Chapter 2 — Let the Bond Choose.

Eliana's POV

With the look on their faces, I was already getting uncomfortable with all of that.

And I mean ‘uncomfortable’ in the way that made my skin prickle and my brain start sending signals that my legs hadn't quite agreed to act on yet. I didn't know these two. I had never seen them before today even though at the same time, it still felt like I had seen them before now. And yet they were standing here, hands still resting on my shoulders like they had every right to, looking at me like I was something they had been searching for.

That alone should have been enough to make me scream.

"Seriously…" I managed to say, then faked a huff of relief to buy myself a second to think. "…you guys can let me go, please."

The one on my right didn't move.

"I can't let you go," he said.

His voice was calm. Not aggressive, not threatening, rather it was just certain. The kind of certainty that didn't need to raise its volume because it already knew it was right.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

And before I could even finish deciding how offended I was going to be about that, he added quietly … like it was the most natural thing in the world to say to a complete stranger in a school corridor:

"You are my mate."

The word landed in the middle of my chest and just … sat there.

‘Mate.’

I touched my chin without thinking, that nervous habit I could never fully kick, and let go almost in the same breath. I looked at him properly for the first time. And that was when I noticed it … the shift happening right in front of my eyes, so subtle at first that I almost convinced myself I was imagining it.

His eyes changed. The color drained out of them and then flooded back into a deep, burning amber-gold that caught the corridor light in a way that human eyes simply did not. His jaw tightened slightly, and when his lips parted, I saw his teeth. It was not the normal teeth. It was longer and seemed sharper. The kind you only ever saw in the werewolf movies right before something happened that you couldn't take back.

My breath caught in my throat.

‘This isn't real. This is not real.’

But it was real. It was happening, right here, right now, and every rational explanation I reached for dissolved the second I touched it because there was no rational explanation for what I was seeing.

Before I could find my voice, the one on my left moved.

I felt it before I saw it … the lightest press of his second finger against the side of my neck, so deliberate it almost felt clinical. And then a small, sharp sting. I swallowed an invisible gulp, my whole body going rigid as I felt something trail slowly downward along my throat.

‘Blood.’

My blood.

He leaned in. Not violently and not even quickly. Just close enough that I felt the warmth of him shift into something cooler, yet at the same time, something that didn't feel entirely human, and he ‘inhaled.’ Like whatever was running down my neck was the only thing in this corridor worth paying attention to.

‘Okay. Okay, these guys are definitely not human.’

That thought arrived completely calm, which probably said something about the state I was in.

And then I saw it happen to the second one too. The same shift — his eyes bleeding from whatever color they'd been before into a striking, almost electric blue. Bright, cold and endless which felt like looking at deep water from above and not being able to see the bottom. His teeth, when I caught a glimpse of them, matched the first … sharp, precise. And at both sides of his head, just barely visible, the faintest outline of something that curled upward like a horn.

I couldn't look directly at it for long.

Not because I was afraid … and that was the part that confused me most. I wasn't necessarily afraid. I probably ‘should’ have been. Every sane, self-preserving instinct I possessed was telling me that this was the moment to scream, to bolt, to do literally anything except stand here between two clearly supernatural beings who were looking at me like I belonged to them.

But there was this feeling. Sitting right underneath all the shock, the confusion and the racing heartbeat which seemed quiet, stubborn and impossible to shake. Like some part of me that I had never had access to before was saying:

‘They won't hurt you.’

I didn't know why I believed it.

But, I believed it anyway.

"Your blood is intoxicating," the one on my left said, and his fingers found my chin, turning my face gently but firmly toward him the moment I tried to look away. His eyes held mine and didn't let go. "I can't let you go either, mate."

And at that — at hearing that word a second time, from a second mouth … I felt my legs make their opinion known. My knees weren't exactly giving out, but they weren't being cooperative either, and I must have swayed slightly because both of them shifted at the same moment, letting me lean against them without making a thing of it.

Like they'd already expected it.

Like they already knew my body better than I did.

‘What is happening to me?’

"Let me mark you," the one on my left said, and his hand moved to my hair, drawing it back from my neck slowly, exposing the skin there. Not rough and not urgent either. It was like he had all the time in the world and he had already decided how this was going to go.

"She doesn't need it to be gentle," the one on my right said.

I couldn't even decide which one of them to look at.

And right in that moment … right in the space between one breath and the next — I felt something. Not pain. Not fear. Something I didn't have a perfect word for yet, moving through me like a current that started at both sides simultaneously and met somewhere in the middle of my chest. Warm, pulling and so deeply, disturbingly ‘familiar’ that it made my eyes sting.

Both of them went still at the same second.

Like they felt it too.

And then, in the same breath and in the same voice, they said:

"Let the bond choose."

I wish I could tell you I fought it. I wish I could say I came to my senses, found my voice, pushed them back and walked away from whatever this was before it went any further. But the truth was that my body had stopped consulting me somewhere between the corridor and right now, and whatever this pull was … this thing I had no name for … it had already made its decision.

They bent toward my neck. Both of them. At the same time.

And they marked me.

The sound I made wasn't a scream. It wasn't painful either.

Rather, it was something in between as it was something that dissolved almost as quickly as it came. Then it was replaced by that same warm, consuming current that moved through me like it was rearranging something on the inside.

I was only human. That was the only thought I had left that made any sense. Only human, standing in a school corridor, between beings that seemed like a werewolf and a vampire, having just been marked by both of them — and the most terrifying part of all of it was not what they were.

It was the fact that some quiet, traitor part of me didn't want them to stop.