AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Freya
The inside of the mage’s house looked nothing like I expected. She invited me into a perfectly normal kitchen. A stainless steel oven and a mismatched white refrigerator, perfectly normal cabinets, and wooden countertops surrounded an ordinary dark wood kitchen table and chairs.
Scars crisscrossed the mage’s hands, and her long, red hair fell in braids down her back. She didn’t seem much older than me, perhaps in her early thirties, but with a quiet energy that spoke of self-confidence in her capabilities. She wore a simple, indigo blue tunic shirt over gray leggings and fluffy purple slippers.
She chuckled when she caught my expression. “You were expecting a cauldron?”
I couldn’t help but grin. “And a few bats as carrier pigeons. My name is Freya.”
“Freya. A powerful name from a goddess with powerful magic.” Her uncanny green eyes glanced me up and down. I swore I saw lightning in them before she turned toward a cabinet. “Tea?”
“Sure,” I said, taking a seat at the table as she put two mugs of water into the microwave.
“My name is Brielle.” Her silken voice wrapped around me like an enchantment. “Like you, one of my parents was a wolf shifter, and one was a mage.”
“How can you be so sure I’m the same?”
“You’re a wolf, aren’t you?”
“Everyone says so.”
Brielle nodded as though it was obvious, then passed me a mug and joined me at the table. She bobbed her tea sachet up and down in the mug a few times. The moment felt normal and domestic, not like I was sitting across from a powerful mage. Until her unnatural eyes pinned me to my seat.
“There’s no easy way to say this, my dear. You are double cursed. One curse is old, the other new.”
I gasped. “Cursed?”
“By a fellow witch or mage, betrayed by one of our own.”
Her mouth twisted as if to say, ‘What do you expect?’
“What’s the old curse?” I asked, my heart in my throat.
“That curse is to contain your magic.” Before I could react to that, she continued, “The new one is much more interesting, and complex. It appears the same spellcaster who bound your magic as a child also cursed you with a fake fated mate bond.”
“What… Who…Why?” I gaped like a fish out of water. At least she’d waited until I was sitting down to tell me.
Brielle calmly waited for me to gather my thoughts into coherent sentences.
“Why is Ironwood still coming after me if it’s fake? Especially since Luka already rejected me as his mate, fated or not?”
“That I cannot explain.”
They must think it was real, just as I had.
“How and why would someone even do that?” Then I held up a hand, preventing Brielle from repeating herself. “Wait, the why is easy to explain. Considering the night that it happened, whoever did this clearly wanted to ruin any chances of a FrostFang / Ironwood alliance. And they picked the lowest of the low — me — to do the deed.”
And since everyone thought the fated mate bond was real, Pack Alpha Nira of the Frost Fang pack demanded my death to secure the pack alliance.
“That explains the why, then,” Brielle agreed. “As for the how, the appearance and sensations of a fated mate bond are easy enough to fake. Most shifters wouldn’t detect the difference at first, but it’s easy enough for a witch or mage to sense the residual magic on you.”
That fake fated mate bond had destroyed my life. I’d been disgraced, exiled, and sent to die in the wildlands. I nearly had, too. If it weren’t for Flint…
I glanced toward the doorway where I’d last seen him. How many times had I wished I’d been fated to him instead? But if the fated mate bond was fake, then I was free to mate who I wanted…
“Wait!” Another realization struck me. “Why does everyone think I’m going into heat then? The bond is fake, so it couldn’t have triggered the heat.”
Could the spellcaster also have faked the heat?
