Chapter Ten
~Kalo~
I hadn’t been back in my room for long before there was another knock at my door.
As a genie, centuries had passed without a single uninterrupted moment to myself; one master’s final wish dissolved into another’s summons, with no time to breathe between them.
At the Crimsontooth pack house, the constant knocks on my door felt almost the same.
Would ignoring the noise be an option, I wondered? I could pretend I’d fallen asleep or been in the bathroom and hadn’t heard it. In fact, I’d almost made up my mind to do that when Leo’s voice drifted through the wood.
“Kalo? If you want me to go away, I will, but my wolf won’t let me leave until we know you’re safe.”
Did his wolf really say that, or was that a convenient excuse since I couldn’t tell the difference?
In either case, the sentiment behind it seemed well-intentioned, and I strode over to the door and opened it to find Leo standing there, his ear practically pressed against where the door had been.
He stumbled back when the barrier dividing us disappeared.
“Oh. Hello.” He swallowed awkwardly, as if he’d been about to say more and forced it back down.
His eyes quickly scanned my body, checking for any sign of harm, and when he’d satisfied himself that I was still in one piece, his gaze once again met mine.
“I meant it: if you’d rather be alone, I’ll go. ”
“It’s not that I want to be alone,” I corrected him, turning from the door and walked back into the room, leaving an open invitation for him to follow. He did, closing the door gently behind him. “Not right now, anyway. I just didn’t necessarily want to answer more questions.”
His wince told me that he’d come with questions of his own. “You’ve become a bit of a celebrity around here,” he said, his tone an apology. “Everyone wants to know more about you, and I’m afraid I’m just the same.”
Except he wasn’t just another curious stranger, and we both knew it. He was the whole reason I was there, and the reason I couldn’t leave until we figured out how to undo the bond tying us together.
Maybe the time had come to ask him a question or two about that.
“You mentioned before that giving me your mark makes breaking the bond more complicated, but you didn’t call it impossible. Is there a way to get out of it?”
The sudden change of subject took him so much by surprise that for several seconds, all he could do was blink at me.
“I’ll have to consult with the pack elders,” was his reply when he collected himself enough to give one. “If that’s what you wish.”
The final word made me wince. “I’ll never wish for anything again, but I would like to know what the options are.”
“I understand.” He swallowed again, his lips pulling down into a frown for just a second before he smoothed them out again.
Abruptly, he turned and ambled over to the window, looking out at the forest where we’d gone walking that morning.
“Can you tell me more about the wish you made to become a genie?”
“I don’t know much more than what I told Calista and Felix. I wished for it, and the genie made it happen.”
“But why did you make the wish?” he pressed. “Why did you want to be a genie?”
I’d never talked about that with anyone, not only because no one else had cared enough to ask before, but also because I was embarrassed about the whole situation.
At the start, I was broken-hearted, but eventually, shame replaced the sadness, and now, with the benefit of hindsight and all the wisdom I’d accumulated during my years of servitude, I could only pity the fool I’d been back then.
But Leo watched me with so much curiosity and genuine interest that it didn’t take me long to decide to break my silence on the subject.
“You asked before if I’d been in many relationships, and I told you that I was in love once.”
Leo settled into the chair at the desk, as if he anticipated this might take some time, so I took a seat on the bed across from him.
“I also told you that relationships between two men of equal standing were forbidden.”
“I remember,” he assured me solemnly, and a second later, his eyes widened just enough that I knew he’d made the connection I was leading him towards. “You mean your relationship was forbidden?”
“Yes. Akkara and I were about as equally matched as two people could be.”
It had been so long since I’d spoken his name aloud that it felt strange in my mouth.
“Our fathers were both landowners and members of the king’s court.
Their wealth was practically indistinguishable.
And they both had sons born close to each other, so they decided to pool their resources and hire one tutor for both of us.
We were only boys then, and we became fast friends.
As the years went by, friendship deepened into something more. ”
If I closed my eyes, I could still feel the warm sun on my face as Akkara and I ran through the olive groves to escape our lessons, and how he’d told me to put an olive between my teeth.
When I did, he leaned in close to steal the olive from me, and our mouths collided around the ripe fruit.
I could still taste that olive in my memory, warmed by his lips.
It had been completely unexpected, and my first experience with anything that felt truly magical.
“Soon, we were stealing moments whenever we could, painfully aware that getting caught could get us killed. It went on for years that way, until one day, his father announced that he’d found Akkara a bride.”
More flashes of memories spun across my mind: Akkara running into my house, wild with despair, and the pain and jealousy I felt the first time I saw them together, dressed up to be presented at court. What could we do, though? Laws were laws.
“The night before the wedding, he snuck in through my bedroom window. I thought he’d come for one final night together, but it didn’t take me long to realize he had something very different in mind.
He carried a sack with him, and from it, he drew out an oil lamp.
He told me he’d stolen it from the king’s own collection and that it was blessed with extraordinary magic.
All we had to do was make a wish, and it would come true. ”
Leo’s lips pursed. “That must have been difficult to believe.”
“A little, but magic played a much larger part in our lives than it does now. People believed in many different things that science has since disproven, but magic… well, magic was rare, but real, just as it is now.”
“So, you summoned a genie,” Leo guessed.
“Yes. Akkara wanted me to make the wish, so I took the lamp and wished that he didn’t have to get married. The next thing we knew, another man appeared in the room with us, one with whiter skin than I’d ever seen and shockingly white hair.”
I should have taken some warning from the way the air around us chilled when he appeared, like even the sun drew back in caution. But we were young and desperate, and unable to fully appreciate the depths of the magic’s power.
“The genie explained to us that he could grant me three wishes and advised me to think them over carefully.”
Akkara and I discussed it throughout the night, trying to decide on the best use of the genie’s magic.
Him not getting married was a start, but that wouldn’t allow us to be together the way we wanted to.
What if we changed the law that forbade our relationship in the first place?
What if we simply wished ourselves a fortune so that we could leave our home and travel to new lands where no one knew us and our backgrounds? The possibilities were endless.
“As the morning dawned, we had decided that three wishes weren’t enough for everything we wanted.
Even one more would make all the difference, so Akkara came up with a plan.
I would make two wishes and use the third to become a genie myself.
He would immediately summon me and make an additional two wishes before wishing me human again.
We asked the genie if it would work, and he believed it would.
He said we’d need an object to attach me to, and Akkara had a necklace that belonged to his mother that he was meant to give his bride the next day. ”
The first time I laid eyes on that piece of jewellery, I never imagined how much my life would become entwined with it.
“So, I made my wishes. I wished that Akkara didn’t have to marry, and I wished for a stash of gold to start our new life. Then, with my final wish, I wished to become a genie.”
Instantly, my world had shifted. From standing in my bedroom with Akkara and the genie, I suddenly found myself at Akkara’s house, several days later. He said he’d wanted to check that the first two wishes were fulfilled before he called me back.
Leo leaned forward, his attention fixed on me. “What happened next?”
“My wishes all came true, but not as we planned. His fiancée was killed on the way to the ceremony, and the gold I’d wished for was stolen by marauders.
Akkara said he wanted to be more careful about the next wishes.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that he’d also become addicted to the power the genie’s wishes bring.
I’ve seen it many times since then, but at the time, I didn’t know it could happen. ”
Leo’s next question was quiet, anticipating correctly that the story would not end well. “What did he wish for?”
“First, he wished for a vast estate in a distant territory, where laws were looser. I granted the wish, and we were both instantly transported to a beautiful villa in a lush, coastal area. Then, he wished for hundreds of slaves to work the land for him, to keep him rich. Of course, I still thought we were planning our life together, expecting his final wish to be to free me.”
Leo’s words were barely a whisper. “But he didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t.” I swallowed down the lingering pain of betrayal as I forced the next words out.
“He wished for a princess to marry, someone who would bring him even more power and wealth. I had no choice; the magic bound me to fulfill the wish, and the last image I saw of him was him standing in his new home, ready to start his new life, and smiling as the magic pulled me back into the necklace.”
That was the shameful truth that I’d never shared before: the man I would have sacrificed everything for ended up sacrificing me instead.
So as much as I didn’t want the bond with Leo because of the freedom it denied me, part of me feared something even worse: that I could give myself away freely to another man who would care more about what I could do for him than he would about me.
My heart had failed me before, and I didn’t trust it enough to follow it again.