I Don't Believe In Fate

Christie's POV

I should have gone back inside.

That was the logical thing to do. It was the middle of the night, I had been running on almost no sleep for two days, and the man sitting on the floor outside my door was the same man who had kidnapped me three days ago.

Instead I slid down the wall and sat beside him.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"You scared me," I said finally.

"I know. Sorry."

"You're not sorry."

"No," he agreed. "Not really."

I pulled my knees up to my chest. The hallway was cold and dark and completely quiet. Lyon was close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his arm.

"Lyon."

"Hmm."

"What is a Luna?"

He turned his head and looked at me.

"You've been holding that question for a while," he said.

"Since the first day. Everyone keeps saying it like I should already know what it means."

He was quiet for a moment. Not the kind of quiet that meant he wasn't going to answer. The kind that meant he was deciding where to start.

"A Luna is the Alpha's mate," he said. "The woman who leads alongside him. She isn't just a wife. She's the other half of the pack's foundation. Without a Luna, an Alpha can lead but there's always something missing. The pack feels it even if they are loyal followers of their alpha.”

"And Kendra was supposed to be yours," I said.

"She was arranged to be. It's not the same thing."

I looked at him. "What's the difference?"

"A Luna isn't chosen by elders or bloodlines," Lyon said. "She's recognised. By the Alpha. By his wolf. Sometimes by the pack before the Alpha even admits it to himself."

Something about the way he said that made me very still.

"And what's a fated mate?" I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"It means exactly what it sounds like. It's one person chosen before either of you has a say in it. The bond is both physical and instinctive, it's not something you talk yourself into or out of. When you're near her, everything in you settles. When she's in danger, nothing else exists."

The hallway was very quiet.

"That sounds terrifying," I said.

"It is," he said simply.

I sat with that for a while.

"I don't believe in fate," I said. "I believe in choices. I believe people decide who they love and how and when. I've never trusted anything I couldn't see the evidence for."

Lyon nodded slowly. "I know."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

"Because you asked," he said. "And because you deserve an honest answer more than you deserve a comfortable one."

"Lyon." I turned to face him properly. "Are you telling me that you think you might have found fated mate…and that might be me?"

He looked at me with that steady, unbothered expression that gave nothing away and somehow said everything.

"I'm telling you what the bond is," he said. "What you do with that information is your choice. I'm not going to go any further than you should actually know, because that'll be like forcing things on you. I've done enough forcing since the night I walked into your lab."

"That's a very diplomatic non-answer."

"It's the most honest thing I've said in years," he said.

I didn't know what to say to that. I turned back to face the hallway and we sat in silence as the dark outside the windows slowly began to change. The black thinned out into grey, then into the pale flat light that comes just before sunrise.

Lyon stood up first. He reached his hand down to me and I took it.

He pulled me to my feet and neither of us let go. We just stood there in the early morning light, his hand around mine, close enough that I could see the detail of his face clearly for the first time without a crisis pulling my attention somewhere else.

He was looking at me the way he had looked at his mother when she opened her eyes. Like something he had been afraid of losing.

He leaned down slowly.

I didn't move back.

His face was close, close enough that I could feel his breath, and then something at the end of the hallway moved.

We both looked up at the same time.

Kendra was standing at the far end of the corridor. She looked at our joined hands and at the distance between our faces. Her expression was flat. She just kept looking, like she was memorising the whole scenario, and then she turned and walked away without a single word.

An hour later, I was back in Nima's room checking her morning readings when I reached for the IV line and stopped cold.

The drip had been tampered with.