As she slips from this world, he’s there, clutching her to him. Anger rattles his chest. Why would Fate allow this? He’s found his mate—a moment he’s looked forward to his entire immortal existence. Instead of excitement, though, the only thing spiraling through him is gut-wrenching terror.
Her limp body against his is a hollow reassurance. She can’t actually feel him. She can’t feelanything.The skin pressed to him turns blue, icy streaks paint her hair.
Visions drift in and out of his mind, flashes of her life.
A little girl twirling in front of the mirror, dressed in pale pinks.
Walking through this very park, swinging between her parents.
Satin ribbons flutter into view. She ties them at her ankles before her fingertips fluff the tulle of her costume. Her lips are bold pink in this memory, not the silvery-blue they’re turning now. She smiles, pressing up onto her toes with unencumbered glee.
She’s older now, body and limbs long and lithe, reaching delicate fingers toward the audience. The harbinger can feel the warmth of the spotlight on her. It drowns out the audience in a sea of black, minus one person. The most important one.
The one currently strapped in the seat next to his mate.
Fear blows every memory away, and he sees his mate’s final moments: the car skidding, the screams, the smash of steel breaking through ice, sinking, sinking, sinking, and the panicked push against the water’s resistance.
A panic he recognizes.
The pulse of it is etched into his soul. Any tears the harbinger sheds are carried off with the current. Lost to him as quickly as the joy that flooded every cell of his being when the mate mark began to carve itself into his chest.
A hand grips his shoulder, and he jerks back.
He’s not alone.
Fate’s been there all along, looking on the scene with a somber expression.“You shouldn’t be here, Jax. She’s meant to meet you in Nivea.”
Her voice caresses his mind, its comforting lilt all too familiar. Too much like his first faint memories of her. Raw ones he doesn’t like to think on much. Another shattering of ice. Another plunge into a chilling embrace. Reaching for someone else.
Too late.
His hands clench into quivering fists.“This can’t be right.”
“She is your mate.”Fate’s expression softens, looking at him as if pain is streaked across his flesh instead of frost marks.
“But she’s mortal,”he stammers, not understanding how this is possible.“I just saw her life. Watched her—”
“Her fate is already etched in Frost.”
Fate extends a paint-swirled arm, the usual rainbow of it dulled by the frozen canopy blotting any light bar the strip where the car cracked it into shards. Swirls of glittering magic reach for his mate’s chest. The space that minutes ago was filled with the blissful rhythm of her heartbeat now is filled with empty silence. What he would give to feel it again.
In every scenario he conjured in his dreams, none of them equipped him for finding his mate like this. Dying. He recalls her in the memories. Rich brown hair; shimmering blue eyes; warm, beige skin. So vibrant. So driven.
So alive.
And so much left to do.
“Stop,”he says, wrapping his fingers gently around Fate’s wrist and pulling it back. The magic searing his mate’s chest is severed, leaving behind only the swirl of her mate mark. A sign of what could be.
“Whatwillbe,”Fate calls to him, answering his thought with the truth.
It’s his mate’s time to come home with him. To claim him and her immortality. He’ll hold her close, make the transition better for her than it had been for him. He’ll be everything for her. It’s all he’s wanted for decades: to have this bond and the harbinger attached to it to cherish for all of immortality.
“No.”He’s seen her life, felt her dreams as if they were his own. They’re now chiseled into his bones. Their existences are no longer separate. He carries her within him as much as she will one day carry him.
One day.But not today.
His story may have been cut short, but she deserves to see hers through.
