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“Rachel.”

“Are you busy?”

“I am just finishing,” he says. He walks to one of the workout benches, deactivates his blade and sheathes in, and sits heavily.

“You’re worried about something.”

“Yes. I have many concerns.” He pauses. Then he swallows hard and looks straight at me, running his tongue over his gums. I’ve never seen him like

“What is it? Ra’al, what happened?”

“There is something you must know, my Mate.”

“What?” I feel like I’m walking through a forest after a heavy storm, broken branches on the ground, each leaning tree potentially going to fall and crush me.

“When the servants were en route to the city, there was an abduction. Your friend Lola was taken by a masked triad.”

“But they arrived at the city five days ago! How did no one know? Kat said they had guards and everything.” My legs are unsteady, so I find the bench in front of him, sitting down hard.

“We knew the day it happened. We did not want to burden you with useless pain. Not until we had recovered her.”

I lean back, like I’ve been slapped. There’s a wall between us. I stand back up, unable to stay still, pacing and running my hands through my hair. “So I’ve been down here, living in a fantasy world for the last five days?”

Ra’al stands, stepping towards me, and I make sure the workout bench is between us. “No, Rachel. It’s not like that.”

“It is like that! You go out there with your triad and do big important things, then you come back to your fuckdoll for some R and R. How could you lie to me like that? She could be dead by now!”

“We have drones searching for her around the clock. She will be found.”

I glare at Ra’al. He is a towering alien warrior, but I don’t care. My friend is gone. If I was scared down here, protected by hundreds of feet of metal and rock…then wherever Lola is, she must be terrified.

“Rachel, I’m sorry. You deserved the truth.”

I grit my teeth. I can barely look at him right now. “Krazak. That was his name, wasn’t it? The insane triad from the garden.”

“That man helped save your life and the lives of your friends.”

“It’s him! You know it’s him. How can you be so blind?”

Ra’al shakes his head. “We have considered the possibility. The penalty for that crime is death. Whoever did it knows they cannot evade capture forever. Kazak lost his Mate already. He would not throw everything away for an unbonded woman.”

My eyes go wide. The three men were this rock under me, keeping me up, and now cracks are forming in the foundation. “Unbonded woman? What? So if we weren’t Bonded, what would have happened? You wouldn’t have bothered coming to this world? You would have just let us die?”

His brows furrow in confusion. “Rachel. There was never a world where we were not Fated to be together.”

He can’t even understand my point. To him we are eternally linked, no matter what. And now that we are Bonded, we’re together. Forever.

Even if I ran, even if I betrayed him and stabbed him with a knife, even if I hated him, in his mind, there is no universe where we don’t end up together.

I clench my teeth on the inner flesh of my cheek, hard, tasting blood. I force down my emotions, muting them. I’ve gotten very good at that lately. “Please, just do everything you can to find her. She’s so young…she must be terrified. I…I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me. I had the right to know.”

“We didn’t want these last days to be filled with stress for you.”

“Last days? What are you talking about?”

“There’s something else.”

I run my hands through my hair. I can’t take much more. “More?”