“Enough excuses,” she replied sharply. “You know what to do. Show me, or I’ll not waste any more time on this.”
I let out a snort, shaking my head, but I turned to face my…mate? Was that the right word for us? I couldn’t tell, even after all we’d been through. My breath hissed through clenched teeth as I tried to centre myself, ignoring the frantic roil of my stomach. I moved closer because he sure as hell wasn’t going to, was he? But I stopped.
Fuck him, fuck her, fuck all of them. I was kinda shocked by the rush of anger, but once it flushed through me, I knew where it came from. Here was me, putting my heart out on my sleeve again, and Mason, where was he? Looking torn and uncomfortable. Somehow, I was eighteen all over again, ready to make my choice, hoping like hell it was going to be received positively, but for a crucial difference. I was a woman grown, so I could see the signs that had escaped me as a teen.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said, smiling with absolute bitterness as the words spilled out. They grew once expressed, getting bigger, gathering momentum. “You don’t want…” The end of the sentence, it was a knife edge pushed up against my throat, and as soon as I finished it, it’d slice down. My heart’s blood would spill, again. I’d be aching, again. My jaw locked down, my eyes boring into him, taking every aspect of his stance, his body, his expression in. My teeth ground, but I wasn’t going to live my life like this, with a knife against my neck. “You don’t want—”
“No.” He said the word, broaching the gap between us and reaching out for me, paused, hesitated, then placed a hand on my shoulder, seeming to breathe only when that happened. “No,” he told me again, tilting my head back, searching my eyes to see if I understood. “No,” he said, rejecting my assertion, not me this time, pulling me close, holding me tight then tighter as his arms locked around me. “No,” he said much more firmly, stroking his hand through my hair. A prickle against my skin was the only warning I got of our impending connection, and then the world fell away for him.
“What the fuck are they doing to my mother?”
There was no training room, no adult Mason. He was replaced by a much younger version of himself, standing in a hallway, shaking with rage. Muscles too well honed for a thirteen-year-old popped as his hands went to fists, his eyes blazing silver.
“Is this what you did? Took her away from Dad to do what, Bruce? Be your whore?”
Bruce must have been the other man. Dark hair, dark eyes, there was something familiar in his face. Those cheekbones, that ruffle of wavy hair, I saw Zack in him. He stood in front of a large heavy door, but the sounds that came though it… I frowned, he frowned, shaking his head as he crossed his arms.
“Watch your mouth, Mason,” Bruce growled out, seeming to loom larger.
No, not this, I heard Mason say inside my head. Before.
I watched the two figures disappear, fading into the darkness, only to be replaced by another.
This was when Mum told Dad about her other mate.
“You…” The face of the man who loomed above us was a mask, so contorted by anger, by pain, that it appeared more beast than man. His fangs glistened bright white in the artificial light. “You have another mate?”
“L-Look, Neil, I-I never meant—” she said in a stammering, placating tone. His mother, I felt strongly, even though I only got a partial view of a woman from my viewpoint. This was Mason’s mother, so he was…
“Never meant what? To break my fucking heart?” His voice, Mason’s dad’s, it was part howl, punctuated by his fist slamming down on the table, the many dishes with all the delicious food she’d been fussing over all day clattering, some falling to the floor in a sodden crash. “No, no fucking way. I found you when we were still in primary school. I knew the whole damn time that you were her, you were my mate. Whatever the fuck this is—”
“It’s real, Neil.” We heard the tremor in her voice, felt her fingers tighten way too hard around ours, but we dared not say anything about it, not right now. The adults, the people who kept the household running, who made the rules and enforced them seemed to have forgotten what they were right now.
“So what’re you trying to tell me?” his dad said, almost calmly. Only an idiot would have believed it, Mason’s now latent beast’s instincts on high alert in the face of such danger. He catalogued the tension in his father’s jaw, the frantic working of those big muscles, his fangs getting longer, more prominent, fur even prickling across his skin as his eyes blazed silver. “That my… That my mate is a nix? That you… That you feel the same fucking pull you felt for me with…?”
Mason’s dad couldn’t finish the sentence, and I knew how he felt. Sometimes, it was putting it into words that was the final nail in the coffin. Because that’s what it was for him, what me as an adult could see, what child Mason had no ability to. I was watching someone get cut down, slain before me, his heart breaking into a million pieces.
Which was perhaps why the dishes needed to follow suit.
Child Mason watched his dad swipe the same big strong arm that used to hold him tight across the top of the table, smashing the plates into the walls, splattering their contents on the paint, on the carpet, on the furniture beyond. He felt the erratic throb of his mother’s smothered sobs down the link of her hand and experienced the
