Page 56

I ’m not sure what happened after the Doctor left, or even before that. The next thing I know is Claudia coming one day later with a tray of food and thanks for the rescue.

It started many other visits both from her and Atlas who is cheerful but uncomfortable, and from Beta who is comfortable but grumpy. They always come with food, but I can barely eat. What’s the point?

It’s not their visits that keep me alive. It’s Cain's stubborn nature.

The whole month or so is all a blur of Cain holding me at night, trying to take me out of bed during days, or to shift—before the Doctor prohibits that when we realize it causes more harm than good by tearing the scars afresh. I swear if not for Cain’s obsession with giving me these weird baths I probably would stop washing at all. What’s the point?

He never leaves my side at first, then only a couple of times for some pack matters when Claudia and Atlas come to see me in the evening.

I feel bad about Cain neglecting his pack, his Kingdom, his people… No matter how many times he says he has everything under control with mind-linking and the laptop that his Beta takes every day for charging. I get that he does that for me, but… what’s the point?

I know he needs to prepare the pack for the harsh winter months, and I can’t help him with that. I don’t want to help him with that, but… I can help him return to his life, even when I don’t see a point in mine anymore.

So, I start asking for permission to bake, not for my benefit but for his.

And it works. We start spending a healthy amount of time apart, and Cain starts to feel fine with me being alone sometimes. It’s not like he wouldn’t feel if something was really wrong through the mate bond anyway—so I’m surprised I have to trick him into leaving my side in the first place.

He starts by leaving for the fighting pit and then for the morning office meetings with his officers, and soon, his day goes back to almost normal, and I have time to do what I need.

Every free time I have I take one of Cain’s knives, cut my palm, and concentrate on healing it to the point it stops bleeding but the skin is still open. I wait for the scar to appear and then try to heal it too. It takes me a lot of trial and error before I learn how to stop it at the right time, and even more time to be able to do anything about the scar. The first few times I had to cut over it again to be able to concentrate on the healing. But the longer I wait, the bigger the scar is, and the harder it is to heal.

“Look what I stole from my father's bedroom for you!” Cain enters our room in an exceptionally good mood on my twenty-first birthday that no Rogue, including him, knows about.

I pull on our mate bond through the mark, and I can feel him so… happy?

I stand up with a smile and a knife behind my back. He almost caught me at my daily practice.

“What do you have there?” he asks with furrowed brows and takes a step toward me, with his hand behind his back too.

He is in his warrior gear with combat boots, leather pants, straps with knives, and a sword attached by the handle to his hip—except the fact it’s already October, so I miss summer and his shirtless days. I touch his covered but very muscled chest anyway with my free hand.

“You first,” I nod at his hidden arm.

With a beaming smile, he pulls an old leather-bound black book in front of my face, and I have to take a step back from him to look at it properly.

“Oh wow, is it the first edition?” I rotate it in my free hand, itching to read it.

“Yes,” he is towering over me again. “I know you love military books and hate my father, so I thought stealing it from him would be the best of both worlds.”

“It’s perfect, thank you,” I give him another small smile and put it on the bed behind me. “Now, my surprise, I guess.”

I pull the slightly bloody knife out from behind my back, and his smile falters.

He looks at me very, very unamused. “Asher…”

I can catch fear in his emotions, so I immediately put my hand back on his chest in what I hope is a comforting gesture. “Cain, I wouldn’t… I love my life!”

He rolls his eyes with annoyance and bites his lower lip before slowly drawing it between his teeth.

“Do you?” He looks at me again, pressing his weight on my hand.

I… I do, right? I lower my eyes realizing he is right. I did lose myself after all that happened. I even hate myself sometimes for all the choices I made even if I know I would make them again in a heartbeat… for him.

“I love you ,” I look up into his intense navy-blue gaze and feel so vulnerable after unintentionally saying this simple truth I was hiding more from myself than from him.

It’s no longer hiding under all that lust. I don’t have any excuses anymore because it turns out it was just lust, it was just a mate bond. But now? I don’t have any doubts in my mind that this beautifully terrifying thing that is squeezing my stomach right now is undeniably love.

The biggest love of my life.

And he is standing here with his unreadable face and chiseled chest, so firm under my fingers, with no words escaping him, making me even more nervous.

“See? It’s weird when someone is saying it to you, right?” I ask awkwardly and take my hand off his body.

He catches it by the wrist and leans down to catch my lips too. I let him because I crave any reaction after what I said, even a forced one.

But this kiss… It’s so charged with emotions, slow at first but then quickly picking up pace, not forced at all. Raw. And searing hot.

Cain takes my knife-holding hand off of the back of his neck, which I haven’t realized I put there, and he pulls back from the kiss, leaving my lips swollen and tingling.

“I want your mark, but if you could use your teeth instead of a knife, I would be grateful,” he jokes with a smirk that makes my knees soft.

“I have to show you something,” I say quickly while I still have some courage to do it, and I quickly cut my left palm in front of him.

He looks at blood pooling with pursed lips and then up at me with a condescending expression.

“No, no, look at it!”

He gazes down again, clearly unamused, but I thrive in unfavorable conditions—so I show off the healing, wipe the blood to really showcase the way I stop it, and let the skin scar.

“What the fuck?” He catches my hand from the bottom and pulls it closer to himself to look, “How did you do that?”

“Well, I figured that it’ll scar if I completely stop my powers for a few seconds. That’s why I have all this scarring tissue inside in the first place, right? Because my wolf powers were dormant for a few days? Anyway… look.”

I’m so eager to impress him with the only real project I’ve had for the whole month, that I make my skin repair and smooth out quicker than ever. Or maybe that’s the presence of my oblivious true mate. Either way, I look at him with a wide, proud smile and palm healed as new.

And there it is, his hope leaking through the mate bond and drowning my innocent happiness without mercy. He wants to have his heirs after all, and I hate him for that with my whole heart.

I want to scream at him to go and impregnate any of the women that dream of being fucked by the imposing Rogue Alpha Prince, and there’s a lot of them, a whole Kingdom. Two even. But I don’t because he marked me, and even if he would somehow be able to stomach it, I would suffer with his every move in someone else…

I don’t even know what he is saying to me. I turn around and climb into bed again. I lay down with my body feeling so fucking heavy and my mind so empty all of a sudden. I’m numb, and it’s a special kind of heart-wrenching numbness that sits bone-deep in me. But I know by now that I have to pretend I want to do something, anything, so I point at the book Cain gave me and reach for it when he passes it over with another sour look on his face.

I ignore him and open the book. I must admit it’s one of the best gifts I ever received and I wish I could just read it without drifting away in my numb mind… The book is suddenly snatched away from me.

“I’m done,” Cain hisses at me and yanks me up. “You know I can fucking feel your every emotion, right? I can feel you spiraling down right now.”

I’m being pulled to the bathtub that is yet to be filled with fresh water, and I start to protest, but my mouth is being forcefully closed by Cain’s huge hand, and I know better by now than to fight him.

“You know why for the whole month, while you’ve been doing this—because I assume that’s what you’ve been doing then—you were so fucking happy about every success?” he asks, putting me in the cold used water while I’m still in my shorts and t-shirt. “It’s because I could feel you being better for all these short, increasing moments, and I was so fucking relieved that my emotion doubled your happiness. Because you can feel me, too. Do you know how hard it is for me to not dwell in my sadness when I feel yours, so I won’t make you even worse? It’s fucking hard!”

With every word Cain shouts at me, my composure breaks, and more tears come to my eyes.

He takes my clothes off with a huff, not looking at my face. The clothes land on the floor with a wet slap. He shakes his head, looking intensely to his left, with furrowed brows.

I stand paralyzed with tears slowly falling down my cheeks. He sighs loudly and looks at me again. Our eyes lock before I break the gaze and look down at his full lips.

“I can’t even show you how much I love you because I can’t even touch you!”

“You can touch me,” I whisper, suddenly realizing how frustrating the lack of this kind of intimacy is.

I look up to catch him rolling his eyes at my statement. We both know what the doctor said, but I don’t care anymore. I need him. I need my true mate. I need to feel like myself again.

“You keep bleeding so much I wasn’t even able to smell that you were cutting yourself!” he growls with frustration and uses one of the buckets to pour the cold water over my shivering body.

“Cain, it’s dirty!”

“I don’t care, I need this, stand still,” he rubs my body with a cloth while I try not to freeze to death for no practical reason.

He doesn’t say a word after that and neither do I. Through the mate bond, he so foolishly established, I can feel we both are mental messes. I’m just the only one who usually shows it.

I take off my hair elastic and tie his semi-long black hair in a mini man-ban because they keep falling into his eyes. He stopped going to the barber, not wanting to leave me for anything not essential, and the only thing I could do was shave his sides and trim his beard with a battery-operated clipper. The top of his head grew long.

I like it.

Finally, he gives me a hand to help me get out of the tub because I must have been so weak at some point that he forgot I’m a fucking werewolf with a supernatural balance and I can’t trip over just like that. I feel his frustration with me rise, fueled by my own, even before he throws a towel at my face and storms out of the room with a slam of the doors.

I take a big breath, dry myself, angrily put my pajama set on, and go to bed. Sun barely sets, and I should probably try to go eat dinner with everyone else for the first time in over a month—as I planned for a few days now—marking my birthday as a good day to do it. But I feel so drained after this whole intense conversation with Cain, that I don’t think I would be able to stomach anything.

This whole time, I was so immersed in my pain and this wild certainty that he would be with me through all of it no matter what, that I never really considered how all of it must have affected him.

Cain is wrong about one thing, though. He has been showing me how much he loves me every single day for months now. I was just too stubborn to see it.

He is so strong for me, so understanding, and so supportive no matter what I need. He is always there for me and to be honest, that constant is the only thing that made me want to find a way to heal and push through the darkest time of my life.

I pull my hands over my tired face. He loves me . I try to wrap my mind around that. He told me that dozens of times, but the words never felt as true as his actions…

And I foolishly told him I love him too.

I’m being eaten by the fear that someday it will all be ruined by him finding out I truly am his biggest weakness. And maybe he doesn’t even care right now, so I’m safe at the moment, because he already dealt with both my dad’s army and with Unwanted, but it’s a cruel world we live in. There will always be some new enemy, some new land to conquer, some new Officer Asher who will get under his skin… they all will want a way to hurt him through me.

And he can’t have that.