Page 44 of Betrayed Auctioned Mate

So much for being the only team member not to have ever given him trouble. Those days are long gone.

***

The rooftop of the pack center is quiet when I find her there.

The moon hangs low in the sky, casting a pale silver glow over everything like a wash of white paint. It sharpens the corners of the world. Keira stands near the edge, up against the railing right where I love to stand with my coffee in the mornings, staring out at the forest. Her arms are wrapped around herself as if she’s trying to hold herself together.

I hesitate at the exit to the roof, unsure if approaching her is the right thing to do. But the pull of the bond is relentless. I can’t take it anymore. If I stay away from her any longer, I might just die.

The night before the infiltration, I thought I needed her. I thought I knew what need was. As it turns out, I had no idea what need could feel like—not one fucking clue.

I take a deep breath and step forward. The gravel crunches under my boots, and she tenses at the sound.

She doesn’t turn around, but I know she hears me.

“Keira,” I say softly, my voice barely more than a whisper of breath in the stillness.

She doesn’t respond. Watching the treetops with her shoulders tight around her ears as if it’s an effort to stay upright, she’s still just as beautiful as she’s always been. There, with the night air swirling around her, the moonlight seems to love her almost as much as I do, caressing her face and hair, casting her in an otherworldly glow.

For a heartbeat, I think she’s going to walk away from me. I think if she walked away now, it would be for the final time. She’d be gone forever if she left now.

But she stays where she is.

“I can’t... I can’t keep doing this,” I admit. The thickness of my voice makes me cringe. I am not an emotional man. Not until she came back into my life. “I can’t stand this distance between us. Not after everything. I just can’t do it, Keira. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t do it anymore.”

She’s still silent, her back to me. I step up to the railing and stare at her side profile in the soft glow of the night, imploring her to look at me, to see me as she always has.

The words start spilling out of me, like a dam has finally broken.

“I loved you before,” I say, my voice rough and raw. “I loved you before the bond, before the auction, before everything went to hell, and I’ve loved you for longer than I can even remember, since the day I met you. Keira; I’ve loved you for as long as I’ve known what love feels like. Because it’s only ever been you. And this... this bond, it just... I didn’t want it to happen this way, but it did, and now I feel like I’m burning alive because I can’t be near you.”

My head is spinning—I have to draw breath. I clutch the railing and clear my throat. I feel like a teenager. I feel like an old, old man, so worn out by my life that I only want to lie down beside the woman I love and hold her.

Keira finally turns to look at me, her eyes wide with shock. She doesn’t say anything, but her gaze is locked on mine. The intensity in her eyes almost pins me to the spot, but I step closer with physical strain, closing the distance between us.

“I didn’t want to make that decision,” I continue, my voice softer now. “But I had to. I couldn’t risk losing you. Not again. I couldn’t... I couldn’t let them take you from me. And I couldn’t let that happen to you—even if I never saw you again, I couldn’t let them have your freedom. I couldn’t do that to you. You haveto understand, Keira. This bond... it means something. It’s not just some obligation or some accident. It’s... it’s everything.”

She finally speaks, her voice shaky. “Ado, I... I don’t understand.”

“I love you,” I tell her, my voice breaking. I need her to hear me, to really believe me. If I could take my heart from my chest to show her, I would. “How could I not love you? Look at you. I couldn’t not want you, not after all the times I’ve watched you fight and struggle and survive. I couldn’t lose you. And you can walk out of this building right now and go back to New York, but I’m going to want you forever, Keira. I’m going to want you until I die. And I refuse to givethat—”I hold up my palm, gesturing to the wound from the blood bond. “—I refuse to give it up.”

Keira’s eyes glisten in the moonlight, and she looks away, back toward the forest. Her silence is deafening. In the ocean of doubt between us, a single thread of gold stretches, thin as a wire, between our souls. We both feel the pull of it. It shines even under the broiling of the dark waves.

“I meant it,” I say. “I mean it. I meant it. I’m asking you to believe me. It’s all I can ask you for.”

She finally looks back at me. Her lips part as if she’s about to say something, but the words don’t come.

In our army days, on long nights on the rooftop when the sky looked just like this, we would play lost and found, the two of us. It was mostly Keira’s game. I would tell her about things I had lost in my life—things, people, places—and she would invent their futures right in front of me, presenting what had happened to each as if it was really that simple. She told me all about the adventure my favorite keyring had gone on when I was eighteen and lost it on a night out in my hometown. She came up with ananswer for why the only girl I’d ever dated had ghosted (she had been abducted by alien-vampire hybrids). She had words to fix every hurt I’d ever had.

She has no words now.

And yet, I wait, my heart pounding in my chest, even as the quiet curdles and cools to discontentment. It is longer than I’d like to admit before I turn away, my shoulders heavy with the weight of everything I’ve just said. Everything I’ve just laid bare.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter, my voice barely audible. “I didn’t mean to... I’ll leave you alone.”

As I reach the door to the stairs, I hear her voice, soft but clear in the quiet night.

“Ado, wait.”

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