“Hey,” I call to him as his exhausted gray eyes land on mine. “We did it.”
A wide proud smile stretches slowly across Ryn’s face, and he pulls my lips to his for a slow kiss before he rests his forehead against mine. “We did it,” he agrees.
We stay like that for a breath, just taking the moment in.
“It almost doesn’t seem real,” he confesses. “I’ve thought of what this day would be like for so long, and now here we are, and nothing is at all like I thought it would be.”
“How so?” I ask.
“For starters, I thought the fighting would stop when there wasn’t a Vow left to fight over, but it’s clear the wounds run deeper than magic.”
I nod and run my fingers through his hair. It was so much shorter when I first saw him, and now I’m not sure which I prefer.
“It’ll take time for everyone, I’m sure. Lucky for us, we seem to live for a fucking long ass time, or at least that’s the impression I got from the archives,” I tell him on a chuckle. “Holy shit, it was you!” I accuse, pushing back from him as I realize something. “You put the mating book right where I would find it in the archives. That’s what you were doing there.”
“I gave my word to Zeph that I wouldn’t tell you about the bond, but if you figured it out and came to me…” he says with a leading tone.
“But why would you agree not to tell me in the first place?” I ask, hoping to finally understand all the fucked up shit that happened between us.
Ryn hesitates, his gray eyes studying my face for a moment, and then he gives a defeated sigh. “Zeph suspected your bloodline. He wanted confirmation before completing the bond, just in case we...” His pause is weighted.
“Just in case you what?” I press.
“We had to make an impossible decision for the good of the Hidden,” he admits tensely.
An impossible decision? What the hell does that mean? Like they were going to kill me or something? I joke in my mind, but as soon as I think the words and scoff in my head, I freeze.
Holy shit, that’s really it.
“You know?” I accuse, as I put missing pieces together and get a good look at a shockingly clear picture.
“Know? Know what?” Ryn questions, befuddled by my reaction.
I shake my head, completely caught off guard. “You didn’t want to mate with me if you were going to have to kill me,” I elaborate, and the shame and silent assent I see in his eyes confirms my suspicions.
It all makes so much sense now. I was told the Hidden had been hunting down anyone who had Bond magic. I assumed they were making sure another situation like the Vow couldn’t happen again, but it’s also possible that they somehow knew killing the bloodline of the original creators of the Vow would end it too.
“It wasn’t as simple as that exactly; we really did suspect that you were a spy for a while, but then your potential blood ties became the larger issue. We weren’t sure what to do. We didn’t know about the gates or any other worlds, so we couldn’t be certain that if you died, you would take the Vow with you. But we couldn’t dismiss the notion either.”
He takes a breath and runs a hand over his face and shakes his head, while I try to figure out my footing in all of this. They knew I was their mate and that they might have to kill me. It definitely sheds light on a lot, but I’m not sure what to think about what I’m looking at now. What if Zeph and I hadn’t had that night and Ryn was able to confirm who I was faster. Would they have gone through with it? Can I even blame them for considering it, knowing what I know now?
“We didn’t know you, and we’d been fighting for so long for our freedom. If you were the last of the line, it felt like this gift, and yet we were calling to each other, so it also felt like a curse all at the same time. It was as though the moon and stars were torturing us, dangling you before us and forcing an impossible decision.”
He looks back at me, his eyes now beseeching.
“In the end, it didn’t matter, because you and Zeph mated, and by the time I had confirmation that you were a direct Sept descendant of the Bond Makers, and possibly the last one, I had mated with you too, and everything was different.”
I nod in understanding, feeling surprisingly calm. I might not have been so calm about this a couple months ago, but I’ve seen so much and we’ve all been through so much that I don’t see the world the same way. I can’t say, if I had been in their shoes, that I wouldn’t have done the same thing. I would have been way less of an asshole for sure, but I would have considered killing someone for the greater good.
That thought gives me pause, and I take a moment to reflect on just how much I’ve changed. I loved bikes and fixing cars and other things. Beers on a Friday were a favorite pastime, and the only thing I had ever killed was spiders and a cactus someone at work gave me once. Now, pants are a cause for celebration, I have magic and gumption and three semi reformed asshole mates. I don’t bat an eye at killing or doing whatever it takes to survive and thrive, and I don’t feel even slightly bad or remorseful about that.
I grew up.
The flaps to the
