Aviva
Ryan looks conflicted, and I immediately change my mind. At first, I’d been more than willing to lie down on this rickety bed and let him have me just to know what it would feel like to lie with my mate. The legends painted this as something so incredibly life-altering. Finding your mate was supposed to be like having your heart torn out and remade, melded with theirs. In a way, I can feel the “heart torn out” part clearly. I get it because I feel that sensation right now in droves.
“Never mind,” I manage to say and tear myself away from him. It takes every fiber of my being to do so, but I step into the cool night air and walk at a steady pace toward the outer ring of the village.
I should go home… not home. My old house. I should go there; I even plan to go there, but my feet carry me out of the village all together, and within minutes, I’m back in the woods, passing the old ruins, walking up along the creek into the hilly, moonlight clearings that follow the base of the mountains.
I’m not alone. Ryan has been following me since I left the healer’s cottage, making his presence known by cursing under his breath and mumbling as he picks through the increasingly dense forest.
He hasn’t spoken to me though. I’m not sure what he could say at this point. He’d laid out his truth. We’re mates, but he doesn’t want me in that way. Sure, we’re bonded now in more ways than one, but that doesn’t matter to him. Something is holding him back, and his only explanation is that he doesn’t deserve me, or whatever.
I’ve had enough.
I whirl on him the moment my feet brush over the soft, moon-drenched grass of a small, tree lined clearing, roughly a mile outside of the village. “Do you mind?”
He huffs a breath and balls his hands into fists at his side–still naked from the waist up, still giving me those sad, puppy-dog eyes despite the tightness on his jaw and his bared teeth.
“We’re going to talk about this–”
“So talk,” I snap, reaching for my blades, reminded I’m not wearing my belt or bow.
He grinds his teeth and shakes his head.
“Don’t waste my time,” I say, rolling my eyes to the moon. “Say what you want to say or go.”
“I’m sorry this isn’t a magical, mind-altering experience for you,” he says flatly.
I meet his eyes in a glare. “Is that your problem with me? That I’m not drooling and fawning over you, professing my undying love?”
“You deserve someone who’s capable of being like that for you–”
“You think that's what I want?” I take a step toward him on impulse, shocked. “Do I seem like someone who can appreciate a grand gesture of romance or even has the desire for it?”
His brow arches as the tension between us reaches deadly heights. “You liked when I gave you your new bow.”
Now I’m the one talking through gritted teeth. “You owed me one.”
“I didn’t owe you anything. It was your own stupid fault you fell off a cliff ledge!”
“What do you want from me?” My thundering voice echoes through the woods, bouncing from tree to tree. “You just told me I was the only thing you ever wanted, but when I told you to show me–to finally show me what you feel–to prove it to me, you just looked… you looked like you’d rather be anywhere else.”
He edges a step in my direction, his battered muscles rigid and flexed. “I don’t know what to do with you. From the moment I met you, Aviva, I haven’t known what the fuck to do with you.”
“Do something because I can’t take this anymore. Reject me.”
“No.”
“Kill me.”
He closes his eyes and takes a single, shallow breath. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s obvious you want out of this.”
“You’re wrong. I do want this, Aviva. I want you. I’ve wanted you since you nearly ripped my throat out for charging at you and the girls when Shoshannah shot me with one of your arrows.” I stay totally, completely still. He opens his eyes. “You mentioned once, a while ago, that I’d come here because I was cast out of my homeland by the king. That’s not true. I’m a prince in Crescent Falls. My father is the Alpha King there. He didn’t force me out. I chose to come here under the guise of what was best for my pack, but that’s not the whole truth.”
His eyes momentarily rise to scan the forest behind me. He continues softly, “I wasn’t ready for the mate bond when I felt it for the first time–with Hadley. It was days after my twenty-first birthday. I’d been running Silverhide for two years. I had my garage to think about, employees, new pack members every day…. Hadley was my Beta’s little sister. She came to Silverhide one day to live with James, and the moment I saw her, I felt it. It was faint, just a glimmer of what it should have been, but she wasn’t twenty-one yet. She wasn’t able to feel it all.”
His eyes meet mine, dark and depthless. “I wasn’t ready. I don’t think I was ever ready to be mated. I don’t think I wanted it at all. Not with her. That’s why… that’s why I… felt so fucking horrible about how it all ended.”
His voice is so low, it’s nearly a whisper, like he isn’t meaning to say the words out loud. “I’d decided at that point that I would reject her. It was a touchy subject because her brother was, and still is, my Beta. I love James like a brother, but he can be an asshole, the kind of guy who holds a grudge, and I was too much of a coward to just tell him about the bond, let him know I have no intentions of pursuing any kind of relationship with Hadley. I don’t know why I was so at odds with it. I grew up believing the mate bond was everything. It was the foundation of everything my family built and is, and I… didn’t want it.”
He’s barely a foot away now, his eyes downcast on the ground between us. His fists relax. “My aunt, your Firestone Queen, left my grandparents and my father behind to join her mate here. Ryatt, my uncle, he… he understood something I didn’t at the time. That the bond isn’t always the bone-breaking, out-of-this-world experience when you see them for the first time. It’s confusing and messy. Sometimes it’s just wrong.” His eyes meet mine. “Sometimes it’s just… a lot. Too much.”
My voice quakes as I choke out, “And how does it feel now?” I’m trying not to feel his past mate’s presence between us. Maybe that swelling, aching feeling in the air is simply his doubts, his reservations. He’s experienced this before, but I haven’t.
“Like I’ve been given a second chance, and I don’t know how to reach you, keep you, and… be with you while reckoning with what I’ve done.”
I take in his words and let them sink into my mind. He’s being brutally honest with me right now. In the woods, in the shelter and solitude of the night sky… this is where we can just be us. No walls to constrain us. No listening ears. No wonder I came here.
No wonder he followed.
He closes the distance between us, breathing deeply, his hands trembling as they close around my arms. “You’ve never been with anyone.”
“And you’ve been with… everyone?”
He licks his lips before he chuckles, low and deep, the corner of his mouth ticking into a smile. “Yeah. Pretty much. Does that bother you?”
“It’s not like you can take it back.”
He groans slightly, but the air between us isn’t choked with tension anymore. It’s actively lifting as he runs his hands up and down my arms, my skin pebbling with gooseflesh. I close my eyes against the feeling, letting myself soak it in.
“I’ve never been with anyone I trusted with my life,” he says heavily.
I’m slightly surprised by this admission. I look into his eyes. “You trust me with your life?”
“I do, even though you have a temper and an affinity for weapons.” He takes a shuddering breath as his hands link with mine, holding there. “Aviva, this feeling… it’s new to me too. Not being mated, but wanting it. Being thankful for it. Wanting to… explore it.” Heat laces through every syllable, and my wolf claws to the surface of my mind, begging. Begging for him, I realize. Those brand new threads in the very fiber of my being pluck as his touch warms my skin.
“But it’s up to you. Whatever you want… I’ll do it. If you don’t want this, if you don’t want me, I can walk away from it. I wouldn’t hold it against you, and I sure as hell won’t force you to be with me, mate bond or not.”
I do want him. I want his jagged, broken pieces. But part of me wonders if this is just the bond talking.
He was honest with me. I should be honest with him, tell him how I feel, but… I’m not very good at that. How else could I say that I want him so badly it hurts? That I understand him. I want him broken, rough, slowly healing, because that’s what makes him… him. And I like that.
I rise on my toes and kiss him–light, a faint brush of my lips against his. The tension in his body softens to the point he leans in, brushing an equally soft kiss to the corner of my mouth. It’s not enough. We both know it. We can feel it. My heart starts to race as he draws me closer, his breath tickling my cheek. “I swear to the Goddess, Aviva, the way you take up every thought in my mind is… a curse. Or a blessing. I’m not entirely sure but–” He inhales deeply as his lips brush over my cheek and into my hair. “Your scent is overwhelming. I can’t–get enough–” He growls low in his throat as he pins me against his chest, his hands grazing up my back, bunching the fabric of the thin linen night dress I’d put on less than an hour ago.
I couldn’t go to bed without talking to him first. Without confirming the feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that blooms to life whenever I look at him.
Mine. He is mine. I’m not ready to give him up. I wasn’t ready for him to die. I’ll never be ready for that. The thought of bursting into the cottage and seeing him nearly lifeless scorches through my head. I tighten my grip on him, curling my fingers into his back and relishing in the way his muscles go tense. He’s sore. I know I’m hurting him right now, but I have to know that he’s here, he’s safe, he’s whole.
He swipes his leg against my ankles, and I yelp in surprise as I lose my balance. I’m flat on my back in an instant, and he’s on top of me, tugging me across the grass to position me exactly where he wants me.
My body warms as he presses his weight against me, closing me in, not a single inch of space between us.
But he stops moving and looks down at me, the tip of his nose touching mine. I meet his gaze, hold it, barely able to catch my breath in the heat of the moment.
“Are we doing this?” I ask hesitantly. Doing what, I’m not entirely sure. Being mates? Well, we don’t have much of a choice. You can be mates and not be… be in love… right?
Being married? Well, we didn’t have much of a choice about that either.
Finally getting this desperate, aching want out of our systems…?
“I’d really like to fuck you now,” Ryan rasps, and my answer comes in the form of a deep, heated kiss.