“Dead, thank the gods,” he replies with a bitter note in his voice. “She was cut down in a devastating conflict that wiped out a good number of magical creatures in this world. It was almost like a culling…thinning the head, so to speak.”
As awful as it seems, I feel no small amount of relief that he was able to escape such a fate and wasn’t stuck with such a horrible creature for all eternity.
“What happens when a mate dies?” I ask.
“You’re haunted by them,” he confesses, his shoulders tensing. “They follow you in your dreams and consume your thoughts, even when you don’t want them in your head. It’s almost as maddening as being shackled to them in the first place.”
The more he talks about this mating bond and his experiences, the more tortuous it all sounds. I’m sure there are mated couples out there who love and cherish each other, but there are probably even more couples that have had similar experiences to Aleixo. What a terrible way to be forced to be with someone. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have my free-will taken from me like that.
“So, you’re constantly thinking about your dead mate?” Was he thinking about her when we were together last night? The thought twists my stomach and makes me feel a little nauseous.
He shakes his head. “No, actually. I’m not. One of the ultimate goals in doing my research about my kind was to find a way to break the bond between mates so we wouldn’t be forced to endure the torment it can cause any longer.”
I gasp. “And don’t tell me…you figured out a way to do it?”
Pushing from the table, he crosses the room to a small safe seated on a countertop. He opens the safe and retrieves a tray of vials that he brings back to me and sets in front of me. There’s some dark, shimmering liquid in each of the little tubes, and I gaze down at them in fascination. I notice that one vial appears to be missing, but I only spare that a passing thought.
Aleixo picks on of the vials up and displays it for me.
“This is a potion I created, a mix of science and magic, that will break the mating bond between two fated beings.”
My eyes bounce between the vial and him as I ask, “And you’ve taken this potion yourself?”
He nods. “Yes, I have. Even though my mate was gone when I first created it, I still felt that bond to her and wanted desperately to break it so I could move on with my life at long last. When I drank this potion, it was as though every feeling and connection I had toward her was totally wiped from my mind. After years of being tormented by her memory, I was finally free. Now if I think about her, it’s almost entirely voluntary, and the reality is that I don’t often think of her.”
Things are clicking into place for me at long last. His behaviors and obvious caution in interacting with me and other people are making more and more sense. Clearly, he’s suffered some significant emotional trauma in his life and that has shaped him into the brilliant but socially insecure man I’ve come to know.
There’re still a few things I don’t understand, though. Namely, his terrible treatment of me.
“Alright, I understand all that, and completely understand why you would hate that bond so much,” I tell him, feeling much more reasonable than I did before when I was a blubbering mess. “But what does that all have to do with me?”
He hesitates to answer, which can’t be a good sign.
“Aleixo?” I press, trying to snag his gaze, because he’s clearly avoiding looking straight at me right now. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He still doesn’t answer me right away, but he does finally look at me again. I can see some internal struggle happening within him. I’m not sure what it is he’s wrestling with, but it’s making me admittedly nervous, and that anxiety only grows worse with each moment he doesn’t speak.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore and snap, “Aleixo, enough! Tell me.”
He jerks, as if I’ve startled him, but then nods. “Yes, yes, you’re right. You deserve the whole truth. Okay, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it…you and I bonded, Samantha.”
His words kind of bounce off of me for a moment and I can’t fully absorb them.
“Excuse me, what?”
He nods, looking pained. “You and I formed a mating bond. It’s why we were so initially…drawn to each other.”
“I don’t understand,” I murmur, my mind beginning to race. “I’m not a phoenix.”
“The bond is not restricted only to our kind. We can form it with beings of a different species.”
Oh, now he suddenly has answers for everything.
“But…but you already had a fated mate,” I point out, as if I can convince him he’s wrong about this. “Isn’t that pretty much a one and done type of situation?”
He shakes his head. “Not necessarily. It’s possible to obtain another mate if yours has perished, though I don’t believe it’s a common occurrence. I understand that this is a lot to take in, but I want to assure you that I’ve broken the bond.”
Those words stun me into momentary silence.
