If he’d known that night would be the last chance to speak to her, to hold her, Viktor wasn’t sure he would have had the strength to reject her offer.
He didn’t know that, come morning, she would block him on every messaging service. He didn’t know that when he showed up to train with Theodore in the afternoon, he would convey the message that he was never again allowed contact with Camille. He didn’t know that he and Theodore would come perilously close to killing one another that day.
In a moment, he lost his mate and a brother. It sat beside the death of his mother as the single worst moment of his life — but at least he understood what had happened, what went wrong, and how it had all been for her own good.
And when the years dragged by without contact, he accepted her decision to end things, though it tore the heart out of him to do it. He respected it right up until that day of the Summit, when he just… couldn’t anymore.
To feel the dawning horror that accompanied the realization that he might have beenwrongto assume he knew what was best,that he didn’t actually understand what had happened…
Viktor’s stomach rolled. Bile crept up the back of his throat as Camille stared at him through the camera, her expression shuttered.
In a flat voice, she explained, “It is a chemical reaction that happens after an elf has reached maturity through the change, a week-long stretch of hormone induced madness and body growth where we are isolated for our own safety. Our mating imperative, thepull,is a hormonal shift that takes place when an elf meets their consort and takes in their pheromones for the first time. After that, they experience increasingly intense compulsions to be near their consort and share skin contact, increasing their intake of pheromones until a chemical bond is in place. It’s meant to help procreation, and often results in pregnancies with multiples.”
She said it with no inflection, as if she was reading from a medical textbook rather than telling him something that made cold sweat break out across his chest.
“When the bond is not put in place, the consequences of pheromone withdrawal range from severe discomfort, paranoia, and aggression, to loss of motor function, uncontrollable rage, and finally, madness.” Camille looked down at her lap. It took him a moment to figure out that she was methodically peeling off one of her skin-tight leather gloves.
Lifting her bare hand, she showed him her pale purple claws and her lovely, finely wrought fingers, and continued, “The only outward sign of the pull is the retraction of claws. We are biologically incapable of harming ourmates,as you would put it.”
Her eyes, a beautiful, luminous violet, gleamed with a hurt so deep, it shook him to the core. “I went through the change when I was sixteen. It was six days of torture and madness in the padded cellar below our house. Days of pain and fear — then relief and exhaustion when it was over. A week later, I asked my mother to take me to the city to celebrate. I wanted to see you. I wanted to know if I was right. That night when we met in the plaza, my claws retracted, just like I knew they would.”
Viktor’s mind spun. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t even see. The feed screen mounted on the far wall blurred, becoming little more than a smudge of blues and grays and lavender. His voice was all rough syllables and ragged edges when he said, “You… have mates.Iam your mate.”
Of course he knew that elves had a form of matehood. He’d even known, to a small degree, about thechange.He’d seen the mate bond in Valen and Andy, as well as in Theodore’s terrifying older sister and her partner, but he never thought they felt a draw to a mate like shifters did, like orcs did.
He never dared to hope that Camille would feel the bite of instinct like he did; that she would feel devoted to him down to the cellular level as he did. Butnow…
Viktor sucked in a deep breath and felt his heart hammering against the cage of his ribs, threatening to break through muscle and bone to reach her. “Cam, I didn’t know—”
“No, you didn’t.” Camille looked down as she primly pulled her glove back on, as if she still needed to hide from him, from the world. Her tone had lost its flatness, but was made altogether worse by the brisk, professional note it had taken on instead. “And it doesn’t matter now, regardless. I purged you from my pores once, Viktor, and I have no intention of putting myself at risk of madness and death for you again.”
Settling her hands in her lap, she lifted her chin and said, with great dignity, “And that is why I am telling you to back off from this ridiculous suit of yours. Whatever care you have for me, whatever responsibility you feel like you have for my wellbeing —disregard it.Nothing is more dangerous to me than you are. So unless you plan on taking me as your mate in front of the gods and all the world, thenleave. Me. Alone.”
Viktor realized two things simultaneously: first, that his mate thought, with every ounce of conviction she possessed, that he wished to hurt her.
Second, that hedidhurt her.
Agony rippled through him. It permeated every corner of his mind, tainted every sweet memory he held close to his heart. It stripped him of his certainty in his actions with acidic ferocity, peeling away two decades of denial to reveal the horrifying truth.
Camille needed him, even when she had been set on saving him from his own father. On a chemical level, sheneededhim.
And instead of asking her why she chose that moment to ask him to run away with her, instead of fighting against the wall her family had put between them after his rejection, he sat in his absolute certainty that, whatever else happened, it was the right choice forher.
Gods, I’m going to be sick.
Viktor leaned his elbows on his knees and covered his face with clammy hands. Inside him, his coyote paced, whimpering and sick with grief, in the darkness of his mind.
“Did it hurt you?” The question burst out of him like a spray of poison, toxifying the air he drew into his lungs.
There was a beat of silence, then, quietly, “Yes. The first time. And the second.”
Everything went quiet inside of him for the span of several heartbeats before, with a tearing, furious cry, Viktor’s hands shifted to claws and swiped at the coffee table. It skidded across the floor, its surface gouged with ten jagged lines, as he fought to keep the horror, the rage, directed at himself.
A small part of him was furious with her for withholding the information from him when he could havedonesomething, but he knew that wasn’t fair. In her place, he would have done the same.
Fuck me, Ididdo the same, didn’t I?
He hadn’t exactly told her about the fever, about the choice his coyote made that day in the garden. A part of him had always just assumed she knew — how shifters mated was common knowledge, after all — but he never actuallysaidit. Was that why she hadn’t been open with him? Did she think that he had just been playing with her, coaxing her for a lark, all the way back then?
