Page 18 of Bitten by Bloodmoon (Mateless Shifters #2)
Ambrose
“ W hat happened?” Emeric asks as I stand before him and the rest of the Moonlight pack and the entire Moonfire coven. There is no hiding the truth from any of them. Without me even speaking, they can see that I failed in bringing back my mate.
“I reject the bond. You aren’t my mate!”
“I reject the bond. You aren’t my mate!”
“I reject the bond. You aren’t my mate!”
Those words won’t stop playing in my head.
They have become my own nightmare song being played exclusively for me.
For the entire time I ran back, I’ve been analyzing her words.
Her body language. Everything that happened.
And I still don’t know that truth. Were they really her words?
Her thoughts? Or were they Nyx’s words that he forced her to speak with his mind control?
I don’t have the answer, but if there is even a chance that Nyx is the cause of her words, then I have to do whatever it takes to break her free of him.
She’s still my mate. Even if she rejected me. Hates me. Wants me dead. Nothing has changed.
Silence spreads through the clearing where everyone is gathered around me, but my mind is still spinning. Still haunted by her never-ending words.
“I reject the bond. You aren’t my mate!”
“I reject the bond. You aren’t my mate!”
“I reject the bond. You aren’t my mate!”
I reach for that connection with her, tentatively, afraid that if I tug on it too hard, it will completely unravel and sever the remaining fragile twine.
My heart stops beating as I close my eyes and try to find her in my head.
That’s the only way to know for sure if her words are true or if Nyx controlled her.
A cool, snowy trail of snowflakes drifts along the edges of my mind, flickering like a fleeting winter flurry.
I follow the soft snowflakes that are slow to fall…
one…two…three…each one falls so slowly that I’m not sure the next one will fall at all.
But I follow them one by one in my brain.
I follow each chilly flake that brings me closer and closer to my answer.
Suddenly, the snowflakes pick up speed, falling faster and faster in my head. My mind runs along the path that has started to freeze over. Colder and colder, I keep pushing, knowing exactly what I’m going to find when I reach the end.
Her .
Lumi—snow.
She’s still there. She hasn’t severed the connection.
It’s just lighter than before. But I feel her presence as strong as ever.
I only allow myself a moment in her head.
Just a moment to ensure she’s okay and that I shouldn’t send the entire pack and coven to Nyx’s doorstep to immediately save her despite the unstoppable war it would create.
She holds a quiet sadness in her mind, but beneath it, I feel an undeniable strength that refuses to break. Suddenly, a biting cold sweeps through me. She’s trying to push everything and everyone out.
I pull back, letting her be for the moment.
I want to go to her, get her back. But I can’t, not without fixing what I broke first.
“Lumi is safe, for now. Nyx believes she’s his mate, so he won’t hurt her.
And Lumi is strong enough to protect herself and gather information against our enemy while she is there,” I answer Emeric.
“I plan on helping her escape before the next full moon. Nyx is wrong; he’s just trying to hurt me like he has before.
Lumi and I still plan to break the curse on the next full moon. ”
Emeric smiles, but it’s a half smile. He was expecting me to return with Lumi and a dead Nyx after what he did to Rowena. I wish I had, too.
“Isolde, I need to speak to you in private.”
She raises an eyebrow at me, but says, “Of course.”
I motion to Emeric to join us.
“Where the hell is Lumi?” Kael asks, jumping in front of me as I lead Isolde and Emeric toward my house.
“She’s with Nyx and his pack.”
“His pack or his vampires?”
“Whoever keeps him company as of late.”
Kael grabs my arm, keeping me from walking. I could end his life in a second, but he’s Lumi’s best friend, and I don’t need to do anything else to hurt my relationship with her.
“Is she really safe? Or was that all a load of crap to keep everyone from overthrowing you as alpha?”
“Come into my office, you should hear this too,” I answer.
I lead Kael, Emeric, and Isolde into my office and shut the door. The main reason I’m having this conversation inside instead of out is to keep the rest of the pack and coven from hearing. But if all of the walls are still intact by the end, it will be a miracle.
I slam the door closed with a flick of my wrist. Kael, who has never seen my magic before, gasps, while Emeric raises an eyebrow at me as if to say we aren’t hiding anything anymore, are we? I want to share everything with both of them, but I have a bigger issue to deal with first.
A blast of my magic shoots from my hand, aimed at Isolde’s chest. She brushes the magic from hitting her body like it’s a bothersome fly.
“I gave you your magic. You really think you have the skills or talent to go up against me, boy?” Isolde says.
A low growl rumbles from deep in my chest, my teeth and claws sharpen into razor points, ready to tear her apart. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“Same,” she says, the fierceness in her eyes cutting through me like a shard of glass.
“Why can’t Lumi control her wolf? Why do I have power over it?”
The room goes so silent I can’t even hear the beat of their hearts or the whiff of their breathing. For a moment, it feels like the entire room has vanished, and it’s just me and Isolde left.
“Why do you think?” she hisses at me.
“I think you intervened! I think you weren’t patient enough for Lumi to figure out how to gain her wolf on her own. I think you tried to control her. I think you didn’t think she could do it on her own before the full moon, so you used your magic to—”
“Ha, you think I forced her to shift? Then why can’t I control her wolf? It’s not me you should be mad at. You were the one who was impatient, not me.”
I growl again, my body beginning to shift into my wolf. I have no control over it at the moment. He wants to rip out her throat.
“I would never do that to my mate!”
“Not even to save yourself? Not even subconsciously?”
“Never!” I snap.
She shakes her head, a cackle in her grin. “And yet, it seems like that’s exactly what happened.”
“I would never do that. I would never control someone like that.”
“And yet, you did.”
My eyes widen in horror. “How do I fix it? How do I give her her wolf back?” How do I make her stop hating me for what I didn’t mean to do?
There’s a pause that extends forever. “You can’t.”
I collapse, falling to my knees, all hope draining from me with her words.
The world tilts and blurs around the edges.
I know Isolde is telling the truth. There is no fixing this.
No giving Lumi back what I took. No healing her.
No healing the relationship. She’ll rightfully hate me forever for what I did.
And she’s my mate.
I still know that’s true. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t love me and that I can’t love her yet. We only get one mate at a time. She’s it until one of us dies; only then will one of us get another.
She’s my mate, and she’ll hate me for the rest of her life. She’ll never stop rejecting the bond. The curse will go stronger instead of us being able to break it. I’ve destroyed everything.
“She’ll forgive you. Tell her the truth.
Tell her you didn’t mean to do it. That your magic did it, not you.
Never use the power against her. Tell her how much you love her, and she’ll forgive you.
Lumi is the most caring, loving person I know.
She’s forgiven me countless times. She’ll forgive her mate for this if it means breaking the curse,” Kael says.
I look up at him from where I’m on my knees on the floor. He’s right. But the problem is, I can’t show her that I love her. I can’t tell her. As it is, I’m balancing a very delicate dance, trying to keep myself from loving her.
“Even if that’s true, I think Nyx might be using his mind control against her to convince her to reject our bond and accept him as her mate,” I say.
“Fuck,” Emeric says under his breath, punching the wall and leaving the first mark.
“Then we kill Nyx,” Kael says, looking from Emeric to me.
“Nyx has done this before. Used his mind control against someone Ambrose loved. It didn’t end well,” Emeric says.
I stand, eyeing Emeric. I guess we are just spilling all of my secrets to everyone in this room.
“Then we definitely need to kill him,” Kael says.
“You and what army, kid? Don’t you think we’ve tried before? Why do you think the Moonfire coven joined forces with the Moonlight pack? It’s not because we get along so well. We’d all be better off if he were dead, but that’s harder to do than you’d think,” Isolde says.
“We have to try. We have to get Lumi back. If that means we have to find a way to kill Nyx, then…” Kael stops, then takes a deep sniff, his eyes darkening into balls of rage as he stares at me.
“What did you do?” he growls at me, the first slowly starting as his canines lengthen and his claws begin to form.
“I already told you.”
“You fucked her! I can smell her scent all over you.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Yes, I fucked her. We’re mates. She loves me, or did until Nyx fucked everything up. We are two consenting adults.”
“No, you fucked her when you could have been saving her,” the deep tanner of his voice so intense that words rattle the room. He shifts into his muddy brown colored wolf.
I sigh. I knew I should have brought them to the backyard and magically soundproofed it. But this felt like there was a chance we’d be more civilized.
Isolde folds her arms and smirks at me. Emeric braces for the impact he’s about to endure as well. Kael is right. I should have been saving Lumi instead of fucking her.
Kael pounces with all the rage he rightfully feels.
I don’t move. I don’t shift. I don’t build my magic in my veins.
I let him tackle me to the ground. I let his teeth get one sink into my neck and his claws one swipe at my face.
There’s a sharp sting in my cheek as blood drips and an even deeper twinge in my neck.
With a wave of my magic, he’s across the room, frozen to the spot on the floor.
“I deserved that. But killing me now won’t save Lumi. And every time you hurt me, you hurt Emeric. That’s his curse. He didn’t do anything to Lumi. I won’t let you hurt him.”
Emeric growls at me. “I can speak for myself. And you could have fallen in love with her while you were fucking her. You could have let a slip of your tongue kill her. How dare you!”
He shifts into his majestic sandy-colored wolf.
This time, I brace harder, knowing that when he hits me, it’s going to do far worse than just leave a scratch like Kael did. Kael has only had his wolf for a few weeks. Emeric has had years to harness his skills.
Emeric grabs onto my arm and then throws me with all of his might, right through one of the walls. The sheet wall scrapes against my skin, cutting me in several places, and my body hits the ground hard, knocking the wind out of me.
I’m slow to get up, not just from the pain, but because Emeric knows in a situation like this, I won’t fight back.
Emeric could kill me right now, and I’d do nothing to defend myself.
Not after everything we’ve been through together.
It used to be the four of us: Emeric, Amara, Rowena, and me.
Now there’s just the two of us left. The only time I’ll ever fight him is on a sparring mat. And in the end, I always let him win.
When I finally bring myself to stand, I expect to see Emeric already attacking again, not letting up.
He’d do it for Lumi. For Rowena. For Amara.
For how foolish I was being with her after everything we’ve been through.
He’d be right, but he wasn’t there. Didn’t know how badly Lumi needed that connection, that safe place.
It was almost as if she knew we’d never get away.
The best she could hope for was a quick reprieve.
A moment where she felt safe. A moment when she could stay connected to me when we were apart.
Instead, he stands just as frozen as Kael. Isolde walks forward, standing in front of the opening in the wall.
I narrow my eyes in a glare at her.
“What? As fun as it was watching you beat each other up and destroy your home, we have more important things to worry about, and time is quickly running out again before the next full moon. I didn’t agree to our deal with you to watch them squander it,” Isolde says.
“Stay out of it, Isolde.”
“No. We have a deal, you and I. I can’t stay out of it.”
“Release Emeric now, before I make you.”
“Not until we are done talking. Then I’ll release him, and you three can go back to killing each other all you want.”
“I’m going to kill you one day.”
She smirks. “If one of us is to end up dead at the hands of the other, it will be you, alpha. Now, what are we going to do about getting Lumi back before the next full moon?”
“It doesn’t matter if we can get her back without breaking Nyx’s mind control and giving her her wolf back; she’ll reject the bond. She won’t complete the marking ceremony.”
Magic races over her skin with glimmering sparks. “She will. You worry about getting her back. Let me worry about her accepting the bond.”
Before I can respond, she vanishes.
I growl, slamming my arms down. No way in hell will I let Isolde or any of her coven force Lumi to do anything. The growl I let out echoes through the house and is enough that when both Emeric and Kael are released, neither of them attacks me.
Silently, I walk forward back into what’s left of my office and then slide against the wall onto the floor. Emeric sits on my right. Kael is on my left. We are all lost in our own minds.
“What are we going to do about Nyx?” Kael asks at the same time Emeric asks, “What are we going to do about Isolde?”
Fuck—two enemies. And a mate who hates me. Rowena’s loss. The pack and the coven are both losing trust in me. How did I fuck this up so much?
“Emeric, you tail Isolde. Make a plan to sever my deal with the Moonfire coven.”
He nods.
“What’s the deal?” Kael asks.
I shake my head. “Later. I’ll focus on figuring out how to give Lumi her wolf back and breaking Nyx’s mind control so we are ready when the opportunity to get her back presents itself.”
And I look to Kael, knowing I’m asking a lot of him and putting a lot of trust in him. “And you will ensure that Nyx doesn’t hurt a hair on Lumi’s head.”
“And how will I do that?” Kael asks.
“By joining the Bloodmoon pack.”