Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
James
“Because fated mates do not exist.” The answer is expected. Samuel told me fae don’t have fated mates.
“No, I know it doesn’t exist for fae, but Peter isn’t fae. Peter told me it’s a faun thing so ma—“
“No, James, fated mates do not exist in any of the nine realms,” Killian interrupts me. “That is why Celeste stopped wanting to be with him. She started to see the truth,” he continues. “I always thought not being fated but choosing each other is far more beautiful,” he says before leaning back.
The temperature drops, causing me to shiver. Every fiber in my body is screaming at me to believe Peter. To believe how good life had been not just for me but for my Matthew and Barry too. To believe I had a valid reason to move to another realm, taking my brothers with me.
“The Lost Ones,” I whimper. I need to know what Peter does to the Lost Ones. To my brothers. Because slowly reason was starting to win from the desperate need to believe Peter.
The way Peter spoke to me in my last dreams, the fact that I was not dying but slowly getting better.
How the juice helped me with my symptoms just like Killian told me.
And worst of all, the genuine hurt etched on Killian’s face when he spoke about Celeste, the reason he gave up his left hand.
I would have done the same If it took me offering my hand to get my brothers back home, I would.
“Your brothers, he made them work as the Lost One’s, didn’t he?
” Killian’s voice wraps around me like the warm blanket he put on me earlier, combating the cold of the realization seeping into my bones.
The warm empathy in his voice is not pity.
He doesn’t see me as sad, or thinks I need emotional philanthropy.
He understands the fears I have; he feels them with me because he is living them.
“He did, because I believed him and wanted them with me.” My words come out muffled, silenced as my lips move pressed against the palm of my hands.
I can’t bear to look at anything now, so I bury my face in my hands.
I just can’t, not after what I have done to my brothers.
For a moment, I squeeze my eyes shut, wanting to wake up in bed, in my parent’s home.
With new stories to tell Matthew and Barry.
Stories about pirates and fauns I dreamed up in my sleep.
But this is a nightmare of my own making, a nightmare spun from the dulcet tones of a pan flute, under the lips of a liar.
“Does he turn them into brownies too?” I feel a little lighter having finally asked the question that had been on my mind since Killian told me about Celeste. I may dread the answer, but knowing is better than not knowing.
“I am sorry,” he says, which is as much an answer as it isn’t.
“I need to get back, please. Peter is never coming to get me. I won’t tell him where you are.
I’ll just get my brothers and go home. I have no idea how I am going to get back to Earth from here.
I have no idea what my parents will say.
All I know is that I need them to get to safety, I need to make it up to my brothers before something bad happens to them,” I plead with Killian, ready to beg him, if that is what he needs.
His forehead crinkles, his nose scrunches up, all while his eyes narrow.
Like he is ready to punish me for even suggesting it.
But this lasts only a split second before his face relaxes again, like someone realized their doll was wound up too tight, and immediately over compensated, by unwinding too much now.
“I can’t let you do that James, not without talking to the crew first.” Perfect, his crew thinks that I am a bother, several crew members even ready to tell it to my face.
“Even if they would say yes, which would surprise me, I have plenty more reason to keep you aboard. Maybe we can stop seeing each other as the villain. And find a way to work together, you to get your brothers to safety. And me to get Celeste back.” This…
makes sense. We both want something back from a now common enemy—he wants Celeste and I want my brothers.
I should be eager to agree to his terms. He has a far better shot of getting me and my brothers home than I have on my own.
Still the idea of working together with the man that ripped me from a home. To once again trust in a stranger’s comforting words, offering me an out from a future I don’t want, has my stomach clenching. My palms grow sweaty, unease slithers down my spine.
“I have no reason to trust you,” I say coldly, standing a little straighter. Hiding my insecurities behind the rigidness of my posture as I have always done.
“You had no reason to trust Peter either, darling, and yet, you did.” Of course, he would say that.
Of course, he would want to show how much better he is.
It is all he has been doing from the moment he dragged me away from the Silvermist lake until now.
It was the root of my apprehension. He would not hesitate to sacrifice me to gain an advantage on Peter.
Slowly remembering all Peter did to me, the lies, the punishment if I didn’t fit in, the perfect mold he wanted for me—it unsettles me.
But there is still the fear that it was not Peter who manipulated me, but Killian.
I felt it too, the mate bond—not just when I moved in with him.
When he had the access to manipulate me.
No, from the second he stepped into my room I felt something.
Peter didn’t force me to come with him. He gave me a choice and couldn’t have manipulated my parents into marrying me off to someone even they were hesitant about.
“Look where that got me, and Peter never forced me to do anything,” I scoff, but my voice falters, my composure cracks, like thin glass in the winter. Like everything around me is cracking. How am I supposed to know what choices to make, when I have no grasp on reality anymore?
“Think about it but let me show you what it could be like to be a real part of the crew. Not just a prisoner.” I never knew one could experience a form of déjà vu even when a moment is completely different from the one it bears resemblance to.
Still, as Killian tells me to think about it, to give my answer tomorrow, as he offers me a snippet of what could have been—It layers perfectly with the first time I met Peter.
When he asked me to think about going to Silvermist with him.
Offering me just one kiss, a tantalizing preview of what it would be like to be with him.
“You’re so fucking similar to Peter that it is staggering,” I growl.
Once again my feet leave the floor. A feeling once unnerving, unstable, scary, has now become common.
Nothing new. Killian Tregear has lifted me up, growling and snarling like a rabid dog so often it’s as scary as getting a headache, an inconvenience I would rather avoid, but a part of life you can’t get away from.
Especially since I can never just shut up.
“I am nothing like that murdering, kidnapping, cursing goat.” His voice, so cold that it once gave me shivers, is more of a nuisance now.
“No, you’re right, your words are close to his, giving me a night to think about it.
Luring me in with some shitty reward. The only difference is Peter did not need to be so aggressive.
He isn’t a brute, like you are.” The words leave my lips as soon as they form in my mind.
My knees ache at the sudden force of my feet landing on sturdy wood.
The cold metal pressed against my skin, doesn’t retreat this time. At odds with how this normally plays out, the rounded edge of the hook presses deeper into my chest. Swallowing becomes hard as Killian crowds me against the glass of the steering room we are in now.
“Peter just kissed you, right? Just one little kiss so he would know what kissing his fated mate feels like.”
My knees buckle. Killian is repeating everything Peter has ever done or said to me, like it is a play he memorized. He should not be able to. There is no way he can know exactly what Peter told me. He wasn’t there for it, unless he was there for it with someone else.
“And if I kiss you, it will be better. Because I won’t be focused on how I can make you believe. I will kiss you because I want to, because I know you deserve better than some goat king. Because men like you deserve a kiss not to manipulate your thoughts but to wipe every thought from your mind.”
Before I can respond to his sudden remark, his lips are on mine, rough, warm, demanding.
I should push him off, slap him again. I should hate him for this.
What I should not do is sigh into the kiss.
My body betrays me, and the second my lips part, his tongue is there, dancing with mine.
Cold metal caressing my heated cheeks makes me body tremble with longing.
Velvet crushes under the palms of the hands that were supposed to push him off, not pull him closer. His scent of ocean salt and pine, invades my senses.
“No, stop,” I finally manage to murmur without pulling back, not until he does.
“At least Peter asked me,” I say softly, the words as weak as my excuse.
I kissed him back, and worst of all, he was right.
I had not a single thing on my mind apart from him.
First kisses are not supposed to feel this good.
First kisses with a stranger you hate should not be better than kissing your fated mate.
Because the kiss with Peter wasn’t tantalizing.
I built it up in my mind. When I just thought about the kiss, I remembered a kiss that took my breath away.
Not the sloppy inexperienced kiss Peter and I shared.
“Go to bed. You have a shift in the afternoon.” His voice is choppy, with how ragged his breathing is, matching the unruly rhythm of my heart now.
His voice, however, is as cold as the air seeping inside as he opens his door to stride off.
My feet are rooted to the ground, somewhere between his tea confessions, and now my body has decided to do everything I don’t want it to do.
I need to go. Every second I keep standing here, watching him climb up the crow’s nest, I am making a fool of myself. I cannot let him know that this kiss was good, that it did something to me.
He stormed off, mad, like I had done something, when it was he who kissed me just to make a point. I should have been the one to storm off, after slapping him off me. Yet I still stand here, like the very Silvermist Ocean caught fire, and I am now watching water burn.
Finally, I get my legs to move, I have no idea how much time has passed. I have no idea how I feel about the fact that I have betrayed Peter. Betrayed the mate bond, because I have no idea if there even is a mate bond to betray.
My knees give up the second the door to my room falls into the lock with a loud creak.
I fall to the floor, curling up in a ball, the velvety silk fabric of my new pants caressing my cheeks where his hook had minutes ago.
A sob tears from my chest, hurting like it is a part of my soul being torn off.
Not because I just betrayed Peter and our possible bond, not because I am a nasty cheater now, but simply because I am not even sure if I truly had anything with him.
Can one even cheat if the relationship was a farce, a pan flute induced fantasy, that holds no merit in reality?
Does it matter if the start was false? Does it take away from the happiness I experienced with him? How much better my life has gotten since meeting him. My body curls up further, another sob wrecking my body at the daunting question.
“Was I really happier?”
When I agreed to go with Peter, take my brothers, let them be under his care as I fled home because of a conversation I never granted my parents to have with me.
I did not just burn bridges, I moved to a realm where those bridges had never existed.
A world where even my knowledge of those bridges slowly faded into the nothingness of life in Silvermist. In the black hole of the mate bond with Peter that had left no capacity for anything else.
And if this all started as a lie, it’s not just the foundation on which I build my life that’s rotten.
It would mean I have no life left at all. No home to return to anymore.