despite Arran’s words, I could no more reject that bond inside of me than I could stop the beating of my own heart.
But the parts we’d each given freely of ourselves, the bits we’d shared that were motivated by trust and affection rather than animalistic destiny… I’d ruined it.
Even if all I’d done was speak the truth—exactly as we’d said we would.
I didn’t want to be Arran’s mate. I didn’t want to beanyone’smate. I barely wanted to be myself, Veyka, High Queen of Annwyn. It had taken me months to claw my way out of the darkness, to a place where I could care about something and someone other than the hollowness in my chest and the sweet taste of revenge.
And just like that, my agency had been ripped away from me once again. My body thrown through realm after realm until I was a broken, bloody mess on the floor; and my soul, tethered to another when I’d only just managed to piece it back together.
Fuck all of it.
