Page 30 of Starlight Mates

We are all distracted as Rochelle slithers up to Hollis’s side and wraps her body around him. He kisses the side of her neck, and my Nexus pushes to the surface. My hands shake as I watch them both, unable to look away. “Hey, babe, are we leaving? We have that dinner with my parents tonight.”

“Of course,” Hollis agrees, like a fucking puppy. “I love you. Where else would I be?”

Love? “You can never love someone who doesn’t properly belong to you. Your Nexus belongs to me, and our souls are fused in every lifetime. We are destined and she is fated to die.”

My eyes widen as I grapple for control over my Nexus and push her right the fuck down. Hollis is angry, Finn has his eyebrows raised, and Onyx looks ready to jump to my rescue. Rochelle’s cheeks are brightened, and she looks like she is going to cry.

Onyx immediately steps in between Hollis and me. “That’s enough from both of you. You are hot-headed,” he says to Hollis before pointing to me, “and that was her Nexus speaking. We both know Nexus can be strange and come out with weird shit.”

I quickly leave before I get myself in any more trouble, and mentally curse my Nexus for being a total possessive weirdo. Shebasically claimed Hollis and threatened Rochelle with death in the space of one creepy sentence.We don’t want the asshole one, Nexus!I know she doesn’t agree; if anything, she sees him as the ultimate challenge. Hollis is going to make my life even worse in his next lesson thanks to this. My Nexus never thinks about the consequences. Oh no, she is happy for me to deal with them.

Classes are changing and it’s packed going into the academy, so I take the path around the castle to the back instead, in the opposite direction to everyone else. I’d rather be alone. I go to the back of the castle and find a pair of stairs leading down the cliff side where there’s a big space of flat rock near the coastline. I don’t like the sea all that much, but there aren’t many places that are empty and big enough to train alone at this time of day. I walk to the edge and look over at the sea. It’s quiet today, but the ledge is so low down that the waves crash around the edges, sometimes brushing onto the edge of the platform. The sea is still deathly beautiful.

“Do you know this is the place that one of our famous ancestors sacrificed his life to the sea?” I spin round to find Hollis behind me, casually leaning on the rock wall. He begins to walk right to me, and he is furious. “My plans are cancelled now you’ve gone and fucked with my girlfriend’s head. I really, really want to thank you.”

His sarcasm just scares me. “No need.”

“I’ve come to teach you something.” He is getting closer.

My heart is racing so loud that it drowns out the sea. “Oh yeah, like what?”

He smirks and undoes his jacket, dropping it onto the flat rock. His muscles flex in his shirt as he looks right at me. “Stop me.” I can’t. He crashes into me like a bull, pushing me onto the floor, and my head smacks on the stone with a thud. I see stars as his hands grab both of mine and shove them above my head, arching my back with his weight as he presses into me. “Foryears, I dreamt of killing you for what you did to me and Rhodes and the consequences. It made Rhodes strong, but it turned me into a monster.”

I flinch at the wordmonster. He hasn’t got a clue who the real monster between us is. He holds me right on the edge, my head almost slipping off into the sea. Water sprays over my face with every wave crashing onto the shore. He leans right down, his lips inches from my throat. “I am never going to be yours. I don’t want you, or this bond, or anything to do with you.”

“You’re the one following me, not the other way round.” Stupid to rile him up, but I know as well as he does that he won’t try to really kill me. His body is perfectly aligned with mine, and now I swear I see his Nexus fighting and clawing its way to the surface just as much as mine is. We’re both fighting a losing battle here, and being away from him is the only way that I can manage to keep my Nexus away.

He laughs into my face, and bleak, cold green shines bright in his eyes. “That’s not true, is it? You want power and you plan to collect us, but you won’t get me. I want to be with her.”

“Keep saying it and one day it might become true,” I whisper. “Either way, I will never want you back. Never, Hollis. It’s not like I don’t have my pick of mates if I decide I want one.”

“You’re cruel and heartless, Gwenieve, and in a different world, I’d think we are the same.” He grips my hands tighter. “Do you know what happened to Rochelle? Why being a bitch to her is just cruel?”

“No,” I snap. She isn’t a nice person, and nothing he?—

“Her mate died just after they were bonded. It destroyed her.” My eyes soften but Hollis’s harden instead. I’ve heard there is no worse pain than losing a mate. Even though I rejected mine, watching any of them die would break me into a million pieces. “And you go spouting off about how mates can onlybelong to each other in front of her. She is crying because of you.”

“It’s—” Water sprays into my face right before a big wave crashes over me, and sea water makes me choke. I’m thrown straight back into the past, unable to stop myself as the memories flood me, just like they did back then. The last time I was held under water before my parents’ death, and it was one of the worst.

My mum claps my back. “You lasted seven minutes this time. Fantastic, but your Nexus needs to be better.”

I shiver, freezing cold on the edge of the pool as I suck in the air to breathe and shake from head to toe. “She’s had enough,” my father’s soft words echo. The pool is better than the sea or the river we usually use, but I wish the training would stop.

“No, she hasn’t. I need to test her magic, or she might as well be given as a gift to the Nexus when they figure out what she is. She cannot be weak or afraid,” my mother demands. I know why we have to do this, but I hate it. The water scares me now. “Alright, throw more fish in the water, and I’ll throw her in.”

Fear locks my muscles up, and I cling to the edge of the pool. “P-please, p-lease s-stop,” I beg my mother, over and over, but she ignores me. My mother never listens. She effortlessly pushes me off the edge of the pool, and I can’t fight her with how weak I feel after hours of this.

For a second, I open my eyes under the water as I sink down, and I’m surrounded by colourful fish. They are so beautiful and I’m going to kill them all. I try to swim to the top, but the weights wrapped around my ankles hold me down as they thud to the bottom of the pool. I gasp, water flooding into my lungs as I drown again, for the tenth time just this night. Everything dies around me, and it takes seven minutes before I breathe again.

The memory fades but not the fear that makes my Nexus hide and my body lock up as I scream and try to break free of Hollis. He lets me go.

“What’s wrong with you? Stop freaking out!” Hollis demands, but there is an inch of worry in his voice that makes me wonder how bad I look. When I finally stop screaming, he steps away from me, letting me go so I can wrap my arms around my neck and start rocking back and forth. I focus on trying to breathe, trying to remember that I’m not back there, that my mum did that for a reason…that it was all for a reason.

“I’ve got you and no one is going to hurt you, Gwen.” Rhodes’s soft words whisper in my ear, and his hand runs down my back. “I’ll be one second.”

I lift my head, sobbing, as Rhodes walks right up to Hollis and punches him hard. I hear Hollis’s nose crunch under Rhodes’s hit, and I wince. Hollis roars. “She’s just being overdramatic for attention. It’s pathetic you’re falling for it.”

“Get over yourself, brother, before you let our past control you,” Rhodes warns with venom in his voice. Heartbreak too. Rhodes picks Hollis up with his telekinesis powers and literally throws him into the sea. He has the same gift as Hollis but that doesn’t surprise me.

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