* * *
Hours and many orgasms later, he held me, his fingers running through my hair as I tried to sleep.
“You know what we have supersedes everything, right?”
I vocalized my response, too tired to form actual words. He got chatty like this sometimes after sex, and while I really just wanted him to be quiet, it was one of his few endearing qualities.
“Nothing can compare to a mate bond. Our connection was written in the stars themselves, ordained by the gods.”
That’s how it was supposed to be, anyway.
The emotions I actually felt for Victor were… complicated. They were all encompassing, and they were primal, but they weren’t love.
He was my only anchor. He’d isolated me, forced me to depend on him for everything and I had no choice but to feel things for him because I had nothing and no one else.
Nothing felt cosmically significant, and the only one ordaining anything about our relationship was him.
I really wished he’d let me study more about mating bonds on my own. Surely there were cases like ours, couples whose personalities and goals didn’t align or fit but still were mates. Who only found common ground when they were in bed.
And even that part of our relationship hadn’t been there right away. It wasn’t until recently that he’d started treating me more gently. Every time he would start to get rough, he’d see one of the scars left by Kain Ulfic’s teeth along my skin and rein it back.
The one on my right bicep was particularly gruesome, a noticeable divot left behind from where he’d actually torn out my flesh.
Victor rubbed his thumb against that scar now, his brow furrowing in regret for failing to protect me.
“You’re my everything, Sage, and you have everything of mine that’s worth giving.”
* * *
I sat on the couch, aimlessly flipping through the channels. I’dalways envied those who had the time to watch TV. In the “before-times,” as I liked to call them, I couldn’t help but feel left out whenever someone started talking about a hit new series I hadn’t watched, let alone heard of. Between school, work, and doctor’s appointments, whatever spare time I did have back then was taken up by gaming.
Now, in the “hereafter,” all I had was time, and honestly? All those shows I’d been meaning to catch up on once I wasn’t so busy were awful.
Nellie had sworn up and down that this reality show of twenty-somethings living in a large house in the wilderness of the neutral lands was riveting, but all I saw was a bunch of whiny, entitled brats who couldn’t scrub a toilet if their lives depended on it.
I absently grabbed for a phone that wasn’t there to text her so I could complain about her trash taste in TV.
Damn, how long was it going to be until that muscle memory was gone?
I really wished Victor would let me have a phone, if only for the two of us to communicate. I got so lonely during the nights while he was working, and it would help if I could text somebody,anybody, just to make a connection to a living being that wasn’t Tailer or Izack, the two guards who took turns standing outside the door.
Not that they weren’t worth knowing, but Victor had made it clear they were to minimize talking to me outside of emergencies, and all my attempts to initiate conversations fizzled out pretty quickly.
I knocked on the front door. “Izack?”
“No, it’s Tailer, ma’am,” came the guard’s muffled voice.
Crap, I thought I’d had their schedules worked out. Had Victor changed them to fuck with me?
“Tailer, do you think Dona and Warner are going to finally hook up on this season ofArcane House? Because the only thing holding them back was her complicated feelings for Titian, but then he left and a different merfolk took his place. So they should finally be good to go, right?”
Tailer cleared his throat, but didn’t reply.
My heat was really ramping up and I was getting antsy. If Victor didn’t get here soon, I was going to have to take matters into my own hands, literally, and he always yelled at me when I did that.
“Is Victor coming? I know he said he’d be late, but I need him…”
The sad, pathetic whine stirred something in my guard and he actually replied. “I’ll let you know as soon as he’s on his way.”
