Broken Bonds

Rey had no idea what her next step should be? Should she try to push him off her or should she try reasoning with him?

Now that he was no longer turned into a wolf, a little bit of tension left her body. His bloodred eyes showed exactly how angry he still was, but Rey spent years with him and during those years she witnessed all of his faces. That’s why seeing him like this didn’t scare her as much as it should.

She went along with reasoning: “Think about what you are doing right now. We are no longer bonded. You have to let me go.”

Her words did nothing to shake him, he only repeated his words: “You are not leaving me!”

He might have the body of a man now, but that very skeleton was still controlled by the wolf and its emotions. Rey realised it wasn’t going to be easy to calm him down.

She tried another futile trick: “Fine, I will not go anywhere. But get off me.”

She used her hands to try and push him off herself, but he used his own to prevent her from doing so and pinned hers to the ground: “I don’t believe you.”

Rey cursed him for being a paranoid ass. Not that he wasn’t right. She planned to bolt right after he gave her even the slightest bit of a chance, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Fine, then. What do you suggest we do? Are we just going to chill here?” Maybe it wasn’t the best time to be sarcastic, but she ran out of all the other ideas.

He fumed at her: “Why did you run?”

Rey retorted with: “Why did you chase me?”

“You are my mate.” The words flew out of his mouth as easily as the water fell from the waterfall, and Rey’s heart clenched as he said them. They were no longer true, and they would never be again.

“No, I am not,” she shook her head. She tried to talk slowly to get his thick head to understand what she was telling him: “Your mate is waiting for you back at your pack and you should really be there with her.”

She saw recognition settling on Talon’s face as she mentioned Elaine, but the wolf wasn’t ready to give up its ground just yet: “You were the one made for me!”

“Maybe,” Rey whispered, “but we don’t always get, what we were supposed to.”

“I can still have you.” His face leaned dangerously close to Rey’s neck, and if she wasn’t utterly terrified until this point, his action sent her to a full-blown panic mode.

“Don’t even think about doing that!” She screamed at him.

The creation of werewolves was a legend shrouded in mystery. There was no one in Rey’s era of time that could claim to know the full story, and even Rey was only raised listening to partial stories.

It wasn’t easy to be a werewolf hundreds of years ago. That much was for sure. If there was a werewolf that died of old age, he was considered extremely lucky. The even luckier ones were those who still had both parents by the age of thirty.

Wolves with romantic souls believed it to be the exact reason why mates were created. An act of apology from the one who created them by giving them the one person who would always be with them when everyone else was taken away.

As Rey learned on her own skin, it was extremely painful to be separated from your mate, and the pain only intensified when one from the pair died. The one left behind was able to live years after the death of his significant other, but that life couldn’t exactly be considered happy.

Most of the time, they had little to live for since wolves were only able to survive in hiding and most couples avoided having kids for this very own reason. A weaker-minded wolf left behind would most likely suffer to death in a couple of months.

That’s why, in that era of time, something called soul-binding was practised. It was yet another gift from their creator to ensure that wolves wouldn’t suffer more than necessary. As the name already suggested, it was an act of binding your lifeline to your mate. For the bond to be strongest, both werewolves had to bite each-others necks to ensure that as one would die, the other one would die with him.

A partial bond, when only one bit the other, could also be created, but it wasn’t as strong as when both parties were involved, and it only had a fifty-fifty chance of working.

It was impossible to do this when one of the pair was a human, their more fragile bodies were unable to bear it, and it was rarely ever practised in Rey’s era of time.

As more humans started accepting werewolves as their allies, more werewolves started creating families. It was normal for almost every mated couple to have their own kids, and it was considered extremely selfish to bind your lifelines together. If something was to happen to one of the pair, the little child could still have at least one parent.

It, however, wasn’t impossible to do so, and Talon’s fangs grazing her neck were sending Rey into a frenzy. “Think about what you are trying to do right now, for heaven’s sake. What about your wife? Or your pack? They will never forgive you.”

Him binding their lives together again would be considered an ultimate betrayal, and since he was trying to do so while the mate bond between the two of them was already broken, it could end in a fatal way.

But the man showed no signs that her words were getting through to him. But he wasn’t thinking like a man at that moment. He was thinking like a wolf. And to the wolf, Rey was the most important person on earth.

“I will most likely die,” Rey blurted out. Talon finally moved an inch away from her and looked at her with a question in his eyes.

“Our bond was broken. There is no guarantee that what you are trying to do won’t end up with both of us dead,” she explained.

Rey prayed to all the gods, she knew, that he would finally understand the severity of the situation. But he only growled at her: “I won’t risk you leaving me!”

And his fangs once again neared her neck.