~Scar That Still Pulses~

003

"I reject you, Raven, as my mate."

I heard it. Processed it. Then I heard it again.

"You what?"

"It was never a bond. You're human. Fully human. Whatever this was, it cannot be what it would need to be. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry." I pulled the blanket around myself, which was a ridiculous thing to do but my hands needed something to hold. "Ten days, Drake. Ten days you kissed me like I was the only thing in the world and now you're sorry."

"I shouldn't have let it go this far."

"Let it." I laughed, and it came out wrong. "You initiated every single thing that happened in this cave. Every kiss. Every time you pulled me back when I tried to give you space. That was you. Don't make it sound like you were doing me a favor by tolerating my presence."

Something moved across his face. Not guilt exactly. Something more complicated than guilt.

"You deserve someone who can choose you fully. I cannot."

"I didn't ask you to choose me fully. I asked you to be honest with me." My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it. "Was any of it real? Or were you just lonely and I was convenient?"

He said nothing. Which was its own kind of answer.

He transformed into his full dragon form and flew. The sky swallowed him and I sat on the cave floor and fell apart in the particular silence of someone who has just learned the difference between being wanted and being chosen.

****************

 I feel a smile pull at my mouth before I can stop it. Not because it was funny. Because it was so completely, catastrophically mine. 

I loved badly and completely and I would probably do it again because I couldn't let Drake shut my door of love.

I remembered that I stole nine hundred thousand dollars from my boss's safe the morning after Drake said those words. Not for survival. Not for rent or food or any of the sensible reasons a person commits a crime. I stole it because I was twenty-two years old and I had spent ten days in a forest cave believing I was loved, and when that belief shattered I needed the money to exist inside the fantasy a little longer. The fantasy where Drake would come back. Where he would land outside whatever window I was sitting by, wings folding, amber eyes finding mine, and say he had made a mistake. I needed funds for that version of my life. The one where I mattered enough to return to.

He had gaslighted me. He told me if “If you really loved him I would do anything for him and I did.

He never came back.

We stayed hidden in the cave behind the convent, tangled in each other with the particular desperation of two people who sense on some animal level that time is running out. He shifted between dragon and man, wings folding around us like a living shelter while he moved inside me slowly and deeply on piles of moss and shed scales that caught the light like scattered coins. I taught him human tenderness, how to kiss without his teeth drawing blood, how to hold without claws leaving marks. I fell so completely that my chest physically ached every time he looked at me. The way he whispered my name in the dark. The way he traced the scar on my belly with careful fingertips after wrecking me until I had nothing left, like he was reading something written there. I thought he felt it too. I was so certain he felt it too.

I was wrong in the particular devastating way you can only be wrong about something you staked everything on.

I was human. I had always been human, no wolf blood, no shifted form, no moon-bond to offer. I knew this. I had known this the entire time and I let myself believe it wouldn't matter because he kissed me like it didn't matter and I was stupid enough to trust a kiss.

I thought being loved was the same as being chosen. Drake taught me the distance between those two things.

The very next morning the news came from the Silverpine pack. My mother was dead. Luna Elara, who was fierce and strong and who had survived things that would have ended other women, was found in the pack den with her throat torn out by her own grief. My father had taken a younger she-wolf, paraded her scent through the pack house like a declaration, and my mother, who had given him everything, could not survive the humiliation of it. She shifted and fought the pain until her heart stopped mid-roar. Or so the messengers said. I never saw her body. I never got to scream at my father.

Two losses in two days. I sat at the edge of the palace garden and felt the ground underneath me turn unreliable in a way it has never fully recovered from.

Aunt Dolores came that same afternoon. She is my mother's twin, which means looking at her has always been its own specific kind of pain, the same bone structure, the same set to the jaw, the same obsidian eyes that see through everything you are trying to hide. She arrived without warning, silver-furred in wolf form. She found me at the forest edge, still smelling of Drake and smoke and everything I had lost.

"Enough," she said. Not unkindly. But with the finality of a door closing.

She bundled me into a car and drove south through the border mists without asking whether I wanted to go, which was the right call because I would have said no and she knew it. The Silverpine pack faded behind us hour by hour until there was nothing left of them, just ordinary roads and Aunt Dolores's hands steady on the wheel. She brought us to New York, to the human world where nothing howled at the moon and no one grew wings, and she told me we were staying. Permanently. That this was not a pause or a recovery but a relocation, a new life built deliberately far from everything that had destroyed the old one.

She enrolled me in secretarial college under a new name. My real name was Nymeria.

Every night, Aunt Dolores would always say “Men are monsters. Supernatural ones are demons wearing beautiful faces. They take, they ruin, they leave, and every single time you will be surprised because they are very good at making you believe this time will be different. Love is useless, don't ever give in.”

She said it until it became the rhythm underneath everything else I thought. She was trying to save me. I understood that. I still understand it. But there is a particular kind of saving that seals the wound wrong, that closes the skin over something that still needed air, and you don't know it until years later when the pressure starts to build.

I remembered the ruthless man I stole from him and ran. I had changed my identity and look and slipped into the convent like smoke looking for somewhere to settle. 

The day moves in its usual shape. Morning mass. Lessons with the children. The herb garden under Aunt Dolores’s watchful eye. During afternoon tea she mentions a name with the casual ease of someone dropping something into still water.

Victor Hale. Victor. I remember him from before all of it, before the wolf blood and Drake and everything that came after. Tall and dark-haired with hazel eyes that used to make my stomach flip across a classroom. 

I barely hear the rest of what she says. My mind has already slid sideways toward the app. Toward the last message sitting unread in ShadowKing's thread, burning quietly at the bottom of my pocket all day.

Night comes over the city. I lock the cell door, light the candle down to its last inch, prop the phone on the shelf. What follows is not something I can justify or explain in any language Aunt Dolores would recognize as reasonable. It is just want, stripped of everything else, months of denial flooding back all at once as his commands arrive and my body answers them without consulting the part of me that knows better.

 I lay on the mattress with my face wet and my thighs slick and the scar on my belly pulsing like a second heartbeat, and I think about Drake's wings folding around me in the dark. I think about my mother, fierce and destroyed by the same hunger I am lying here feeding and then I think about the irresistible stranger.

I remember the reason why I had this scar was because I was almost caught the night I went to steal from my boss. Drake had used his scale to heal me and it was turned into a scar that seemed alive.

I whisper quietly to the ceiling.

"I should delete this app and be normal. I know I should."

But I already know I won't.

Drake built the dream and shattered it and flew away clean. My mother loved without armor and it killed her. Aunt Dolores chose survival over everything and she is not wrong, she is just not enough. Victor is waiting somewhere in this city with steady hands and hazel eyes and absolutely no idea what he is walking into. What did he want from me anyway?

And ShadowKing is waiting in the dark with words that reach through the screen and find the exact place I have been pretending does not exist.

I choose the dark again. 

Some hungers do not care how many times they have already cost you everything.