Page 49 of Broken Arranged Mate
There are times when it feels like I know Oren more than I know myself. Glancing at him across the room, our eyes catching, a deep, unnamable certainty hanging between us there.
And then there are times when he feels impossible to me.
Oren, touching me that first night, rejecting me as his mate. Oren, showing up again years later, asks my brother for a temporary spot among the Ambersky. Oren, everywhere I looked, and yet never really tangible, staying out of the way as best he could. Oren, becoming the alpha leader, and Oren suggesting a marriage to me.
Going through with it. Marrying me, then touching me, holding me, trailing his fingers over the slope of my hip and murmuring words against my skin I couldn’t make out, but that sounded so, so much like the three words I was dying to hear from him.
It’s like there’s something about him that I can’t quite figure out, and I’m so tired, so spent from being with Beth, that I can’t even think about it right now.
So, instead, I fall into bed, pull the covers up over myself, and fall fast asleep.
***
A sprout of dense desert cotton pushes up through the dry earth, barely retaining the sparse moisture provided to it. It grows for a week, reaching up and out toward the sun, until, in a violent, desperate ripping, it’s pulled from the ground and mangled into a bin.
From the bin, it’s spun into fiber, sent off to a processing facility, and dyed. Woven, changed, and turned into a duvet. Then to the store, and finally, purchased by an older woman, who brings it back to her house, washes it, and tucks it onto a bed.
This bed. The bed I’m sleeping on.
I see all this in a single flash, a comprehensive history of the blanket, and feel the strangest sense of connection with it, that little sprout of desert cotton that’s now lived its life and ended up as the blanket keeping me warm.
Then, the history turns into something different, something hazier and less sure—a version of the future that’s hard for me to make out.
Oren stands at the end of the bed, and he’s shouting something, but I can’t quite make it out. Then I realizeI’min the bed, under this same duvet, and when I look down—my vision still blurred around the edges, fuzzy and unsure—I see blood on my hands.
I wake with a start, sitting up in bed and gasping for air, cold sweat over my body, the images replaying through my head again and again. That little desert cotton sprout. Oren is watching me as I bleed.
Pushing the covers off, I grab my phone and huddle in the corner of the room, dialing the first person I can think of to help me.
“Ash?” Kira asks, her voice bleary and still thick with grief. “Everything okay?”
“Sorry to wake you,” I say, and when I speak, I can hear the tremble in my voice.
Logically, I know that Oren would never hurt me. But I can’t find another way to explain away the images I just saw. Him standing at the end of the bed, the blood all over me.
“Is there…is there ever a chance that your premonitions are, like, metaphorical?”
Kira is quiet for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“Like, could you have a vision where something happens, and it’s really just like…a dream. Like, you can interpret it how you want?”
“Ash, did Beth pass her gift to you?”
I pause, biting my tongue. I should have known better than to think I could ask Kira these questions without her figuring something out.
“Yes,” I say, lowering my voice even more, hands shaking around the phone. “And I just had a vision that Oren was…I don’t know. He was there, and there was a lot of blood—I think I need to get out of here. Maybe it was just an accident, but if I leave, I can stop it from happening, right?”
“Ash,” Kira says, and her normally steady, maternal tone is completely gone. “Listen to me—the first couple of premonitions you have can be unreliable. You can’t make decisions based on what you see in them, because sometimes you’re not getting all the information. You haven’t learned how to see everything yet.”
“I have to get out of here, Kira,” I whisper, already starting to move around the room, hoping I’m doing it quietly enough that Oren can’t hear me.
“Just—wait—” I can hear her moving on the other end of the line, whispering something softly under her breath, likely to my brother.
He told me that I could call this off at any time. If I asked him right now, he would come and get me.
But I don’t want Dorian. I want Kira—someone who knows exactly what this is like. Someone who’s had her own premonitions and made her own mistakes by acting on them.
“I’m coming,” she whispers. “Please, Ash, don’t leave before I get there. It would be dangerous for you to be out there alone.”
