“Oh, and you’re so fucking cool and calm, yeah?” Lanier growled a dark animalistic sound. “You just saw your wet dream in the flesh, and apparently, she’s my mate. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s Quint’s too, but he’s being too fucking stubborn to admit it. And you’re cool?”
I clamped down on my anger, my possessiveness. The idea of Lanier or Quint being mated to her made me want to tear the skin clean off my body. She was mine. She’d been mine for years.
And tonight, my beast claimed her.
I didn’t want to tell him that though, and I understood why Quint had yet to talk about it. No one even spoke about the mating bonds anymore. Everyone seemed to be ignoring that part of our history, thinking they’d never come back.
Now here we are, seemingly mated to the same girl?
My plan was to try and find her years ago, but something kept me off. Something told me it wasn’t time. The visions kept coming, and I was getting annoyed with myself. I could just go to her rather than hope and pray for just a minuscule glimpse into her life, but I never did.
And then tonight happened, and she has a body, a face, a person attached to the vision in my mind. She’s real.
“You don’t even know what you’re feeling, Lanier,” I bit out, hating what was going on inside my head. “She has a killer rack and ass for days; this could all be your dick talking to your brain. There is no bond.”
It was a lie; we all knew it. But I couldn’t force myself to face the facts: my girl was real, and she could be mated. To all of us.
I stood up. “She needs to get through the Transition. We won’t know anything for sure until then. Quint, I need you to bring this invitation to her house. Do you have her scent?”
He pulled his body off the couch, throwing the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. “Yeah, I got it.”
He said nothing else as he walked past us and out the front door.
“He’s a fucking Warlock,” Lanier barked at me. “How could he be mated to her too?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything,” I sighed. “But Warlocks have the same process as Nephilim, and their bonds have also disappeared. He could be going through the same thing as us and not saying anything because he doesn’t think it’s real. We won’t know until he says something. Let’s just get her here.”
Lanier laughed humorlessly before taking the same path Quint did to the front door. “Yeah, whatever.”
The door slammed, leaving me alone in our ridiculously large penthouse.
I walked toward the stairs to my left and climbed them slowly, completely exhausted. I wanted to get to my room, lie on my bed, and just fucking sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen. My mind was spinning, my heart aching.
Seeing her in the alley, then having her physically touch me…the pain she inflicted with a simple squeeze from her tiny hand…
A shiver snaked down my spine as I walked down the short hallway to my room.
Up until a month ago, the visions came once a day at a minimum, sometimes upwards of three or four. They came in all shapes and sizes, giving me access to all parts of her life. I’d seen her go about every part of her day. Walking the halls at school, doing homework, eating dinner with her foster brothers and sisters, reading books, crying in her bed, coloring on the back of a piece of used paper. But I never saw her happy unless she was talking to her foster sister and best friend, Brinley.
The little girl that had the prettiest blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Her features stayed soft as she aged, making her look younger than Anna, but she was actually my age—three years older than Anna herself. Her personality was bright, her energy always leaked into my visions, giving me just a small glimpse of the joy she brought whenever she entered a room.
The two girls were close, almost always together. I rarely saw one without the other, but Annalise would disappear from both of us when her foster father came for her. I never got a vision during her time with him, I only saw the aftermath.
Each week, after he’d come for Anna, Brinley would simply wrap her arms around Anna’s waist. She would lay her head on her sister’s chest, and the two would cling tightly to each other.
Even when she was hurting, Annalise cared for her sister. I could tell that Brinley hated seeing the wounds, the battle scars she came back with. Swollen black eyes, cut lips, bruised jawlines. The girl would cry after every session, and Annalise would simply rub the girl’s back, her arms, anywhere she could reach. She would kiss her blonde hair and quietly let out her tears. It was as if Anna was just happy that her sister wasn’t hurt like she was. Like she was protecting her.
Until one day Annalise came back to her room, and Brinley wasn’t there. That was a vision I wished I could forget. Watching Annalise go through the aftermath, all alone, was something I hated remembering. I hoped that it was just one awful night, that the next week she would be back, but she was absent after the next session as well. To this day, it had been seven years since I’d last seen Brinley in any of my visions.
It had also been seven years since I’d seen Annalise cry.
It wasn’t long after the blonde never came back that there was a shift in Annalise. A shift so severe that it made me want to crawl to her—on bloody fucking knees if I had to—because night after night, she sat in her bed with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, staring off into the distance. She would occasionally read, but even that seemed like a chore for her. I was there, watching as she struggled to survive, like something inside of her was too broken to repair without her sister. Sometimes she would pace the length of her small bedroom, other times she would throw things in anger. But she never cried.
As the years passed, Annalise appeared numb. She was lonely and stoic, disappearing inside herself. The visions came less and less, my hold on her began to loosen. I had to fight to keep them coming, forcing myself to sleep at random times during the day. I tried meditating, getting high, drinking myself into hallucinations. I tried everything I could think of to find her.
And those few times it did work, I thought she was okay. Lonely, but still okay. A little angry and a lot broken, but I honestly thought she was going to be fine, that as she grew up, her past would become just that, her past. I was sure that her spirit hadn’t broken.
Tonight’s events proved me wrong. The girl I claimed as mine had been growing angrier and angrier with each week that passed. Each night that she spent without Brinley made for another night of unshed tears.
After tonight, I saw that my Annalise was broken and scarred and brutal. She beat other women for money—she defended herself against me and my brothers.
Over the years, I took notice of the little things she did, how she would chew on the end of her pencils when she was deep in concentration or how her body never fully relaxed—she was tense even in her sleep. I learned a new little tidbit each day, until all I could see was her.
But now I knew what she looked like in the flesh. All grown up, she was breathtaking. Her lips had filled out to soft pink pillows, and her body was now covered in various tattoos.
How was I supposed to convince her that I was a friend, not someone who was out to cause her any harm?
Tonight I watched in what seemed like slow motion as she called on the beast that lay dormant inside her before she issued her barely veiled threat.