What would five do to me?
The memories crash over me like a wave, pulling me under despite my desperate attempts to stay afloat in the present moment. I'm eight years old again, sitting on my mother's lap while she traces the mark on her neck. But her mark isn't like other people's marks—beautiful and whole and full of promise. Hers is a ruin. A scar. Twisted flesh where something beautiful used to be, the raised tissue pale and ugly against her otherwise flawless skin.
"What happened to it, Mama?"I'd asked, my small fingers reaching out to touch the damaged skin."Why does yours look different?"
She'd caught my hand, held it gently but firmly away from the scar. Her eyes, when they met mine, were full of something I was too young to understand.
"I broke it, baby,"she'd said quietly."A long time ago, before you were born. I broke the bond."
"Why?"
"Because I loved your father more than I loved the man fate chose for me."She'd smiled then, but it was a sad smile, heavy with secrets."I chose your father instead. And to do that, I had to sever the bond."
I didn't understand then. How could I? I was eight years old, living in a world where my parents loved each other and my mother's strange scar was just another fact of life, like the way she sometimes got tired for no reason or spent days in bed when everyone else's mother was up and about.
I understand now.
Breaking a soulmate bond is possible, but it's rare—so rare that most people think it's just a myth. The process is agonizing, both physically and emotionally. You're essentially tearing a piece of your own soul away, severing a connection that was meant to be eternal. Most people who attempt it die in the process, their bodies and spirits unable to survive the trauma. The lucky few who survive are never the same.
My mother was one of the "lucky" ones.
She survived the breaking. Spent months recovering, her body fighting against the wound she'd inflicted on her own soul. The doctors called it a miracle that she pulled through at all. The scar never healed—not really. And neither did she.
For twelve years, I watched her fade.
It was gradual at first—tiredness that seemed to come from nowhere, illnesses that lingered longer than they should. Then came the bad days, when she couldn't get out of bed at all, when the color seemed to drain from her face and she'd look at me with eyes that seemed to see something very far away. My father threw himself into his work, unable to face what was happening to his wife. He climbed the ranks at the entertainment company where he worked, becoming an executive, then a senior executive, spending more and more time at the office and less and less time at home.
I don't blame him. Not anymore. Watching someone you love die slowly is its own kind of torture. He coped the only way he knew how—by not being there to watch.
So it was me. Me sitting beside her hospital bed during the final weeks. Me holding her cold hand as the machines beeped and whirred. Me listening as she told me the truth about soulmates that no one else would say.
"The bond wanted me, Keira,"she'd whispered, her voice thin as paper."From the moment it formed, it wanted to consume me. That's what they do—they pull you under, drownyou in connection until you can't tell where you end and they begin."
"But you broke it,"I'd said, tears streaming down my face."You got away."
"No, baby."Her smile was gentle, sad, accepting of a fate she'd chosen long ago."I just traded one death for another. The bond would have consumed me. The breaking destroyed me instead. Either way..."She'd squeezed my hand with what little strength she had left."Either way, love leaves its mark."
She died three days later.
Twelve years old, and I learned that love was a death sentence. That bonds were chains. That the beautiful marks everyone celebrated were just pretty warnings of the destruction to come.
I've spent the years since then building a life designed to avoid that fate. I became a lyricist—creating songs about love and connection without ever having to experience them myself. I work behind the scenes, invisible to the spotlight that consumes so many in this industry. I've kept everyone at arm's length, never letting anyone close enough to matter, never risking the kind of connection that destroyed my mother.
Now this.
Five flowers. Five potential bonds. Five chains waiting to wrap around my soul.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror, at the beautiful mark that suddenly feels like a curse, and I want to scream. I want to rage against the universe that decided this was my fate. Most people have one soulmate, maybe two if they're particularly blessed or particularly cursed. Three is considered rare, the kind of thing that makes headlines when it happens to celebrities or politicians.
But five?
Five is nearly unheard of.
Five means that the universe has decided I don't get to escape. That no matter how carefully I've built my walls, no matter how desperately I've avoided connection, fate has been preparing a trap for me all along. A trap with five locks and no keys except the ones held by strangers I've never met.
My stomach twists with an emotion I refuse to name. Fear. Anger. Underneath it all, buried so deep I almost can't recognize it, a tiny spark of something that might be hope. Or might just be the bond already working its influence, trying to make me want what it wants.
That's the cruelest part, isn't it? The bonds don't just connect you to another person. They make you want the connection. They burrow into your heart and your mind and make you crave the very thing that could destroy you.
