Page 122 of Ensnared

“You’ll never be independent again.” He narrows his eyes. “Why would you want to? Are you looking into transferring your mother’s bond so you can figure out how to dissolve ours?”

I wasn’t, but I should’ve been. “No.”

“Liar.”

I really am so very tired. As he’s stepping into the elevator, I finally give up on arguing for the night and rest my head against his chest. That makes the bond pulse bright green. I want to be annoyed, but for some reason, I can’t manage it. It’s hard to be mad at a man who’s carrying you downstairs when you’re bone tired.

Maybe a stronger woman could manage it, but not me.

In fact, the only thing I do manage to do when Axel carries me to my room is shoo Gideon back to his room, overriding his concerns that Axel’s staying with me again, and check on the kiddos to make sure they’re alright. They must be as tired as I am, because they’re all completely passed out.

Their innocent, sweet faces heal part of the broken shards in my chest from the interaction with Mom.

Not all of them, but some.

I brush my teeth, and then I flop onto the biggest bed I’ve ever seen. It makes king-size beds look like a twin, which is good, because even in his human form, Axel’s massive.

For a moment, I’m ultra conscious that Axel’s beside me, his chest rising and falling as he breathes my air. “Do you use oxygen in this form?” I am exhausted, but sometimes the more tired I am, the more my brain spins round and round.

“Do you really care?”

I ball up my pillow and flip on my side. “I guess not.”

“I do,” he says. “In this form, my body’s closer to yours than in my other form. It’s why we’re not as strong like this. Before we fight, earth blessed always shift.”

“So why did you have those swords?” I yawn.

Axel’s less intimidating when I’m not staring right at him. All that beauty, all that savage grace, it’s a little off-putting to a normal human like me. But just the sound of his voice behind me kind of rolls over me, like a familiar lullaby.

“I thought they were for me, to use once I had mastered this form,” he says. “But now I wonder. The only blessed yet alive who remembers the time we inhabited this planet, sharing it with your ancestors, is my father. The other elders have reunited with the blessed kin, their mortal bodies dissipating.”

“Your dad used to live on earth?”

“He was like me, the Prince of Flame, when we decided to leave Earth for good.”

Wow, that’s crazy. I yawn again, and this time it’s so big that I hear my jaw crack.

“You should sleep. We have plenty of time to discuss things while we search for the heart.”

“Do you have any leads?” I ask.

“You jump around like a foundling,” he says. “You asked about the swords first, and I never finished. I now believe that I was given them for you.”

A strange sense of destiny washes over me.

What are the odds that I would meet the prince of flame in his weak, human form, just outside my neighborhood? What are the chances that I’d be a bright, and that he’d inadvertently bond me? What does it mean, if it’s not a coincidence?

Fate is stupid. It’s worse than co-dependence.

If I buy into fate, it means I don’t have choices at all. It means all the things I’m doing, all the things that have happened to me, they’ve all been predestined. I was meant to hurt Gideon. I was meant to discover Axel’s secret. I was meant to bond to him and betray my own people by entwining.

He’s saying that the swords that he brought back to earth, the swords buried in a massive boulder that no one could remove, like the stupid Arthurian legend, were always meant to be mine. And I was always meant to be his.

If it’s true, that’s insane.

If it’s true, everything feels futile.

So I choose not to believe it. I choose to believe that my decisions matter. I can change the course of my future, and I can make things better. I can fix my errors and do better tomorrow.