Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy
I watched the whole rotten shape of it arrive in him at once, and for the first time since the ceremony, Cole Shade looked as though he might be sick.
"You chose me. It was enough," Tara-Lee said, and she smiled at his ruin.
I stopped listening to her. My mother was dying, and I went to her, reaching up for the silver grown into her wrists.
The chains reacted. The moment my power touched them, they flared white and threw me across the shrine floor. I hit stone and tasted blood.
Behind me, Hunter made a sound I had never heard from him. Low. Wrecked.
I turned. He had gone to the wall, to the great iron rings the chains ran through, and he was staring at the metalwork as though it had spoken h