Page 6

CHAPTER 6

A shley

“I have to see him,” I tell my sister for the fifth time.

Emery tugs at my arm, essentially fighting me from getting out of the door.

“Ashley, you need to rest,” she counters. “Look at you. You’re barely able to stand.”

My legs confirm her words when I stumble, nearly falling into my sister.

“See?” she says, holding me up by my shoulders. “You have to get back into bed.” She wraps an arm around my waist, struggling to get me back into bed.

“No.” I attempt to pull away from her. Desperation claws through me. I have to see him. To know if he made it out of that horrid place as well. Oh, Mother Moon, please let him have made it out.

“Where is he? Did he get out, too?”

“You have to calm down. Your IV,” she reminds me.

“Christophe!” I start yelling since I can’t make it out of the door. His voice. If I could just hear his voice. I need to know that he’s okay.

“Ashley, calm down, please.”

“I can’t calm down,” I tell my sister. “Could you calm down if you didn’t know where your mate was?”

She pauses, looking at me with renewed eyes. Her hold around my waist doesn’t let up, though.

“Your mate? This … you believe this Christophe is your mate?”

I nod. “I don’t believe it. I know it.”

Her eyebrows raise. “You’ve mate bonded.”

I blink. “I— We …” I trail off because I don’t have an answer for her. “Wh-What is mate bonding?”

My sister’s shoulders slump, and I might be mistaken but I think she looks relieved.

“What is mate bonding, Em?” I ask more forcefully this time.

“It means that you’ve bound yourself to your mate for eternity. It’s difficult to explain, but if it happened, you would know it,” she says. “In more ways than one.”

On its own will, my head shakes a little. I might’ve had my first few shifts into my wolf form already but there’s obviously so much about this world I don’t know.

Christophe rarely talked to me about being a wolf shifter. It was always him, asking me to do the talking.

“The sound of your voice reminds me of freedom,” he’d once said when I told him that I was talking too much. My stomach muscles clench in the exact same way they had the first time I heard him say those words to me.

“We might not have mate bonded, or whatever it’s called, but he’s my mate.”

“How do you know, Ashley?” my sister counters.

“Because he’s the one who kept me alive in that place. Christophe is the only reason I’m alive right now. So many times I wanted to give up in there, but he made me fight to stay alive. He knew we would get out one day. That we’d be free.”

I bite my bottom lip to keep from blurting out the truth.

Christophe always said that I would get out of that place. He never talked about his own freedom. Not once did he mention his life after imprisonment.

“Where is he? You have to let me see him.” I renew my fight to get to him, wherever he is.

I must take Emery by surprise because she’s about a second too slow when I reach for the door, opening it.

I make it past the threshold before she can stop me.

“Christophe?” I yell down the long hospital hallway.

A couple nurses at the far end worriedly look my way. They instantly drop whatever it is they’re doing and start in my direction.

“Christophe? Can you hear me?” I shout, ignoring my sister behind me, tugging at the cotton pajama shirt I have on.

“Ashley, you’re disrupting the other patients.”

I stop and spin to her.

“What other patients? Are they also survivors of that place? Of the prison?” I don’t know how to reference where we were kept locked up and imprisoned, treated like animals. Surely, even prison is more humane than how we were treated.

“Some of them,” Emery answers.

“Miss, is there anything we can help you with?” one of the three nurses, who’ve now made their way to us, asks.

Guilt curls up in the pit of my stomach. The last thing I want is to disturb the other patients, especially if they’ve been newly freed, like me.

“I just … I just need to find Christophe.”

“Christophe?” one of the nurses questions.

“Yes, he—” I stop short because I was about to give her a description but I draw a blank.

We’ve never seen one another, face to face. I never even thought to ask him what he looked like. Appearance seemed inconsequential during our confinement. And how do I use the sound of his voice as a means of identifying him?

It’s deep with notes of sweetness in it. Comforting like a warm blanket or fuzzy socks. But his voice can sound infused with iron when he’s trying to get his point across. Such as when he’s telling—no, demanding that I not give up.

“Please,” I beg the nurses even as my sister gets in between us.

“Ashley, you should come back to your room.”

“But he’s in here. I can feel it,” I recognize for the first time out loud. Christophe, like me, made it out.

That’s when I pause and look at Emery once again.

Not once did she try to negate his existence. She asked me how I knew that he was my mate, but not how I knew he was real.

Something pings in my gut.

“D-Do you know him?” The question materializes in my mind at the same time I ask it out loud.

She presses her lips together, briefly looking over her shoulder at the nurses.

“Em.” I grab her arm, shaking it. There’s something she’s not telling me. “Do you know him?”

Emery looks back at me.

“No.” She shakes her head. “I’ve never met him, but Chance has.”

My eyes widen. “How?”

“They’re brothers.”