Kian’s roughened fingertips graze over my cheek. His hand trails down my face, my neck, over my collarbone. When his fingers come to rest over my heart, our gazes meet again.
Mine.
It’s a small echo of a feeling. The same feeling we had that night we met in Montana, when I gave myself to him in a cheap hotel room and thought he would be my future. A possessiveness like the mating bond that he so callously denied back then.
The ache in my chest is so familiar. The connection is still there like a phantom limb, lost but not really forgotten.
How is it possible for me to feel this way? For it to feel so much like a mate bond?
I don’t want to admit out loud that I still feel some kind of connection between us, especially when I don’t understand what it is or how it’s possible. So I place my hands on his chest and avoid his gaze, picking my words carefully as I ask, “The potion you all slipped me when we reached the Tree of Life—what was it meant to do?”
Kian’s palms slide up my arms, although his gaze remains firmly on my face. “It was meant to break the mate bond. No more, no less.”
“Oh.”
His hands drift to my neck, and his thumbs press gently into my jaw bone, angling my face up, forcing me to meet his eyes. His gaze grows more intense, heavy with unspoken meaning. He leans in close, his lips brushing against mine as he speaks again.
“But maybe,” he murmurs. “Maybe there are some things you just can’t fight. Some things that won’t break.”
I shiver in his arms, an electric feeling trickling down my spine. The truth in his words seems to resonate in my very bones.
Is he right? Are some things unbreakable?
There’s no way I should still feel so connected to him or Malix or Frost. And yet, I do.
I don’t know how to feel about the possibility that we’re still mated somehow. If the three of them are fated to bring the shadow realm to Earth, and as a result, ultimately destroy it… And I’m destined to die if I continue along this path of being bonded to them…
Fuck. How are any of us supposed to come out of this alive?
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say all of that out loud, but I don’t. Why speak such a thing into existence if I don’t have to?
I don’t want to shatter this moment of tenuous peace that’s been forged between us, but it’s too late. Reality comes rushing back in like it always does, pricking me with the reminders of where we are and everything that led us here.
Kian releases me, and cold air rushes in as he steps away.
“We should head back,” he says gruffly. “I’d like to be near when Frost wakes up. Just in case.”
I watch as his walls move back into place brick by brick. One by one, he builds them up, shutting me out, and even though I don’t mean to, I can feel myself doing the same.
It’s habit by now, for each of us. Something so deeply woven into the fabric of who we are that if we pulled out those threads, I’m not sure there would be anything left.
“Yeah.” I nod, pressing away from the tree and ignoring the warm feeling of Kian’s cum sliding down my inner thigh. “Let’s go back.”
Side by side, but with enough distance between us that our arms don’t brush, we make our way through the trees toward the farmhouse.