“My gut says I’m an idiot,” I mutter.
“Why?”
“Because even without the bond—even when it was gone and I was standing there feeling empty and hollow and wrong—I stillwanted him.” The admission costs me. “I still looked at him and thought,yes. This. Him.Which is either the mate bond talking or I’m just really committed to bad decisions.”
“Or,” Elena says carefully, “it’s real. And you know it. And that scares you.”
“Of course it scares me.” My voice cracks. “I’ve known him for eight days, Lennie. EIGHT. That’s not enough time to decide if I want to be magically bonded to someone forever.”
“How long would be enough?”
“I don’t know. A year? Five years? Never?”
“And if you had five years, would you feel more certain? Or would you just have five years of reasons to talk yourself out of it?”
I hate that she’s right.
Hate that she knows me well enough to know I’d overthink this into oblivion if given the chance.
“He said her name,” I whisper. “When we were together. In bed. He was inside me, and he saidLyria.”
Elena’s expression shifts. “Oh, Mara.”
“So yeah. Forgive me for being a little hesitant about the whole mate bond situation when he’s clearly still in love with a dead woman who was apparently perfect in every way and saved his entire clan and—”
“Stop.” Lila’s voice cuts through. Sharp. “You’re catastrophizing.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“You’re comparing yourself to a memory. To a person who’s been dead for four hundred years and has been idealized beyond recognition.” She leans forward. “I knew grief like that. After the Syndicate took me. After I thought I’d never see Elena again. I turned her into this perfect thing in my mind. This symbol of everything I’d lost.”
Elena goes very still beside her.
“And when I finally saw her again?” Lila continues. “She was real. Flawed. Human. Not the perfect child I’d been mourning but an actual person with complications and agency and a whole life I hadn’t been part of.” She pauses. “It was better. Harder, but better. Because real people are always better than perfect memories.”
“So you’re saying K needs to get over his memory of Lyria.”
“I’m saying he already is. By letting the mate bond begin with you. By asking you to consider accepting it.” Lila’s eyes are steady. “Do you think he’d do that lightly? Let a bond form if he wasn’t certain?”
“I think he’s centuries old and lonely and I happened to be convenient. Let’s face it, the guy’s never gonna learn how to use Tinder.”
“Mara.” Elena’s voice is firm now. “You are many things. Convenient is not one of them.”
Despite everything, I almost laugh. “Fair.”
“You’re brilliant. Manic. Loyal to a fault. You hack government security systems for fun and live-stream alien landings at all hours of the night, and you literally refused to leave K with those Syndicate fuckers even when you were dying.” She meets my eyes. “That’s not convenient. That’s extraordinary. And if he can’t see that, he doesn’t deserve you.”
My throat closes.
“But he does see it,” Elena continues quietly. “I watched him with you. The way he looks at you.” She shakes her head. “Caleb said he stopped the interrogation and ran up three flights of stairs because he felt the healing bond breaking. That’s not obligation, babe. That’s—”
Alarms blare.
Loud. Jarring. The kind of sound that meanssomething is very wrong.
Red lights flash along the ceiling. People scramble. Chairs scraping. Voices shouting.
Elena’s on her feet immediately. “That’s the perimeter breach alarm.”
