“I feel more violated now than I did when they took me.” She sobs. “Like they’ve crawled inside my mind and made a home of my grief.”
“I wasn’t fast enough. I’m so sorry, Lumi.”
She blinks.”Andrik, there is no world in which this is your fault.”
“I couldn’t control my shift, which made you run. I was struggling so hard with our bond that you felt you had no other option than to sneak out the bathroom window in the middle of a snowstorm. And then, I couldn’t even track you properly because they did something to hide your scents.”
A silence stretches between us.
“Please come with me,” I say quietly. “I can’t protect you here, and I won't let you sleep somewhere he’s already been. ”
17
FURRY ASS
Anoymous-
She found it.
I watch her hands tremble as she opens the note. Eyes widening with the same cracked-glass grief she wore the day of Anna’s funeral. Her voice is hoarse when she says it out loud:“It's from my journal.”
The sound cracks something in my chest. Watching her break like that—like a memory gasping for air—it makes me ache for her.
For us.
She breaks. Folds over on herself like I nicked something vital.
I could feel it... the moment she read my words. When she realized someone had been inside her drawers. Her pages... Her past.
Her journal holds parts of her she thinks no one deserves, but I’ve earned them. She wrote down the most sacred parts of herself and thought no one would ever touch them, but I did. And now, every time she thinks of Anna... every time she thinks of that night—she’ll think of me.
Andrik can hold her for now. Let him believe he’s enough for her. Let him pretend the bond between them is more real than ours. But it was I who stepped into her most painful moments.
I walked through her memories like a cathedral. Read every word of her grief like poetry. Ran my fingers down the hollow curve where her sister used to live.
She thought she buried Anna, but all she did was unearth me.
She doesn’t know it yet, but I’ve been breathing in her pain longer than that beast has been whispering those made-up words in her ear. I don’t need a sacred tongue to speak her language.
Suffering.
Rage.
The little crack in her soul where something dark slipped in and made a home. We are made of the same beautiful, broken thing.
I don't want to take her. I want her to give herself freely. I want her to choose me. And when he touches her—when that overgrown animal wraps himself around her and pretends he can soothe her—I wonder if she thinks of me instead. Not because I’m gentle, but because I see her in ways he never will—and love her despite them.
The way she tries to hide her sobs inside her pillow, like they won't crawl through the seams and beg to be heard—I’ve heard every single one of them.
He told her I wanted her fear, but that’s not what I came for. I came for the raw, ruined parts of her. The pieces she only shows to the ghosts.
I’ll wait, though.
I’ll wait while he coddles her and pretends she’s helpless. While he wraps her in his fur and feeds her lies about safety. While they pretend that mate-bonds and monsters are enough to keep me out.
But one day, she’ll come looking again. She’ll open that journal, trace the line I left her, and feel me.
He thinks he’s earned her because he bares his teeth and growls like a rabid animal. But he doesn't understand her the way I do. He wasn’t there the night the river almost swallowed her.
