Chapter 2 #2
The bond scar flared white-hot and the world rushed back in like a dam breaking, and it was agony.
Every nerve ending I'd thought was dead lit up at once. My lungs burned. My vision blurred. The magic in my chest—the borrowed power I'd barely been able to feel for weeks—surged violently, pressing against my ribs like it wanted out.
Nathan's expression shifted. The professional mask cracked—just for a second, just enough for me to see the shock beneath it. His eyes widened. His lips parted. He took half a step back, as if I'd struck him.
Then the mask slammed back into place.
"Ellie," he said. Just my name. Flat. Controlled. Like we were colleagues who hadn't seen each other in a while. Like he hadn't ripped our bond apart with his bare hands and walked away while I was still bleeding.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Two years.
Two years since he'd looked me in the eye and told me the bond was a mistake.
That he couldn't—wouldn't—accept it. That I wasn't what he needed.
Two years since I'd felt my soul crack down the middle as the rejection tore through me, severing something that was supposed to be permanent, sacred, unbreakable.
He'd broken it anyway.
And now he was standing six feet away from me in a hotel hallway in Poland, and my treacherous, stupid body was reaching for him. The bond scar pulsed like a second heartbeat, raw and desperate, as if the dead tissue remembered what it had been and was trying to grow back.
Megan stood slightly behind him, her posture perfect, her face carefully blank.
She was watching me the way you'd watch an animal you weren't sure was dangerous.
Calculating. Cautious. Her hand rested on Nathan's arm, a subtle claim on her property.
My heart tightened at the sight of her hands on him. The man who was supposed to be mine.
"You're on the team," Nathan said. Not a question. His jaw tightened. "You're one of the carriers."
"Nathan," I said. I couldn’t manage anything else, but my voice stayed steady.
Megan stepped forward, and I saw the discomfort in her posture, the way she didn't quite meet my eyes.
"We didn't know you'd be—" She hesitated. "It's good to see you. You're one of the carriers?"
"Yes."
Something crossed her face. Too fast to read. "That's... that takes courage."
I almost laughed. Courage. That's what she thought this was.
It wasn't courage. It was the absence of anything worth staying for. There was a difference, but I wasn't about to explain it to the woman who'd taken my mate.
"Thank you," I said instead, because politeness was armour and I'd been wearing it for two years.
The silence that followed was unbearable.
Three people standing in a hotel corridor, the air between us thick with everything unsaid.
The bond scar throbbed in my chest like a wound freshly reopened, and I could feel the magic stirring beneath it, agitated, pressing against the walls of my well in a way it never had before.
"The briefing's at eight tomorrow," Nathan said, his tone cool and professional. "We'll go over team assignments then. Cover protocols."
Team assignments.
Right. Because of course we were on the same team. Clearly the universe had decided that breaking me once wasn't enough.
"Great," I said.
The silence stretched. Nathan's jaw tightened—that little muscle that twitched when he was uncomfortable. Megan shifted her weight. They were waiting for me to say something else. To ask how they'd been, to acknowledge the situation, to be normal.
I couldn't.
The pain in my chest was spreading now. Down my arms. Into my stomach. Like the bond scar was a wound that had never properly healed, and seeing Nathan had torn it open again.
"I should—" I gestured vaguely toward my room.
"Of course," Nathan said quickly. "We'll see you tomorrow." He turned and went into their bedroom. Megan hung back, watching me.
I turned around but could still feel her eyes on my back. I focused on keeping my spine straight, my pace even, my breathing controlled as I fumbled with the key card. My hands were shaking so badly it took three tries.
The lock clicked. I pushed the door open.
"Ellie," Megan said quietly.
I stopped. Didn't turn around.
"I didn't know you'd be here," she said. "If I had—"
"It's fine," I said.
My voice was flat. Dead. I didn't care. I stepped into my room and closed the door, making it two steps before my legs gave out.
I caught myself against the wall, hands flat against the plaster, breath coming in short gasps.
The bond scar was on fire. Not metaphorically.
It burned, sharp and insistent, like someone had pressed a brand against my sternum.
I pressed my palm against it, but that just made it worse.
Seeing him brought it all back. The certainty.
The recognition. My mate. The rejection, the way he'd chosen Megan instead.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees pulled to my chest. Grief and humiliation crashed over me like a wave, sharp and vicious and impossible to ignore, but I didn't cry.
I'd stopped crying over Nathan a long time ago.
Crying required hope. Required the belief that things could be different, better. I didn't have that anymore.
So I just sat there on the floor of my hotel room, feeling everything at once.
I'd volunteered for this mission because I didn't care if I survived. Dying twenty five thousand years in the past seemed easier than living with this emptiness, but now Nathan was here. Now I'd have to see him every day, have to work with him and the woman he’d chosen over me and pretend I was fine. Pretend he hadn’t destroyed me.
And the worst part was that seeing him had woken something up. The numbness was gone. The careful distance I'd built between myself and the world had cracked wide open. I could feel again.
And god, I wished I couldn't.
I don't know how long I sat there, but it was long enough for my legs to go numb and the light outside to fade from grey to deep blue.
Eventually, I stood. Unpacked mechanically.
Hung up my clothes. Lined up my toiletries in the bathroom.
Practical things that stopped me thinking about tomorrow and the briefing.
About sitting in a room with Nathan and pretending I was whole.
I should eat something. I'd skipped lunch.
Skipped breakfast too, probably. I couldn't remember.
Instead, I lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling.
The hotel wasn't busy. Tourist season was months away and I could hear everything.
Pipes creaking. Muffled voices through the walls.
And then—
A thump.
I went still.
Another thump. Rhythmic. Steady.
The headboard. Next door.
No.
I held my breath.
A voice. Female. Breathy. Muffled through the wall but unmistakable.
Nathan and Megan. In the room next to mine. Having sex while I sat on the other side of the wall with the ghost of our bond burning a hole through my chest.
My stomach lurched. I pressed my hands over my ears, but it didn't help.
I should have moved. Should have gone to the bathroom and turned the shower on, or stuffed my head under the pillow, or walked out into the snow and keep walking until I couldn't hear anything but the wind.
But my body wouldn't cooperate. I was pinned there, frozen, listening to the rhythmic evidence of everything I'd lost.
The thing was—and I hated myself for this, truly, deeply hated myself—Nathan had never been good in bed.
Not with me. During the brief, bright weeks when we'd been together, before he'd torn it all apart, the sex had been.
.. fine. Adequate. He'd been mechanical about it, efficient, like it was another task on his to-do list. I'd told myself it would get better.
That the bond would deepen and he'd relax into it, into us. That he just needed time.
He hadn't needed time. He'd needed someone else.
I wondered if it was better with her. If she got the version of him I'd been promised—tender, passionate, present. If the sounds she was making were real or performed.
Pain lanced through me, white-hot and blinding, radiating outward from the scar like cracks spreading through glass.
I pressed both hands flat against my sternum and bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
The magic in my well churned, agitated, pressing against the walls of my chest like a trapped animal.
I could feel it responding to my distress, swelling and contracting in time with each horrible, rhythmic thump from the other side of the wall.
Stop it, I told myself. Stop listening. Stop caring. You don't get to care anymore.
But the bond scar didn't listen to reason.
It never had. It was a stupid, animal thing, etched into the deepest part of me, and it didn't understand that Nathan had chosen someone else.
It only knew that my mate was close—so close I could hear him breathing—and that he was with another woman, and that this was wrong, wrong, wrong in a way that went beyond emotion into something primal and cellular.
The thumping stopped. He never had lasted very long, even when he was with me. I remembered the feel of his arms around me, one under my leg, lifting me so he could get deeper, his eyes closed in passion. Or had he just not wanted to look at me?
Something inside me tore.
Not the bond—that was already broken. This was something else. Some last fragile hope I hadn't realized I'd been carrying. The possibility that maybe, somehow, seeing me again would make him remember. Would make him realize he'd made a mistake.
But he hadn't.
He'd taken Megan into their room and fucked her while I sat six inches of plaster away with my soul in shreds. That was his answer. That was all I needed to know.
I rolled onto my side, curled into myself, and pressed my face into the pillow.
The magic churned in my chest—restless, volatile, nothing like the quiet dead weight it had been for weeks.
It felt like it was responding to something, reaching for something, and I had to clamp down hard to keep it contained.
The last thing I needed was to lose control of a few hundred witches' worth of borrowed power in a hotel room in Poland because my ex-mate had lousy stamina and thin walls.
The absurdity of that thought almost made me laugh. Almost.
I lay there until the silence next door settled into something permanent.
Until I heard the low murmur of conversation, too quiet to make out words, just the cadence of two people talking in the dark.
Intimate. Comfortable. The sounds of a life I'd been promised and never received. Then, finally, I slept.